Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating piece in the New Yorker about the limits of southern liberalism, focusing on fictional lawyer Atticus Finch and real life governor Big Jim Folsom:
Folsom was not a civil-rights activist. Activists were interested in using the full, impersonal force of the law to compel equality. In fact, the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended Folsom’s career, because the racial backlash that it created drove moderates off the political stage. The historian Michael Klarman writes, “Virtually no southern politician could survive in this political environment without toeing the massive resistance line, and in most states politicians competed to occupy the most extreme position on the racial spectrum.” Folsom lost his job to the segregationist John Patterson, who then gave way to the radical George Wallace. In Birmingham, which was quietly liberalizing through the early nineteen-fifties, Bull Connor (who notoriously set police dogs on civil-rights marchers in the nineteen-sixties) had been in political exile. It was the Brown decision that brought him back. Old-style Southern liberalism—gradual and paternalistic—crumbled in the face of liberalism in the form of an urgent demand for formal equality. Activism proved incompatible with Folsomism.
[….]Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. He will leave the judge standing on the sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes. What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama.
More generally, the idea here is that changing hearts and minds on the subject of race was an abject failure, that the problem has always been structural rather than personal and moral. I don’t know anything about this from the perspective of the south; I recommend reading Phil Nugent to see that.
But much the same is true of the nation’s political and media culture. There’s some notion that superficial changes like getting Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs off the air (something I do support) would have some actual impact on things. The real problems are at a much deeper, structural level, having nothing to do with individual personalities.
As long as Jeff Immelt and Rupert Murdoch have control of what does and doesn’t go on television, we’re going to see a lot of pro-corporate propaganda masquerading as journalism, no matter whether Chris Matthews or David Gregory has some kind of “change of heart” about this or that issue.
Update. If my point seems unclear here, let me put it more simply: just as pre-Civil Rights racism in the south wasn’t about a few racist nuts in this or that small town, our current political/media environment isn’t about a few birfers on CNN. I’m all for getting the birfers on CNN off the air, but they’re a symptom, not cause.
Napoleon
I hate the south and have finally gotten to the point with those bozos that I would be more then happy if they just left the USA.
By the way Doug, maybe my mind is just not working (yet) this morning, but I honestly don’t understand your point other then the line “More generally, the idea here is that changing hearts and minds on the subject of race was an abject failure. . . .”
Punchy
This.
And “pro-corporate” by and large means “pro-Republcan”, for all reasons taxes, regulation, and a gallimaufry of other reasons.
Napoleon
PS, what I mean is while I understand what you say in your last 2 paragraphs, they seem to me unrelated to what comes before them. Its like you combined 2 seperate post together.
beltane
Our only hope is that the public becomes a little more savvy at recognizing the propaganda thrown at them by our corporate-controlled media. In high school I had a friend who had recently emigrated from Romania who was a genius at this. She would flip through the pages of Time or Newsweek and say “propaganda, propaganda, OK that’s a real news story, propaganda, meh.”
One you realize the people on TV are working for their bosses and not the public, they lose a lot of their power to shape opinions.
DougJ
By the way Doug, maybe my mind is just not working (yet) this morning, but I honestly don’t understand your point other then the line “More generally, the idea here is that changing hearts and minds on the subject of race was an abject failure. . .
Maybe my mind’s not working yet either. I’ll reread the post when I’m more awake and try to make it more clear if it looks to me like it’s not making sense.
Scott
So how do we go about changing the structure?
someguy
I think that means that the racists are still with us, they just all turned into Republicans when the progressives marginalized them out of the Democratic Party. Makes perfect sense to me; the R’s are a seething racist lynch mob in suits. And meth freak trailer trashwear. Wouldn’t want to leave out their rural working class fans.
Karmakin
I actually think there’s a second aspect at play here, and it’s the honest focus on “balance” and what it means to them. They want to be perceived as being neutral. So that means they actually work towards obtaining relatively neutral results. Because that proves their neutrality. So they often act as the finger on the scale, making sure that neither side gets too far ahead.
The problem is that issue-wise, it would be very easy for the progressive side to run away with things, so they’re usually coming pushing the conservative PoV.
Zifnab
@Napoleon:
Hey! Screw you, buddy! There are a lot of honest, non-asshole people who live down here. And, if you’d be a bit more honest with yourself, you don’t have to throw a brick very far to hit a racist in New York City or a homophobe downtown San Fransisco if you know where to look.
Desegregation was absolutely necessary in repairing race relations in America. So long as you could divide out people by color, everyone could talk a good game about loving one’s neighbor, but it all boiled down to that – talk. The game plan wasn’t all that different then as now. The white community would suck up all the tax dollars and horde all the government services. And when the black community cried out in suffering, the retort was that if they weren’t so shiftless and lazy and criminal, they’d be doing just as well.
But when you go to school with a black kid sitting at the desk next to you, or when you have to sit on the same toilet as the Mexican and the Arab and the Slanty Eyed Chinaman, it breaks down that feeling of xenophobia people naturally develop otherwise.
