… Jesse Helms …
Funny thing is, Southern heritage/victimization pops up in unexpected places. The Calgary NHL team, for example.
Both of these statements are based in misconceptions about humans and history.
Hmmm. We might actually want to keep that one. Sometimes it’s good to have a reminder around about what assholes we were.
As in “not unique.” Yes.
No. We just established that it’s not unique.
I really couldn’t speak to to why anybody would think what you postulate.
Thanks!
It isn’t anyone in the north that is responsible for the Governor of South Carolina calling for the shitty flag to come down. And it isn’t anyone in the north that is responsible for the Governor of Alabama for-the-luvva-pete to actually bring the shitty flag down. Time for the Southerners who live in denial become adults.
Of course there are racists everywhere. Not just the South.
Where else is anyone going to see this?
Every State Flag is Wrong, and Here is Why
Every state flag is teh stupid. Maybe it’s a good time to change all of them.
Don’t you for an instant think this went unnoticed. You are a horrible person and should feel shame. Shame, I tell you.
Love the Quote at the end “God do not like ugly.”
I am getting the impression that people didn’t actually read the OP. I didn’t mention the flag in South Carolina at all. My only reference to it was pulling the Dukes of Hazzard from TV because the General Lee has a Confederate flag painted on it. It still think that is incredibly dumb and probably counterproductive. I probably should have left any flag examples out completely because it isn’t essential to the overall point and people seem to have an unusual fixation with it even over much more important and currently relevant topics.
This thread was meant to be a lot more broad than that. Notorious mass murders and acts of terrorism have happened all across the country in recent years ranging from Colorado to Connecticut to Boston. There have been full-scale race riots in California and others. All of those are tragic but the larger public almost never blames the whole region for the crimes of one or a few. You often hear discourse about problems that are endemic to all of America but isn’t generalized to be mainly caused by regional culture.
Luckily, until this tragedy, most of the really high profile crimes, even race based crimes and unrest, didn’t take place in the South at all. However, people seemed to be waiting for the first lone nut to pull something like this in the wrong state. Then, boom, the media and public go into a frenzy describing how all of Southern culture is deeply flawed and has been that way for hundreds of years just based on deep-seated prejudice. Part of that is true but my major point is that it is also hypocritical because nothing about it is unique to the South today. I truly believe that the South is just being used as a scapegoat so that other areas of the country can ignore their own problems that are often much worse. That attitude is divisive on its own and won’t help anyone including the deluded people that hold those attitudes.
I think that there has been a lot of delusion about race issues, and how we are supposedly past them, that have been shown to be lies all over this country. For the past you name how many years. In recent years, with the police shootings of *not white *people and the subsequent civil unrest, Americans in general are more fed up than any time since 1964.
The only backlash against “The South” in particular has been directed at the wink-wink-nudge-nudge aint our flag historical bullshit.
What’s unique about the South today, or at least about many/most white people in the South, is the unwillingness to accept the truly horrible and dehumanizing nature of historical Southern culture and society. It truly is, in my mind, similar to descendants of Nazi Germans whitewashing that history and claiming that their culture and the associated atrocities were not uniquely terrible or particularly out of the ordinary, and shouldn’t be so highly criticized and focused on.
Funny site. But taking the question seriously, I disagree.
I’ll respond to this more fully in Cafe Society: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=18487671#post18487671
I disagree. Who in the South is saying there wasn’t slavery?
Seriously, this whole Northern righteousness against the South really smacks of hypocrisy to me. The North had slaves until 1804. Do Northernors need to walk around acknowledging all the atrocities and injustices that occurred in the North before 1804? Slavery has been gone for almost 150 years. Nobody alive is responsible for it. Slavery has been a problem since civilization began. It is hardly a Southern thing.
I live in the North now, but I prefer the South. People in the South are genuinely nicer, IMHO. There is such a thing as Southern Hospitality, and it seems like it’s taken seriously. Northernors seem a lot more dour, and unfriendly. The South is prettier, has a better climate, better food, the accents are sexy while Northernors are clangy and grating. Southern women are hotter. People are a little more relaxed and enjoy life more. There is a better sense of community.
Nobody goes around asking Northernors to apologize for “Jersey Shore.” It seems to me that there is this big old holier than thou attitude since the North gave up Slavery 50 years earlier. Big fucking whoop.
Bless your heart.
But no northern state–not even New Jersey–has put a picture of the cast of “Jersey Shore” on the state flag, or put up a big “Jersey Shore” monument on the lawn of the state capitol.
Committing treason to protect and expand slavery is not the South’s sole racist sin, Scylla. Pretending that the reign of racial terror in the South ended in 1863 is part of the problem we have in America with whitewashing.
It would be silly if the argument were “Your gt-gt-gt grandfather was a racist, but mine wasn’t. It was his grandfather who was the racist,” but I think few make that argument. It is present-day racism that is the problem.
There are racists and non-racists everywhere but it would be silly to pretend that the problem isn’t worse in the South. Between 1882 and 1968 there were 492 blacks lynched in Georgia but only 2 in California. Given present-day U.S. politics, voting in national elections can be taken as a *very *crude proxy for racism. In Alabama, Romney beat Obama 84-15 among whites. In California, Romney’s margin among whites was 53-45.
This is the key point.