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Notes on the Confederacy/Back in the USA 1/30/2004 4:06:08 PM
While I have made my home in Boston for many years, I grew up in Washington, D.C. A recent visit home caused me to reflect on race and Southern culture.
I returned to Boston from Washington D.C. via the night train on the morning of December 31st after a visit with my family. While the visit was largely a good one, I had a terrible reminder as to what I do not like about the South.
Due to tenuous connections that link all human beings to one another, I had find myself as a guest at family gathering. Not my family mind you. Is was an old Southern White Anglo Saxon Protestant family that has lived in Virginia and Maryland for generations. I have vague memories of a few of these people from sometime before puberty and I wish somebody had given me flash cards so I could have studied the names and faces before I came through the front door. The only people in this family with whom I had a strong connection had been dead for the better part of a decade.
Things I observe about this tribe: The women are friendly and ask lots of questions, responding with the most positive interpretation of what one says. This is almost refreshing given the understated jadedness so common in New England. They also all have unnaturally blonde hair. Even if it is their natural color, there is some sort of geling process that turns the hair into a solid mass.
The men all have close cropped hair and have exactly three facial expressions:
1.) blank;
2.) blank with head tilted forward to denote seriousness;
3.) A large and completely unsubtle smile that causes the skin to crease around the eyes.
The men talk about Donald Rumsfeld as if they know him and appear to be unable to make any but the most vague references about what they know on any given topic should the information be less than fifty years old. It shows a general avoidance of confrontation or controversy. However, none of them seem to like Donald Rumsfeld.
These are nice people. Though, I have little in common with them, everyone is polite, and it is certainly nice to have been invited to their gathering, but I am an outsider in every possible manner and have not the slightest ability to change that. I put on a little mime show for the children since it is the least that I can do to show my thanks for having been invited.
I listen in to a couple of the men as they speak of the Confederate States of America in the first person plural, along with the usual canards of "the civil war wasn't about slavery...." This is the ugly side of the South: their oh so polite revisionist history regarding a war that their power elite started to defend their white supremacist institutions after an election did not go their way. It doesn’t matter that the economy of the CSA was so dependent on slave labor that images of slaves were used on Confederate money. Nor does it matter that the secession of the Southern states followed a.) the election of an abolitionist president; and b.) the failed attempt by officials of the Commonwealth of Maryland and city of Baltimore to assassinate said abolitionist president-elect on his way to the inauguration.
That night, I see a lecture on C-SPAN by historian, Gary Wills. He notes that the South has created a powerful mythology to deny the facts of racism, slavery, the reasons the civil war was fought and why the civil rights movement had to follow. Though many Northerners had been complicit in slavery, the North also allowed the abolitionist movement to operate freely, while in the South, the very distribution of abolitionist literature was often illegal. He also notes that rather than present the facts, Northerners have for too long allowed this sort of revisionist history to be disseminated as if it were nothing more than a regional eccentricity.
Of course, this is what I disliked about growing up in D.C.. The moment I went beyond the beltway, I would see Confederate flags all over the place. I came to see the stars and bars as the American swastika. There is much about Southern culture that should be a source of pride: Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bill Monroe, Truman Capote, Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Tennessee Williams the civil rights movement, jazz, blues, bluegrass, country music... none of which the Confederate flag represents. The stars and bars do not represent Southern culture any more than the Swastika represents German culture.
When I was growing up, much of the white population of the District was still made up of families from Maryland and Virginia and their racism was always present in the most polite way. Being Jewish, I was confronted with more of their subliminal racism: as early as fourth grade, my white peers would be unnerved by my very Semitic features and kept trying to pressure me into having rhinoplasty so that I can have a faux Anglo-Saxon nose. I was close to being white but not so close that I was not seen as needing some surgical alteration, as they wanted to cut off the the large probing member of Semitic flesh.
I once mentioned this to my friend, Sarah, and she noted that when she was in college in the Midwest, many of her white peers were also verbally upset about her Semitic features: again, the nose, and the dark expressive eyebrows. She even speculated that part of the reason the author of the Wicked_Pissah blog [see my previous entry, “On Groupies and Bloggers: Part II: The Blogger”] was so offended by the flyer for the October 14 show because both Puppet Master Jake and I have strong Jewish features while “Wicked Elizabeth” is a white Midwesterner by way of Georgia.
Of course, being Jewish, was also something that the White Anglo Saxon Protestant felt could be altered. I very quickly came to see Christianity as the oppressor’s religion; an attitude of which I have only been cured in the last several years after I moved to New England.
[Note that many Southern White Anglo Saxon Protestants also do not view Roman Catholics as Christian.]
When I went to high school and my peers were predominately African American, I discovered that this ideology of white supremacy had infected them as well. Despite living in a city with the highest per capita black middle class, they had organized themselves into a caste system of light skin to dark skin. Dark skinned kids wanted to date lighter skinned kids so to somehow elevate their status in the caste system-- and the range of hues also represented a mixture of bloodlines that no one wanted to talk about.
Needless to say, it was a relief to move to the north. Racism is present in the north as well, but the dynamics are more of a conflict between tribal identity and multiculturalism and not just maintaining one's place in a hierarchy that everyone accepts.
While it is by no means perfect, when I debarked the train at Back Bay Station on that last morning of 2003, I was glad to be back in the USA.