You weren’t going to have a series of Socratic Debates that slowly won over the hearts of the south and finally brought people around. Until a person starts dealing with other races and cultures on a more daily basis, he’s never going to be comfortable. And in a culture littered with racist stereotypes and small minded bigotry, he’s never going to deal with someone of another race unless he’s forced to.
harlana pepper
@Napoleon: Thanks, but it would be kinda nice if those of us in the south who are progressive (yes, they do exist in the south) got a little sympathy that we are stuck in red areas wherein we get little if no emotional support and have to listen to Obama-bashing and “die Dems, die” shit on a regular basis. Thanks a lot for making us feel even more alienated.
Hunter Gathers
@Karmakin: Great, our system is run by people from the Neutral Planet.
“What do you have to say, your neutralness?”
“I have no strong feelings one way or the other!”
Must be terrifying to be under beige alert all day.
harlana pepper
and I don’t want to hear one fucking word about “stop your whining and do something” because I did, I tried so fucking hard beginning 4 years ago, I thought I would lose my fucking mind out of pure frustration and lack of support – I was utterly ALONE here in an area deeply hostile towards Dems. I failed, but I tried.
DougJ
and I don’t want to hear one fucking word about “stop your whining and do something” because I did, I tried so fucking hard beginning 4 years ago, I thought I would lose my fucking mind out of pure frustration and lack of support – I was utterly ALONE here in an area deeply hostile towards Dems. I failed, but I tried.
I hear you. And it sounds to me like what you did took a lot of heart and guts.
Morbo
@Scott: Exactly. No offense, Doug, but any time someone writes about “structural” problems I have a knee-jerk reaction of zoning out. I blame McArdle.
p.a.
I guess in some respects it’s a chicken-egg problem; how much do politicians try, and how effective is the effort, at educating the public on changes in social policy, as opposed to just having courts impose change. Not very comforting to those asked to stay calm while being denied constitutional rights, I know. But if it prevents a 2-generation backlash? I fall on the side of not waiting, but I think it is a debatable issue.
someguy
@ Zifnab –
Desegregation is a great idea, but the racist white Republicans all moved out of areas where they’d have to integrate, opened private schools, and did everything they could to ever keep from having to deal with a white person. I suspect NASCAR only got really big when they had to start admitting black people to college football games. If you look at the Charlotte school district, for example, it is utterly segregated. Durham is the same way. This isn’t due to a failure of desegregation, those districts are under busing orders, but due to the racists moving out of town when they were told their kids would have to go to school with black kids. So none of that change happens because their kids don’t grow up in mixed-race schools. They live in white enclave suburbs. Ocasionally some blacks may move in, but they are The Right Kind of People, i.e. they act just like whites. When you look at housing and school patters in the South you realize that racism is stronger than ever on the reactionary right. It just stays undercover better than its predecessor.
harlana pepper
@DougJ: Thank you, DougJ. Even my few Dem friends who I could count on one hand, were scared shitless to say a word against Bush.
Napoleon
@Zifnab:
I know that, there are good people everywhere, but some places in the world are ruled by the morons, and the south is one of them.
But I am sick of this country really not being much better then a bigger richer Argentina or Chile. If the south goes then we end up more like a bigger richer Germany. By the way, if that happens you will be welcome north with open arms.
matt
Relentlessly mocking and ridiculing southerners isn’t going to help change hearts and minds any more than handing out bibles in Baghdad is going to change Iraqi hearts and minds.
Changing minds requires building relationships built on trust, respect and empathy. It’s easier (and more fun!) to mock and deride people who don’t see the world exactly the way you do and people get off on feeling morally and intellectually superior.
That’s my pissy rant for the day.
tc125231
Noam Chomski, who CAN be annoying, had this pegged 30 years ago. We now live in a corporatist state, Corporations have rights, not people, except to the extent that they appear to control or represent corporations.
Harlana P’s remark is fatuous. Lots of people said things against Bush. So what? They were nobodies, not the heads of large corporations.
El Cid
The critique is well placed, and even should go further – without Southern segregationists, agribusinesses, and textile barons, we might have been able to keep up the much cheaper and more effective New Deal public works programs or tried true anti-poverty home ownership programs (like NC governor Terry Sanford’s experiments), but instead they all screamed “NO SOCI_ALISM” and feared raising wages for blacks and factory workers. (We could have spent far less money, raised millions more out of poverty, invested trillions in infrastructure and human development, but the Free Market would have cried, so, you know, fuck that, right?)
That’s a big reason why we instead went for poor aid programs as welfare, and conservatives knew damn well they’d soon be able to run against the welfare programs as free white money to lazy blacks, and thus we got Ronald Reagan.
Still, we should not rhetorically give ‘the South’ to its white and usually conservative population.
A majority of our nation’s African Americans live in the South but somehow always get left out of our notion of the word ‘Southerner’.
Not to mention a huge portion of our nation’s growing Latino community.
And quite a strong set of elected African American and Democratic Congressmembers from Southern cities.
I’m always among the first in line to call out the backwards, troglodyte, right wing, white conservative and Talibangelical jackasses who still dominate so much of Southern politics, but please make sure not to give the plaguers our entire region.
