It’s easy to play the ugly American when the target is right here in America, in the American South.
We love making fun of all those ignorant bohunks with their Southern twangs.
As the Confederate battle flag comes down in South Carolina (and elsewhere), perhaps Civil War re-enactments will end, too. Then maybe we can also stop talking about American slavery as if it ended only yesterday.
We’re supposed to learn from history, not keep reliving it. The South, though, has been held hostage by American central casting.
I made my first visit to the South in the 90’s. My dad was from a small town in Arkansas, just over the Mississippi state line. He left the South as a young man to fight in World War II and never went back. He rarely talked about his childhood. The only references he made to it were with certain Southern expressions (“poke and grits,” for example, or “raw-heads and bloody bones”).
When I told him I was going to visit his hometown and the Mississippi Delta, he was unimpressed.
“Why the hell would you want to go there?” he said, which was pretty much what he said years earlier when I visited some WWII sites.
Of the two childhood photos I have of my dad, the best one shows a boy dressed in farmer’s overalls, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes defeated, as if whatever’s coming next can’t be good. He looks to be about 14, which was roughly the age he was when he dropped out of school.
I didn’t learn why he had dropped out until after he was dead. His family moved around so much, he couldn’t keep up in school. After being held back, one grade after another, he was so much bigger than the other students it was embarrassing so he left.
Was he also embarrassed to be from the South? It’s often portrayed as the closest thing to visiting a foreign country without leaving the U.S.
It’s not unlike traveling in parts of Germany. When you get off the bus in the city of Dachau, the driver doesn’t wait to be asked. He knows exactly what you’re looking for and points you in the direction of the camp.
Likewise, if someone in the barely-there town of Money, Miss., sees a stranger stopping at the dilapidated remains of a grocery store, he knows exactly what she’s looking for.
In Oxford, Miss., (home of the Ole’ Miss Rebels), the town’s celebrated independent book store on Courthouse Square sells a magazine called “Blue & Gray,” a contemporary magazine devoted to the Civil War. Its motto: “For Those Who Still Hear the Guns!”
In Vicksburg, the Old Courthouse Museum displayed its memories with no gussying-up. I don’t know what the museum is like now, but when I visited it, what struck me was its simplicity. At times I felt like I had stepped into a parlor and was looking at the family heirlooms, some of them valued for their notoriety.
At the Duff Green Mansion in Vicksburg, the innkeepers readily told stories of when it was used as a hospital for Confederate troops – and later Union soldiers – during the siege of Vicksburg. A member of the staff pointed out scars left from the cannonballs. Later when she learned I was planning to also visit Natchez, she became slightly defensive.
“They’ll tell you they have more beautiful homes than we do,” she warned. “That’s because Natchez surrendered. We didn’t.”
Yes, they still hear the guns. How can they not? The rest of America won’t let them forget. Do non-Southerners ever contemplate the sound of their own gunfire in the street gangs that dominate some of America’s inner cities – even in abolitionist states?
Typical of this condescension was a comment by L.A. Times travel writer Christopher Reynolds, which I found while planning my trip to the South. He described a scene at a bar in Oxford, Mississippi: “After a long Saturday of re-enacting skirmishes from 1863, several dozen Civil War fanatics, all white and most of them dressed in Confederate uniform, feel comfortable leaping to the tabletops in The Gin bar in downtown Oxford, swilling beer, and shouting along with the lyrics to ‘Play That Funky Music, White Boy.’ With restraint astonishing to a Californian, the bar’s handful of black customers waited quietly and patiently for the retro-soldiers, some of whom had come from neighboring states, to finish and leave.”
What’s astonishing about Reynolds’ astonishment is that he wrote that just two years after his own hometown – Los Angeles – erupted into a race riot that left 53 dead and at least 2,000 injured. Who was he to lecture white Southerners on how to behave? Or was he astonished that the blacks in Oxford did not start rioting?
Blacks and whites have lived together in the South a lot longer than they have in other parts of the U.S. They don’t hate each other as much as non-Southerners want to believe.
It’s not surprising that when a young white man named Dylann Roof walked into Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, the black study group welcomed him. Neither is it surprising that Roof’s father and uncle immediately offered up his identity to police after recognizing him in the church video. Nor is it surprising that a white woman spotted Roof’s car, recognized the driver, alerted authorities and followed him until the police could stop him.
There’s a quote attributed to Martin Luther King that goes something like, “In the South, whites like blacks as individuals but don’t like the race. In the North, it’s the other way around.”
The North has its own history of racism, but it doesn’t attract tourists or re-enactments. In fact, next month there will be an anniversary for a race-related riot that was one of the deadliest in American history.
The New York City Draft Riots in 1863 began when white men – especially poor, white men – objected to being drafted to fight in the Civil War. About 115 people died, including almost a dozen black men who were lynched.
