A conversation about the Confederate flag...

[Scootaloo]

9. I'm from Alabama, and a big critic of "southern culture"

well, originally from Alabama, I escaped some years ago.

The problem is there are a LOT of people in the south who honestly can't tell their asses from their elbows when it comes to the history of the region. It's not necessarily their fault, but ignorance is institutionalized and frankly like most peopel anywhere, they just accept and move on.

Case in point I remember in 10th grade, doing an Alabama History course. The book was talking about Reconstruction, and made the point over and over again that Blacks were just not fit to govern. Oh, not because they were black, mind - the books were a little more evolved than that - but becuase, you know, "conditions." And of course it used that lovely cartoon from Harper's Weekly, "Colored Rule in a Reconstructed State" to illustrate the period:

It wasn't until years and years later when I started reading actual academic material on the subject that I discovered that that was a complete and total fabrication - that the blacks elected to office ran things at least as well as, and in some cases better than their white counterparts - and that they didn't dwindle out of office because of incompetence but because of Jim crow laws designed to force them from office.

The perception of eternal victimization is also deeply ingrained in the south. Same book tells all about the harsh oppression of "Carpetbaggers" (i.e., immigrants) and "Scalliwags" (i.e., people who voted republican and registered blacks to vote.) The portrayal of secession as a noble cause unfairly stomped to death by an oppressive north is rife, as evidenced in the frankly idiotic epithet, "the south will rise again!" There's a perception of slavery as "not that bad" - and of course the notion that it had nothing to do with the issue of the civil war.

Perhaps these mentalities were draining away for a time, and then boom, civil rights movement and suddenly the privileged whites are feeling victimized by the specter of equality, and the south-as-victim outlook took a new leap to prominence, aided by both the Dixiecrats and Nixon's Southern Strategy of telling southern whites that they were deeply aggrieved and oppressed and put upon and burdened.

The region is a mess. And it will remain a mess so log as this miasma of ignorance and false victimization persist. Unfortunately even the people who would be helpful in fixing it - southern democrats perhaps, like we have on DU - are so deeply invested in the culture of white victimization that any mention of the problem immediately causes ranks to be closed and a horrid bleating of "regional bigotry" to rise, rather than any examination of "Huh, our schoolbooks and popular culture really DO enforce this sort of nonsense, we should fix it!"

I can't blame the people per se - they were raised into it, same as i was, and i figure I'd still be hanging onto what i learned if it weren't for a huge interest in history which frankly few people anywhere seem to actually have. But honestly, southern culture is made fun of because southern culture is pretty fucking ridiculous.