I’m happy that the 40 year strategy of using the Southern reactionaries to tie Republicans’ revanchist victories is now trapping them as the ever shrinking Republican Party of the Dixie Confederate Palin Baptist Free Market Uprising, but I’d like to see more liberal and Democrat victories here too.
A 50 state strategy may not always pay off with victories in the most hard core right wing Southern districts, but it’d be nice to have more Democrats and liberals giving my local shitbag bullies hell, if just to see their incomprehension of being challenged at all.
Bootlegger
@Punchy: The Dems are indomitably pro-corporate these days.
Halteclere
My mother-in-law is a perfect example of the institutionalized racism in the South. She grew up in a small town in Mississippi, and recently made the comment that Brown v. Board of Education HURT white students because their classrooms became disrupted by the unruly black kids.
There are still many, many people in the South who think of black people as a shifty, lazy, disruptive segment of the population that are unwilling to “fit in” and better themselves.
Hunter Gathers
@harlana pepper: I feel you. But don’t get too pessimistic. The demographics are trending blue big time(http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/3/761457/-New-Gallup-PollBad-News,-TERRIBLE-News,-for-The-Republican-Party, my HMTL skilzs are to fail)
And besides, crazier things have happened.
For instance:
It’s September 21st, 2001. Everybody in the country is scared shitless. You are sitting on your couch, enveloped by coverage on CNN, when a time/space portal opens up and a being that looks exactly like you, only a little older, steps through. It is the craziest fucking thing you have ever heard of or seen. Then this person tells you : ‘In seven and a half years, a black guy named Barack Hussien Obama will be elected President of the United States’. That time portal that opened up 15 seconds before? It is now no longer the craziest fucking thing you have ever seen or heard.
Bootlegger
@matt: Actually Matt, you are dead on. In Texas, then Alabama and now Kentucky I find that building community relationships is the best way to work on the structure. I let my freak-flag fly with the Obama/anti-war/rainbow bumper stickers and I don’t volunteer to anyone that I’m an atheist. But I coach youth soccer, go to town meetings, and educate kids whose worldview is over the next holler. Here, I can have an impact, not just by the force of my argument or strength of my conviction, but by demonstrating that we are all one community. As several commenters already noted, its actions that carry the water in the south, everything else is hot air.
harlana pepper
@Hunter Gathers: You have an excellent point. Never in a gabillion years did I see that one coming!
The Bearded Blogger
Of course Big Media is in the tank for Big Business, Big Health and all kinds of Big Dorks, and as long as legislation does not see the public sphere as a common good for a working democracy, this will continue to be so. However, everytime, say, blow-up doll Orly Taitz apears on a big network, Big Media sheds little legitimacy. Maybe its part of the agenda though, to de-legitimize the public sphere altogether, which is bad for democracy and therefore good for big business.
On the other subject, which DougJ akwardly used as an analogy, I think most hicks haven’t really gotten over the fact that THE PRESIDENT IS BLACK. I think after the storm the country will be a little less racist over all.
(Were racists claiming Jackie Robinson was born in Kenya when he started playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers?)
harlana pepper
@Bootlegger: I have indeed come to the conclusion that I would be more useful at the local level, volunteering and such, setting an example instead of constantly pissing in the wind. Wow, I got really caught up in the netroots and thought I could change the frickin world by sheer force of will and raising lotsa money. It takes so much more than that, it goes so much deeper. Good for you.
The Grand Panjandrum
I originally typed a nice long response to those whose paint all white southerners are racists and want the South to secede. My opinion on this matter is rather unimportant but, I do want to thank you for reminding me that not all the morons and narrow minded assholes are on the other side of the political spectrum.
cmorenc
There are some of us older progressives who can still remember (a bit painfully) what it was like growing up ourselves thoroughly steeped in the prevailing racist mindset of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s hard for outsiders to comprehend how difficult it was for folks to find the thread out of such a pervasive common mentality in the overwhelming majority of people in your community, your friends, your family, and find enough motivation and gumption to begin following it against the tide. It seems so glaringly obvious now how wrong, evil even this mindset was. But I will GUARANTEE one thing: there are so many of you folks younger than about 40 to 45 or so, or who grew up in supposedly much more progressive, unsegregated places who scorn the southern mentality who, had you grown up here, would NOT have escaped yourself, at least not until somewhere during the time when you went away to college and began to be immersed in a different environment where progressive thought on racial and other matters was more encouraged.
Thank goodness so many of us did successfully escape that mindset, and the south is truly immensely different. Just not nearly enough different from how it usta be.
Zifnab
@Napoleon:
Take a look over at California, where a few cleverly written state laws and a handful of gerrymandered districts have turned what many people perceive as one of the bluest states in the union into a GOP controlled bastion. Now give the GOP a slight majority in the state rather than a bare filibustering minority, and you’ve got Texas.
The problem, in both cases, has less to do with the people and more to do with the political hedging. I mean, you and someguy are right. The glibertarians and conservatives have done an excellent job of sequestering their homes off just enough so they don’t have to live with black people, but they can still outvote them.