The rioters who took to New York’s streets didn’t need a Confederate battle flag to rally around.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
Have you ever heard of Kevin Baker’s ‘City of Fire’ trilogy? The second book in the series ‘Paradise Alley’ is about the Civil War era anti-draft riot in New York. Very well written and I assume researched. The fist book ‘Dreamland’ is also an amazing read.
I have heard of that trilogy but have never explored it. Since we’re coming up on the anniversary, I’ll try “Paradise Alley” first.
The New York Times gave it a triumphant review:
“From Monday, July 13, through Wednesday, July 17, mobs held much of Manhattan. The rioters were working class, overwhelmingly Irish Catholic and filled with smoldering resentments — at the Yankee Protestants who exploited and demeaned them, at the squalor in which they were forced to live, at inflationary prices and lockouts and strikebreaking. … Baker’s itinerary encompasses ravaged Ireland and the carnage at Fredericksburg, as well as New York’s lower depths. He takes his readers to a bull-baiting pit, walks them past slaughterhouses and through a Manhattan sewer filled with scuttling rats. And we visit places most New Yorkers know nothing about: Seneca Village, the black squatters’ settlement that stood in the center of what is now Central Park till 19th-century gentrification moved uptown and wiped it out… .”
I’ve been in Central Park and don’t recall seeing a reference to Seneca Village, but maybe I just missed it.
Thanks for the recommendation, Tom.
That the confederate battle flag has much to do with the savage murder of those black parishioners, I am uncertain.
However, I am certain that racial opportunists were again successful in refocusing the attention of even the most clear eyed observers of the American scene.
This mass murder has become a successful attack on white people and American culture. The flag serves as a tool for racial opportunists to further aggravate the divides that have been increased and exacerbated during this our American period of Obamism.
It now seems fair game to disinter dead confederates, opine about white pathologies,
the justice of removing Washington statuary and, etc., etc. The opportunities for new objects for grievance and race fire fuel is an endlessly renewable one, evidently.
Something will always exist in the culture that is painful and unbearable for someone on the left and must be removed and or suppressed or rioted against or postured about.
To be drawn into the denunciation of the flag is to lose sight of what is vital and positive about our country and its (at one time) perpetually positive aspirations, not to mention the reality of the individual who committed the murders.
It is so easy to gull the well-meaning. A cultural dismantlement is under way. We will regret it if for no other reason than we shall be filled with self-loathing when we realize our participation in its (our) destruction.
Sometimes we ask of peoples that deliver themselves up for ruin, “Why did they do it?” It is so obvious to us moderns what those low and cheating figures like Goebbels were playing at; those who were destroyed had to have been, in some degree, complicit in their own destruction.
My retort was you can’t blame them for what came about. As Monty Python used to say, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Well our modern inquisition is just as vicious and as stupidly cruel as that of the counter-reformation or the inquisition. And the evil that has enacted this false flag frenzy is about as subtle as Kristallnacht.
Maybe one could have been surprised by Torquemada’s lads. But the Hitler creatures were not just predictable they were as blatant in their destructive hate as any of the opportunists who wrap themselves in this “flag” rhetoric or rather wrap us in it – or a leader who declares a thug to be his imaginary son.
We grab the dagger from those that profit from our destruction and push it into our belly ourselves and are thankful for the opportunity.
Sometimes disgust is the only legitimate response to modern Americans – both white and black.
What a great comment, Larry. You connect the past, present and where we’re headed. Too bad our politicians, educators or media celebrities won’t do the same. It’s not that none of them see what’s going on. They are afraid of negative publicity and losing their jobs.
That’s why Obama has been such a disppointment. He has been in a unique position to show the black community (and certain white politicians) that the ultimate racist put-down is to assume that black Americans are such sensitive, little picaninnies they can’t possibly help themselves.
I recently reread a Fourth of July column from several years ago by black writer Thomas Sowell. In it he writes:
“Too many Americans today are not only unconcerned about what it will take to preserve this country but are busy dismantling the things that make it America.
“Our national motto, ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — from many, one — has been turned upside down as educators, activists and politicians strive to fragment the American population into separate racial, social, linquistic and ideological blocs.”
Yes, Larry, there were undoubtedly people — who are on no hate group lists — who secretly saw a political upside when they heard a white guy killed nine blacks in a historic black church.
Thank you for your patience. Clearly, I’d worked myself into a state and in review I think my coherence…uh…fades at times.
I’m attaching a link to Blogging Heads. I recommend The Glenn Show. Glenn Loury is a black intellectual I often disagree with but whom I always respect. I was pointed to him by Althouse, another blogger I do not always agree with but…
http://bloggingheads.tv/programs/current/glenn-show
This divide and conquer program of the American Left is fatal if it is maintained.