Southern Delusions

I am a Southerner. That cannot be denied. I was born, raised, and have lived my entire life in the South, so my Bona fide’s are well deserved, but that comes with something of a caveat that a number of my Southern brethren will likely not agree with; I do not elevate “the South” or being a “Southerner” with any type of special cultural pride, which I can tell you sets me apart. Most Southerners take special pride in quite a number of the South’s defining cultural signatures, such as our hospitality, and focus on family, not to mention a bag full of “ma’ams” and “sirs” ready to unleash at our elders. Southerners also take particular pride in their “Lord and savior Jesus Christ”, as evident at the profusion of churches on most every street corner. In fact, newcomers to the south will likely not get more than a minute into a conversation without being asked about their church affiliation and attendance.  

And there is no doubt that I have adopted a fair share of southern mannerisms and traditions myself, a few of which I even strive to cultivate, such as respect for our elders, but there is one southern tradition that I draw a hard line in the sand against and refuse to cede even an inch of validity, that being “Confederate pride”, and here in the south, especially when driving through the rural south, a confederate flag will confront you about as often as a traffic light. And it’s this leftover cultural artifact that stands at ground-zero regarding the feelings I hold for my southern heritage. I believe those who continue to display it so proudly fail to appreciate the brutal history lying at its feet, or perhaps they do and continue to do so because they identify with it, which I suspect is the case. Either way, it is no small grievance, so allow me to elaborate.

Clearly, I understand the majority of modern-day Southerners only tacitly accept of the confederate flag as nothing more than a familiar cultural icon without endorsing its ideology in any way. But symbols displayed to the public necessarily speak to that public, and what many passive Southerners fail to consider is that their casual acceptance of the confederate flag only encourages and emboldens the radicals lurking in the weeds, those who really do endorse the racist ideology of the confederacy. In other words, it’s the moderates who accept the flag as a relatively benign Southern symbol and nothing more who are unwittingly providing cover for the racists in our communities.

Just last summer our nation witnessed a uniquely Southern flareup that exposed the underbelly of this entire polemic. The trouble focused on the hundreds of statues around the south prominently displaying Confederate War Heroes at various State Capitals, and other government buildings. The debate has been brewing quietly for several years now, but with Trump’s election, and the associated side effect of “White Nationalism” growing across the country, the subject has only amplified since.

At one time I believed these types of public debates, even clashes on occasion (think of the student protests over Vietnam), should not overly alarm anyone in and of themselves, since they can often shed new vantage points on difficult issues, as well as encourage our “Free Speech” muscles to flex a bit. But with the rise of the aforementioned White Nationalism, I’ve seen a sharp increase in Confederate nostalgia and even some racist pride emerging that has inspired a new generation to embrace its heritage as if it were somehow synonymous with patriotism.

This particular flareup began two years ago on the night of August 11^th, when a group of Ku Klux Klansmen and other white supremacists marched across the University of Virgina campus carrying torches and harassing students due to the scheduled removal the next day of a Robert E. Lee statue at a downtown park. The following day they showed up again looking for a fight.

The notorious racist, David Duke, then leader of the KKK declared at the time:

“This represents a turning point for the people of this country…..We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

But protesters showed up to voice their opposition and their racist propaganda, and soon turned violent, with dozens injured and one young woman left dead after a white supremist drove his car into a crowd of protesters. After continuous “dog whistling” from President Trump that gave white supremacists a level of moral cover to come out from the shadows, they did so and have become emboldened. Neo-Fascist militia groups such as “The Proud Boys” and “The Oath Keepers” emerged promoting their “White Power” agendas, all while swearing allegiance to Trump and his call to unite behind him. Few people wanted to admit to any of this, but after August 11th and 12th in Charlottesville, there would be January 6^th, with the Confederate flag flying right alongside the Stars and Stripes as another insurrection unfolded before our eyes.