But in a state with 24.6 million people, there are far more liberals and progressives than we gets credit for. And, if you know where to look (Austin, downtown Houston, large parts of Dallas) there are a lot of folks no less fair minded and sane than you’d find in Chicago or LA or New York. A lot of the problem stems for disorganization on the left, and large cash flows on the right. But even that is changing – abet at a somewhat glacial pace.
If the Dems can get some legs under them and some statewide wins under their belts in 2010 and 2012, this state may trend blue sooner than you think. Texas isn’t a lost cause, it’s just behind the curve.
CaseyL
As several commenters already noted, its actions that carry the water in the south, everything else is hot air.
But do they actually make any difference? The South seems to be as monolithically racist, classist, and bone-deep ignorant as it was before the Brown decision, and that’s 50 years after Brown.
I do feel for progressives stuck down there, but doesn’t there come a point where you realize it’s never going to change – not structurally, culturally, economically – and, for the sake of your own sanity and your own family say “OK, we’re outta here”?
Because no, it doesn’t look like the South is ever going to join the 20th Century, much less the 21st.
gex
@Zifnab: Excellent point on the necessity of desegregation. Social scientists often point out that hearts and minds change more readily if someone knows people from the minority group whether it be blacks, gays, etc.
harlana pepper
@The Grand Panjandrum: If it weren’t for my family being here, I would have been long gone. My relationship with the south is love/hate. I love it because it’s my home and it’s just so darned beautiful, but I often find I relate better to “nawthen” transplants that my own people.
Bootlegger
@harlana pepper: I still engage nationally through portals like this and national elections, but you can only change your little part of the world. It’s not easy biting my tongue some times when a mom at a swim meet tells me her daughter likes basketball better but “she’s the wrong color” or my neighbor explains a pedophile by the strong male sex drive’s affect on the “gay lifestyle”. I respond, after several deep breaths, in an even and thoughtful manner. Especially since what I really want to do is scream and knock them over the head with a stoopid stick. But it works, they pause and think about what they said, but if I attack they get defensive. I have to take a similar tack with my university students.
Molly
@Scott: “So how do we go about changing the structure?”
A lot of it is generational. As others have pointed out. As the generations turn over, you’ll see a change. For now, we wait for an older generation to die off. That sounds cold, but that’s the reality.
harlana pepper
@Bootlegger: You must have the patience of Job.
gex
@Zifnab: And to further elaborate, it really isn’t north vs. south on this. It is more closely correlated to urban vs. rural. Proximity and exposure.
Bootlegger
@CaseyL: Nonsense, it has changed. Auburn, Alabama’s First Baptist Church is very progressive and they have a large and active UU congregation. Most southern states, including my Kentucky and now my County, have laws against sexual orientation discrimination and granting benefits for workers to same-sex partners. This isn’t just window dressing but real structural change. Yeah, we all wish it would move faster, but such is not the nature of the plural society.
Tonybrown74
The article sounds like the same old, “be patient, and you’ll get your rights in due time,” shtick, except that it’s from the perspective of someone who isn’t oppressed.
Personally, as a black man, I am tired of that excuse. I’d like to think that for once, I can own a nice car without worrying about being pulled over (or even surviving the experience). As a gay man, I would like to think that if I ever meet someone and decide to get married, that I can legally protect my family (or not having to constantly be aware of my surroundings in case of a bashing). I can’t even imagine all the shit that women go through on a daily basis.
Sometimes, it just exhausting having to worry about all these things, and having to fight for some scrap of respect and equality because of who I am. Every damned day!
I cannot feel sorry or sympathy for Folsom right now. I am too busy deciding which is the lesser of two evils for me: living with second class citizenship, or the backlash that comes when the law mandates I be treated equally.
Bootlegger
@harlana pepper: Nah, I don’t suffer fools well at all actually. But growing up here you learn how to outmaneuver the morons. I also like to post on local politics websites as a catharsis, there you can engage the true moron directly and shout yourself hoarse.
Bootlegger
@Tonybrown74: That kind of bullshit happens all over the US, its not somehow banished to the South. Look at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, they map hate groups around the US. California, New York and Pennsylvania are not hurting for their share of hate.
Also think about where the most recent example of racial profiling occurred, Cambridge, Mass. (though I’m not convinced this was as clear as many thought).
hoosierteachergirl
To: #10 harlana pepper
As a progressive dem in Indiana (only recently turned blue after a 40-year red scare…), I have a sense of your pain. I love the south, though I admit some places do scare me, as I’m sure you can attest to. There is an historical feel to it that is fascinating, and oh, my, is there some natural beauty. Hang in there with the haters!
Steeplejack
No, it was a simpler, more natural time. People drank unfluoridated water, brushed their teeth with baking soda, smoked unfiltered Camels and were content to call him a n*gger.
