Frankly, Scarlett, you weren't just selfish, you were a damned racist, too [View all]

[UTUSN]

Once again, a gossip website/Gawker delivers sharper commentary than pundits.

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http://gawker.com/the-southern-belle-is-a-racist-fiction-1647358414

[font size=5]The "Southern Belle" Is a Racist Fiction[/font]

Sam BIDDLE

Sometime between Reconstruction, this episode of MTV: True Life, and the hundred-thousandth wedding held on a plantation in South Carolina, the term Southern Belle became just another friendly identifier to put in your Twitter bio, a throwaway regional label no weightier than Cali Surfer Dude. But the difference between SoCal pride and honoring your Southern gentility is that the latter celebrates the ugliest stain in America's history.

The notion of the Southern Belle dates back to the 19th century, when it was a cheery name given to a specific sort of white person who flourished in the American South before the end of the Civil War. Belles were a few very specific things: white, bourgeois, and almost certainly beneficiaries of the slave trade, married to the plantation owners whose wealth was secured through black chattel. ....

But [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]praising[/FONT] the loyalty and generosity of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]the Southern Belle is about as cheery as celebrating the camaraderie of the Hitler Youth, the fresh air of the Trail of Tears, or the cardiovascular benefits of the Bataan Death March[/FONT]. You can find something fun in any horror of history! And the Belles of today do exactly that—if you bring up sl*very, they'll point to all the nice parts about the Old South. The architecture, the parties, the sipping of cool drinks on warm porches. Oh, the fields? Those fields are just for growing delicious strawberries and tomatoes for folks to enjoy. Nothing more.

Every perk and beautiful part of white plantation life was created through black slavery. If Belles were patient and gracious, it's because forced black labor enabled it. If the Southern life was pretty and sophisticated, it's because slavery afforded it. Everything pleasant about Belle-hood was a function of human suffering on a vast scale—it's conceptually impossible to separate the society bankrolled by slavery from the slavery itself. ....

Unfortunately for the nostalgics, the Old South is synonymous with the Antebellum south, which in turn is synonymous with the slave economy. Bu-bu-but tradition! Sorry. Your tradition was someone else's nightmare. Pining for those days, even if you're too detached from national history to realize it, is pining for the comforts of whiteness when black people were property. You ignore it, you can romanticize it, and you can deny it, but you don't get to pick and choose the portions of history that actually happened; the Old South is a soiled rag, too rank with national shame to be wrung out. Antebellum America cannot be redeemed for the sake of your wedding, fraternity mixer, or lifestyle website.

So: Please pick a different party venue, because otherwise your wedding is going to be shitty and racist.

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