At the time the Charlottesville incident played out I worked with two co-workers, both Southern raised, who strongly opposed the removal of Lee’s statue and voiced their vehemence against it, but I felt they were neglecting to honestly consider and appreciate the message those statues were explicitly communicating to a large portion of our country, and told them as much. As a thought experiment, I asked them to imagine being Jewish, for example, who had family members who died at concentration camps during WW II, repeating my imperative to imagine their grandparents being fed to the furnaces at Dachau, while they lived in modern day Germany with the government buildings still displayed statues of Himmler, Goering, and Hitler; how would they feel about those statues? Then I finished by stating that “if we’re committed to having an inclusive, open society, then decisions have to be made, and removing the statues of someone like Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the KKK after the war), is one of those decisions.” Not surprisingly, my point didn’t land on either of them.

Here I want to pause and frame my intent here, because that flag has found new, younger followers. Even as a teenager in the 70s I remember “The Charlie Daniel’s Band” had a major hit with the song “The South’s Gonna to Do It Again”, which effectively worked as an anthem for Southern Pride and received an enormous amount of airplay here in the South. But the song exposed, both then and now, the massive blind spot that must be factored in here. That blind spot is to honestly coming to terms with the fact that if the South had won the war, or even fought to a draw, that slavery would have made it well into the 20^th century, with the America, the supposed beacon of freedom to the world, being the ONLY industrialized nation on earth supporting this disgusting offense to human decency.

And that is precisely what the confederate flag was created to represent. It was THE unifying symbol for a racist ideology, with whites at the top and people of color under their boot. In real terms it is no different than Nazi radicals in Germany today flying swastika flags. Those who attempt to soften the hard facts will argue that the Civil War didn’t begin over slavery, but rather State rights or some such nonsense, but that is revisionist history, propaganda to confuse the uneducated.

The fact is that South Carolina (home to the above-mentioned Charlottesville) was the first state to succeed, and did so immediately after Lincoln’s election because it was well known that he was anti-slavery. In fact, it was in December of 1860, before Lincoln was even sworn in, that Southern representatives asked Tennessee Senator, Andrew Johnson, to speak with the newly elected President, hoping to find a compromise. One of his suggestions to Lincoln was that if he truly wanted to keep the South from succeeding, as he claimed, he should promise to agree with a constitutional amendment protecting slavery! That’s right, the founding document of the United States, which states in its preamble that “all men are created equal”, would be amended to legally protect chattel slavery. Lincoln refused, of course, giving the remaining Southern states their justification to follow South Carolina’s lead and split from the union.

Thus, the Confederate flag was born.

For anyone who may still doubt precisely why the Civil War was fought, they need look no further the confederacies founding speech by their own Vice President, Alexander Stephens a few weeks before the start of the war. In it, Stephens used the word “cornerstone” to describe the “great truth” of white supremacy and black subordination upon which their secession and the Confederacy were based:

“Our new government[‘s]…foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

And there you have it. Clearly the Confederate flag carries some heavily racist baggage, as Alexander Stephens proudly framed for us above, and that history began with the South’s “fight to the death” for the right to own black men, women, and children as livestock. Whatever apologetics confederate sympathizers wish to voice will only be window dressing meant to rehabilitate its image.

But I am not here for the revised version. I am writing this as a reminder of what that flag stood for then, and still alludes to today, so picking apart the political maneuverings or battlefield strategies will not help us confront what slavery meant at ground level. With the Supreme Court ruling against Dred Scott in 1857, which stipulated that since slaves were not rightfully “US citizens” they had no rights within the court’s jurisdiction. Meaning they had no rights at all. In other words, slaves were the mere property of their owners, no different from their chickens, pigs, or cattle. Therefore, slave owners were given legal carte blanche control to handle (treat) their property anyway they wished. Slaves could be bought and sold, kicked, whipped, beaten, raped, and even tortured to death without raising an eyebrow of the law. Young toddlers were sold away from their mothers like puppies; husbands, sons, daughters, and wives sold to other owners, never to be heard from again. Modern historians even have letters written by several rich slave owners that were mailed to influential southern politicians, where they were “pimping” their “light-skinned” teenage slave girls who would be made “available” to secure their favor. It was all the very definition of moral depravity.