The Grand Panjandrum
@harlana pepper: The south is a beautiful place and one should never underestimate the power of family and roots. They are strong bonds and not easily broken even when we detest much of what we presume to love. I love travelling through the South. Last year we drove hundreds of miles out of way going across country just to eat at Rhoda’s Famous Tamales in Lake Village, AR and it was worth every drop of gasoline. Rhoda’s isn’t on the ‘official’ trail guide for the Tamale Trail, it is one of might favorite stops. The Tamale Trail road trip is rife with seriously great grub and the people are genuinely nice all along the way. I imagine I’ve run into some genuine racists but I’m there to eat–not talk about Jesus or politics.
ericvsthem
I’ve run into enough well-educated, white Virginians (not even the “Deep South!”) who readily make the claim that the South “fought the North to a draw” in the Civil War to understand that these fuckers are still fighting a war they lost almost 150 years ago.
I see no reason to try to work or reason with them on any political issue. Best hope is that they and their kin marginalize themselves into irrelevance.
Molly
@CaseyL: “But do they actually make any difference? The South seems to be as monolithically racist, classist, and bone-deep ignorant as it was before the Brown decision, and that’s 50 years after Brown.”
Casey, you are wrong. You’re guilty of the same thing you accuse Southerns of. In much of the South, things have changed a LOT. Zifnab pointed out the areas that are genuinely liberal. Do we still fight it? HELL YES. But is it all of the South, all Southerners? NO. You think the large gay communities in Atlanta and Houston are a bunch of right-wing racists? How about Virginia, they obviously hated Barack Obama in the election, no? Barbara Jordan came from my home town. John Lewis represents Atlanta. We are not all a bunch of right-wing frothers.
Instead of making ignorant statements like this, how about you listen to those of us who live here and seek to learn something?
That is all.
Aspasia
El Cid at 21 above has it about right, although the “structural” in the original post goes much deeper than corporate control, which is the form that uncontrolled capitalism took in the last century. Historians of American slavery argue that white-supremacist racism originated during the post-colonial period as an ideological excuse to distinguish free labor from slave labor, hence ensuring that free laborers would readily despise their nearest competition and thus be distracted from their own ill-treatment by their economic masters. This pattern has played out over and over in American history, as, fer instance, during the modern Civil Rights movement where resistance was led by Birmingham capitalists but acted out by poor whites. And no, I’m not a Marxist; just a lonely progressive trying to survive in the ideological climate of Arizona, where currently Barry Goldwater seems like a liberal.
Aspasia
Bootlegger
@ericvsthem: Not to be one of your morons, but the North was on its heels and only won with its manufacturing. Head to head it wasn’t even close. A similar and much ignored fact is that our troops in WW2 got whipped by the Krauts and Japs (the Eyeties were pussies) early on until our technology and manufacturing overwhelmed them.
More to your point, people may see the history that way and there are a small vocal minority who are still sincere about this, but nobody I know takes that shit seriously.
Bootlegger
@Aspasia: Chris Mathews called Joan Walsh a marxist for making this argument, she and the other guy on the show slapped him down and he stuttered something about “conspiracy theories”.
Steeplejack
@CaseyL:
Only from the outside. A Southerner of the 1950s transported to Atlanta today would not recognize the place. There are blacks in positions of power in government, business and the arts, whereas 50 years ago blacks couldn’t even drink from the same public drinking fountains as whites.
And it’s not just the big cities. All across the South there are small towns where schools are integrated and black kids and white kids play on the same football teams, where blacks no longer have to be afraid of being out and about after dark or worry about being in the wrong part of town. I don’t think any black person (note: I am not one) would disagree that the South today, for all its faults, is a much better place than it was 50 years ago.
Are things perfect? No. Are there still racist, willfully stupid fuckheads littering the landscape? Yes. But there are still racist, willfully stupid fuckheads littering the landscape all across the fruited plain (as Rush would say). The difference is that your average racist fuckhead in, say, Bismarck, ND, doesn’t get a chance to display his racism on a daily basis.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
This.
I’m not going to go full-Kumbaya we-live-in-a-post-racial-society, but from watching my kids grow up I can tell that their world is not the country I grew up in during the 60s/70s. Sometimes we have discussions about the past and when I try to describe to them what it was like living in a highly segregated and very overtly racist society, I can tell that the idea of it just doesn’t register with them – I might as well be describing the topology of canals on Mars or living in a country where there are no cars and people walk everywhere. They understand the idea of racism as a formal, abstract concept, but it just doesn’t relate very well to the daily world that they and their friends live in (which is very rainbow) and which is all they’ve ever known. This generational gulf also became apparent when Obama was elected and it took some real explaining on my part for them to understand that to older people it was a big deal that the POTUS was a person of mixed race for the 1st time. Their attitude was more like “um, yeah that’s nice, dad – so when are you going to get to the important stuff you said you were going to tell us about?”
I know that this isn’t going to last, that part of it is the more innocent world of the young and when they hit the adult world there will be some ugly realities waiting for them, but it makes me hopeful that we have made some progress.
CaseyL
Molly & Bootlegger –
You’re talking about individual pols and enclaves within states – sometimes enclaves within cities. Those are fine and wonderful and no doubt vital oases for you, as individuals, to find some comfort in.
But when half of all respondents in the South say they doubt Obama was born in the US, there is no way you can argue things are “getting better” down there. When opposition to the Democratic agenda is based and centered and nourished in the South, there is no way you can argue things are “getting better” down there.
Things are actually getting worse.
Aspasia
@Bootlegger:
I saw that bit on Matthews’ show. I can never figure out if Matthews is as ignorant as he seems, or if he is sly like a fox, shilling for his corporate masters.
And Walsh was definitely not happy to be called a marxist, because she knew it was an attempt to discount her analysis.
That’s how the epithet “marxist” usually works anyhow.
Aspasia
Bootlegger
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: A lot depends on how parents filter this “new world”. My kids are the same as yours, but I suspect a racist parent would be telling their kids something different. Then there is the much larger number in between the extremes. But my hope, paralleling yours, is that our kids influence that middle more than the racist kids. My sense is that this is already how its playing out.
Esther
random thoughts:
These people who “hate” the “ignorant” South are displaying the very close-mindedness and ignorance that they’re contemptuous of.
I don’t understand what you mean by “structure.”
Poor whites in the South were always cheated, screwed over, and kept down in the same way blacks were. (Before the New South, a cheap, uneducated labor force – of whatever color – was essential for the South to survive economically.) Poor white people were treated with contempt in a way that blacks never were. Everyone knew that black people had the deck stacked against them because of their color, but poor whites were poor because they were trash. Is that the “structure” you’re talking about?
Tonybrown74
https://balloon-juice.com/?p=24978&cpage=1#comment-1319155
I’m well aware of that. I live in Boston and was in high school right down the street from neighborhood where Charles Stuart killed his wife and blamed some black man for the crime. My mother lived in fear every time she sent me to school (since the cops were ransacking the neighborhood looking for the suspect), and actually kept me home a few times to make sure I was safe.
My post was in relation to the mindset of being patient, NOT about the south. My apologies for not being clear on that.
Bootlegger
@CaseyL: Where do you think I live? Some happy progressive, walled ghetto with our own schools and media? You think the new state laws protecting same-sex partners benefits and outlawing discrimination are just in our little “enclave”? WTF?
I live in the middle of the southern world and have for most of my adult life. It is nothing like it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
What poll says half of all southerners believe Obama is not a citizen? Even in the national elections Obama polled over 40%, high 40’s mostly. In a room with 10 people, that’s 4 and 6. Close enough for a fair fistfight.
Bootlegger
@Aspasia: Right, she didn’t like his attempt to marginalize her, but it was also an inaccurate application of marxism as she pointed out to him. Yeah, he’s a maroon.
Bootlegger
@Tonybrown74: Ahh, ok, in that case I fully agree with everything you said sir.
Comrade Dread
I don’t think Murdoch and company are necessarily the root problem.
The root problem seems largely to be that Americans frequently choose the most sensationalist, vapid ‘news’ that entertains them over quality reporting that would hold government accountable.
I don’t see a way to get around that, unless we focus on education and stressing principles about the need to keep government and corporations accountable by being well-informed and active.
Otherwise, we could step in and reset rules that restrict corporate ownership of multiple news sources. But that would likely mean we’d just have dozens of smaller companies all trying to out do each other to pander to the entertainment impulses of America.
Or we could nationalize news bureaus and trade corporate propaganda for government propaganda.
Point being, we are the main problem.
Cat
@Bootlegger:
Not to be one of your morons, but the North was on its heels and only won with its manufacturing. Head to head it wasn’t even close. A similar and much ignored fact is that our troops in WW2 got whipped by the Krauts and Japs (the Eyeties were pussies) early on until our technology and manufacturing overwhelmed them.
Yes, the South and the Axis were better then American’s in every way, except in the areas that are important in winning wars, technology and manufacturing (according to you). I’m sure it wasn’t a tactical failure on the Confederate’s leadership part they didn’t take their superior fighting force and neutralize those manufacturing centers. It was just bad luck, right?
Military forces that lose wars are logically not superior. Army’s are more then just the guys in the uniforms. They are also the political leaders, the culture they come from, the arms they use, their supply chains, and the family who they left back at home. A weakness in one of those things can cause an army to lose a war just as easily as being made up of soldiers who can’t shoot straight or General’s who make bad decisions.
DougJ
The article sounds like the same old, “be patient, and you’ll get your rights in due time,” shtick, except that it’s from the perspective of someone who isn’t oppressed.
I think Gladwell’s point is a bit the opposite.
Brachiator
This is the problem for me. I got stuck on Gladwell’s perverse revisionism, which tries to make the paternalistic racism of the South of the 50s into something positive. This makes it hard for me to see anything applicable, even metaphorically, to today’s issues.
It’s almost as if he were siding with the “go-slow” benignly racist establishment that MLK castigated in his letter from a Birmingham Jail. I know that Gladwell was reaching for a larger point, but he only ended up confusing himself.
Anyway, the part of the South that wants to align with teabaggers and Republican opposition to Obama will soon have to show how they can climb out of the recession while rejecting any assistance that the federal government would like to provide:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090804/us_nm/us_usa_economy_south
Tax Analyst
“But do they actually make any difference? The South seems to be as monolithically racist, classist, and bone-deep ignorant as it was before the Brown decision, and that’s 50 years after Brown.”