Then to top off the South’s moral delusion with a healthy dose of pious absurdity, southern churches preached that slavery was righteously ordained directly from the pulpit, by God himself, with quotes pulled directly from the Bible (1 Peter 2:18, Colossians 3:22). There was a popular Southern Baptist minister at the time named Henry Tucker, who called on the armies of heaven to join the Confederate battles in retaliation at the North, calling “arms to arms, let us kill, let us destroy.” Another prominent Southern Baptist minister from Alabama, Basil Manley, preached the same from his own pulpit, arguing that slavery was divinely sanctioned and should be defended “out of duty to God.”

But that is history we all know, perhaps forgotten by many, but it’s there in history books. What I learned just recently is that Southern lawmakers quickly found inventive ways to continue their enslavement of black men for decades into the future. That’s right, even in defeat, it should shock no one that hardcore racism remained deeply imbedded in the fabric of southern lives for generations, which represented a powerful social and political weapon that kept like-minded southern politicians and civic leaders in power for the next century.

What exactly does that mean?

First, allow me to circle back to the immediate political concerns held by many slave abolitionists in the North regarding the newly freed slaves. I came across this from an excellent book on Lincoln titled, “And There Was Light.” This quote comes from an unnamed northern politician on what the former slaves could expect from Southern legislation in the years to come.

“I must say that if the end of all the blood that has been shed and the treasure expended the unfortunate n**** is to be left in the hands of his infuriated and disappointed former owners to legislate and fix his status, God help him for his cup of bitterness will overflow indeed.”

And indeed, it did. Even in defeat that South still had State legislatures that controlled local laws, and they wasted little time reasserting that domination over the former slaves by manipulating their new economic playing field with laws that, in effect, continued slave labor; it just came packaged under a different guise. I first learned about it after reading “Slavery by Another Name” by Douglas Blackmon, which shocked me to the bone, because I have read a fair share of history in my life, but was completely unaware of this. Blackmon’s documentary even earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

Allow me to cut to the chase and say that Southern states began passing new laws, particularly “vagrancy” laws that allow local law enforcement to arresting men without jobs, or other minor offenses, obviously targeting the newly freed slaves, who may have won their freedom but were often penniless and starving as a result. Once in custody these black men were duly fined and jailed, where they had no ability to pay off their fine.

At this point Southern politicians began putting their insidious plan into action by establishing a system of involuntary servitude under the guise of law enforcement, which affectively re-enslaved tens of thousands of black men over the following decades. The official term for it is called “neo-slavery”, as once these men were in custody, they were then “leased” to American businesses who were always in need of cheap labor, such as American Steel, and the Coal Industry, among others. These clean-cut American businesses were quick to seize upon the opportunity to exploit and profit by this new system of cheap labor, as capitalism will do. According to surviving documentation, these men were forced to work from 4 am to 9 pm most every day.

And as one can easily predict, the money paid for their labor did not go to the working prisoners to pay off their fines, of course not, and was never designed to, but rather to line the pockets of local and state officials. Not only that, but State governments also paid the local counties for prisoner upkeep, such as food and medical care, with whatever money left over at the end of the month left to the discretion of the jailers. Again, it takes no imagination to guess where that money went, or how that played out for the black prisoners. Those men were forced into working an inhuman number of hours in coal mines and steel mills while being fed just enough to keep them alive. Also, professional “foremen” were hired to exact every ounce of work from the prisoners as possible and were even given legal permission to beat and whip them if needed. For tens of thousands of black men over the next 70 odd years after the war, the North’s victory meant nothing but more of the same.

Even after the Supreme Court finally put an end to the practice in 1938, which I find shockingly late, the South still persisted with its racist character by enacting “Jim Crow” laws that forcibly kept blacks from interacting with whites. Separate restrooms were established; restaurants and other businesses were free to refuse service to black customers. Even the use of water fountains was legislated.

So, please, after taking all of this in, place yourself in the lives of those crushed by the South’s exploitation, harassments, and humiliations, then explain to me why the confederate flag should find a seat at anyone’s moral table. And I haven’t even mentioned the lynchings and other murders committed by “white supremacists” during that timeline. It took the Federal Government stamping its foot down, finally, with sweeping Civil Rights reforms, such as ending school segregation, which only the Southern states enforced by law. The reforms effectively forced the South to get with the program and step into the modern world. Racism didn’t end of course, but at least in the eyes of the law, justice became somewhat color-blind.