It’s mostly just the majority of voters in Senatorial and Presidential elections (and Obama’s election showed some substantial change in several states). But if you look at the Senators elected in many of the Southern states all you can do is hold your nose and shake your head.
Are there blantantly racist folks in the South? Sure. We’ve got a bunch of them in Californy, too. I wish we didn’t, but wishin’ don’t make them disappear. The die-hards won’t change, but eventually they will just die out eventually. Goodbye, good riddance. But the main point is to keep from growing any more of them. They’re a pimple on the ass of humanity, for damned sure.
El Cid
Sometimes I remember that both black and white Southerners had FDR’s portrait hanging in their house, and closed down the mills and the country stores when he died.
Why? Because he did something for them. Sure thr Republicans and the NAM was screaming about “soci_alism”, but FDR helped take the average millworker who literally made too little to feed both him/herself and the kids, and he helped make ’em middle class, and FDR finally went along with A. Philip Randolph and hired African Americans in defense plants, and they all saw new roads and dams and medical clinics and schools and gov’t buildings and factories and military bases.
Let me tell you something I think.
I think that you can take the most reactionary, vote against any Democrat, vote against their own material interests, conservative and racist whites.
And if you make it so they or their kids can go to the doctor and afford it and not have to worry about going bankrupt or losing their health insurance when yet another store or plant moves or closes…
…and they KNOW that Obama and the Democrats pushed this through…
…you might get a bit of that FDR effect among a WHOLE lot of conservative Southern whites who otherwise would be and probably are now saying crazy nasty things about Obama.
You give ’em something real and direct, something undeniably done by the federal government, and which really makes their lives better, and you’ll see some things — I believe — that seem impossible right now.
latts
Haven’t read all the comments, and my position isn’t all that popular, but oh well…
I’m in the South (born & bred), a lifelong liberal, and am not particularly offended by the wish-they’d-secede comments. The South is pretty much a dead weight wrt progressivism and general societal advancement, and there’s no point in pretending it’s not. It doesn’t matter whether we attribute it to the stylized Cavalier social models of the antebellum period, neo-feudalism, Scots-Irish belligerence, the history of migration towards Texas, or whatever theory suits one’s purpose, there’s clearly something about the region that makes cooperative, forward-thinking small-d democracy an uncomfortable fit. A culture that developed around ownership of other humans will most likely never be on the curve of social justice, much less ahead of it. It’s frustrating as hell, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not some broader truth in the snide comments. I recommend reading Ed Kilgore wrt the South– he manages to be both clear-eyed and have a lot more affection for the place than I ever will, as the best Southern writers often do.
That does not mean that we Southern progressives suck, either by association or due to some massive political failure of our own. We’re outnumbered and fighting a particularly burdensome history, after all. The difference between Southern racism and other regions’ isn’t in its nature or even in its numbers, but in its long history of institutional dominance that continues to provide validation. That’s not going away anytime soon, any more than a lot of unpleasant cultural legacies are in China or India or Egypt or anywhere else in the world with a substantial history of injustice that has not been swept away by either intermarriage or a massive geopolitical shock.
I’m particularly badly suited for the neighborly strategy for political progress, because I’m aggressively liberal and very impatient, so I’m as frustrated as any Northeastern progressive by the region. The best result I hope for is the political neutralization of the South, with some strong pockets of blue… there’s only so far we’re able to go with the materials we’ve got. But that’s okay; we just have to accept that there’s a more recalcitrant region in this country that has the potential to improve, but almost certainly not to lead.
2th&nayle
@The Grand Panjandrum: Thx for the links. I live in central Arkansas and usually make a trip to Lake Village each spring to go ‘crappie huntin’ on Lake Chico with my Dad. I have never been to Rhonda’s but will put it on the itinerary for the next trip. I’m always amazed at the things you can learn here at BJ!
BTW, I also completely agree with your comment @ 29. Thx again!
Bootlegger
@Cat: Are you trying to be dense or do you just like taking on the straw man? I never argued that manufacturing or technology were “luck” or had nothing to do with an army’s success. In fact, since the United States armies prevailed in both cases, and thousands of others with such advantage throughout history, its clear that tech and supplies, particularly the latter, are fundamental to armed conflict. No freakin’ duh.
Southerners who make the claim that the “south shoulda won” or “we fought ’em to a draw” are only referring to the actual man on man fight, which is exactly which is exactly the point to which I was responding. Only an idiot would ignore the fact that the Union armies were beaten at every turn and almost lost DC in the first three years of the war. The Union eventually wore down the Confederates with more men, supplies, and better tech (see repeating rifles and gatling guns).
Please read my posts before you reveal your obtuseness.
28 Percent
@ericvsthem:
I’ve run into enough well-educated, white Virginians (not even the “Deep South!”) who readily make the claim that the South “fought the North to a draw” in the Civil War to understand that these fuckers are still fighting a war they lost almost 150 years ago.
hilarity ensues.
Yes, after four years of fighting, the South was able to force the Union to accept the Southern states back into the Union under generous terms (“generous” in this context means that the southern states got to keep their previous geographic territories… mostly… except Virginia, of course).