I have often wondered why this dark relic from America’s slave owning past, of white superiority in particular, remains prevalent in pockets of our southern communities to this day, so allow me to slow this train down a bit to catch our breath, because I truly want to understand what it is in our neurological makeup that allows otherwise good people to credulously defend, promote, and actively engage with divisive, even appalling ideals. Just consider those pious European Christians of the 16^th and 17^th century, our direct ancestors, burning heretics alive for their love of Jesus, while also sailing to Africa seeking profit by kidnapping and selling millions of human beings and not see the absurd contradiction to it. Well, I would suggest that our enthusiastic confederate supporters have tethered themselves to the same matrix of moral confusion, albeit far less explicitly.

Of course, explaining the “how and why” of southern racism is not so simple, because there are any number of influences that come into play during a lifetime, which I tend to think of in terms of  ingredients thrown into a pot of stew, with pertinent experiences occurring throughout the lives of those captured by the delusion. The first, and most obvious ingredient being that of childhood indoctrination, which can thoroughly color, taint, or distort our views across all sorts of topics, as family opinions and community norms are “imprinted” on our young impressionable minds, with parental prejudices often passing down through the generations as dependably as genetic traits.

But that only explains the foundation, the broth. Another key ingredient for this stew is our psychological need for social connections. We are social primates, after all, who find it difficult to stand alone and apart from the crowd, certainly under peer pressure, so we seek approval by bonding with groups of friends or other like-minded people who comfort, validate, and even embolden the beliefs on offer, as we saw in Charlottesville, producing a dopamine released that our emotional well-being craves, effectively creating social bonds that are often stronger than family ties.

But this stew still isn’t finished yet, because the final spice I would suggest needs to be added is the credulity at play, where we can see that certain types of minds are simply enthralled by narrative, be that political or religious. If I give my honest opinion here, and I have no reason not to, there are personality types among us that are unusually susceptible to dogmatic thinking (in the pejorative since), whose minds are easily swept away by a compelling storyline, the marketing of the thing…. the sales pitch, in other words. For propagandists who are sculpting this sales pitch, credulity is the vein of gold they’re aiming for, and the narrative they create boils down to marketing, crafting ideas that taste sweet on the proverbial tongue, that are dense with emotional calories, but thin on rational protein. Typically speaking, these are emotionally charged ideas that can be easily communicated by a simple slogan or flag, as we clearly see with the MAGA cult. I call it “bumper sticker” intelligence, because the message is delivered to their intended targets with minimal effort, offering “believers” the intoxication of belonging to an exclusive “in-group”, which is the strongest drug of all.

If it’s not already apparent, I find the rise of racism in America revolting, and can only stomach so much of it, so allow me to take a step back and conclude this marathon tirade on a related theme that I have always found amusing and was actually the starting point for this essay in the first place. As any Southerner will know, the great 70’s Southern Rock group, “Lynard Skynyrd” had their biggest radio hit with “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974), and from that song the most popular verse was aimed at Neil Young, after Neil had written a blistering song about the South called “Southern Man” (1970). Here is the verse of Skynyrd’s rebuke.

“Well I heard ole Neil sing about her
I heard ole Neil put her down
Well I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow”

What I find curious there is that I know many Southers who will claim that Van Zant’s dismissive verse slammed the door shut in Neil’s face as an utterly righteous rhetorical rebuff. But allow me to provide the lyrics that Van Zant was responding to and you be the judge.

Southern man, better keep your head
Don’t forget what your good book said
Southern change gonna come at last
Now your crosses are burning fast
Southern man

I saw cotton and I saw black
Tall white mansions and little shacks
Southern man, when will you pay them back?
I heard screamin’ and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long? How?

Lily Belle, your hair is golden brown
I’ve seen your black man comin’ round
Swear by God I’m gonna cut him down

I heard screamin’ and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long? How?

There you can clearly see that Neil Young unleashed a flamethrower to the notion of Southern pride, while all Van Zant could produce in response was a match. Now explain to me, after reading these 3600 words, considering the trail of carnage left in its wake, how many moral blind spots can you see exposed in “Southern Pride” by Van Zant’s anemic response?

I ask that rhetorically.