28 Percent
@Cat:
the North was on its heels and only won with its manufacturing. Head to head it wasn’t even close. … I’m sure it wasn’t a tactical failure on the Confederate’s leadership part they didn’t take their superior fighting force and neutralize those manufacturing centers.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment for a few nitpicky reasons. First off, it discounts the equal importance of the North’s population advantage (not including border states, the north had 20mil to the south’s 6million free + 4million slave population) so that’s a 10:3 advantage and a resident 5th column.
Second, each side had around 100K deaths in battle, as far as anybody’s been able to tell (southern recordkeeping is problematic). The real disparity in deaths came from disease – the Northern army lost about 200K to disease, the South 100K.
Third, the North used balls, brilliant tactics and practically revolutionary ideas about logistics to retake the Mississippi River, after which it was all only a matter of time. We tend to focus our historical perception of the war on the campaigns that involved the Army of Northern Virginia (the only part that really went well for the South – coincidence? hmmmm…) but the war was really won when Grant took Vicksburg and Farragut secured the Mississippi.
And Fourth, the Confederacy’s generalship did attempt twice to invade northern territory, albeit to force a political solution. But even if they’d known that Pittsburgh – and I can’t think of a manufacturing center more accessible to Confederate armies than that – had become a manufacturing center during the war (and it wasn’t one before) – they never had a chance of getting anywhere near it militarily.
melissa
I love this blog, but the comments in this thread dishearten me.
The Gladwell piece gives us lots to think about: how Southern racism was complicated before Brown v. Board of education; how the popularity of To Kill A Mockingbirdalmost always omits the structural racism, class prejudice, and misogyny; how our complicated relations and biases consist of many levels (personal, distanced & “fair”, structural).
This thread has veered into stale generalizations & rebuttals (about the south, the civil war, and etc). I was impressed with the re-evaluation of TKaM. The book & its popularity has nagged at me since I was in my late teens. It is taught a lot in high schools and I question the presentation.
Could we talk for a minute about Folsom & Finch?
Melissa
melissa
I love this blog, but the comments in this thread dishearten me.
The Gladwell piece gives us lots to think about: how Southern racism was complicated before Brown v. Board of education; how the popularity of To Kill A Mockingbirdalmost always omits the structural racism, class prejudice, and misogyny; how our complicated relations and biases consist of many levels (personal, distanced & “fair”, structural).
This thread has veered into stale generalizations & rebuttals (about the south, the civil war, and etc). I was impressed with the re-evaluation of TKaM. The book & its popularity has nagged at me since I was in my late teens. It is taught a lot in high schools and I question the presentation.
Could we talk for a minute about Folsom & Finch?
Melissa
melissa
I love this blog, but the comments in this thread dishearten me.
The Gladwell piece gives us lots to think about: how Southern racism was complicated before Brown v. Board of education; how the popularity of To Kill A Mockingbirdalmost always omits the structural racism, class prejudice, and misogyny; how our complicated relations and biases consist of many levels (personal, distanced & “fair”, structural).
This thread has veered into stale generalizations & rebuttals (about the south, the civil war, and etc). I was impressed with the re-evaluation of TKaM. The book & its popularity has nagged at me since I was in my late teens. It is taught a lot in high schools and I question the presentation.
Could we talk for a minute about Folsom & Finch?
Melissa
melissa
I love this blog, but the comments in this thread dishearten me.
The Gladwell piece gives us lots to think about: how Southern racism was complicated before Brown v. Board of education; how the popularity of To Kill A Mockingbirdalmost always omits the structural racism, class prejudice, and misogyny; how our complicated relations and biases consist of many levels (personal, distanced & “fair”, structural).
This thread has veered into stale generalizations & rebuttals (about the south, the civil war, and etc). I was impressed with the re-evaluation of TKaM. The book & its popularity has nagged at me since I was in my late teens. It is taught a lot in high schools and I question the presentation.
Could we talk for a minute about Folsom & Finch?
Melissa
melissa
I love this blog, but the comments in this thread dishearten me.
The Gladwell piece gives us lots to think about: how Southern racism was complicated before Brown v. Board of education; how the popularity of To Kill A Mockingbirdalmost always omits the structural racism, class prejudice, and misogyny; how our complicated relations and biases consist of many levels (personal, distanced & “fair”, structural).
This thread has veered into stale generalizations & rebuttals (about the south, the civil war, and etc). I was impressed with the re-evaluation of TKaM. The book & its popularity has nagged at me since I was in my late teens. It is taught a lot in high schools and I question the presentation.
Could we talk for a minute about Folsom & Finch?
Melissa
Nutella
re: South vs North
I read a book about a black man’s motorcycle trip through the USA (by E. Lynn Harris, if I remember right). The thing that struck me most about it was him saying that he found white northerners were very nervous to see him since they so rarely saw black people around them while white southerners were more accustomed to the presence of blacks.
And if I didn’t already know that Gladwell was a Yankee, it’s obvious from the quote since he doesn’t know that Massive Resistance is always capitalized.
But please, let’s not fight the Civil War over again.