So I was minding my own business, publicizing this year’s Southern Girls Convention in various forums for progressive and radical politics, when someone decided it was heigh time to weigh in with a diatribe against everyone and everything south of the Mason-Dixon line. I quote, at length; names have been omitted to protect the guilty:

Sorry Folks

I can’t be a part of this.

The horrible, atrocious activities and acts of the people from the American South is beyond reconcilliation and as far as I’m concerned…unforgiveable.

I wouldn’t stoop down to urinate on anyone over the age of consent from down there…even if they were on fire….and I mean that… so if a statement like this gets me kicked off this mail list…so be it….I’m still voteing green…regardless.

And if a statement like this makes me appear intolerant…well…I reckon so…because it’s true…..I can’t put up with them…one bit.

To say that I dispise the U.S South, it’s culture and people is a great understatement.

The entire South voted for the ethnocentric George Bush, a Texan and Southerner. We have what we see in the news today…largely because of southern based policies….and ‘good ‘ol George W.

They have yet to answer for their atrocities dateing back before the 1860s to this present day. To wit, crimes against humanity and crimes against nature.

As I see it…those Republicans and all those exclusive religious fanatics and social conservatives AND their women are on their own down there in that polluted mud hole of a region for as long as they choose to remain there.

They can just stay there…and ‘rot’.

I’d written a rather lengthy and bombastic reply which I decided to file away in the calm down and read it over again in the morning folder before I fired it off to the list. I was pleased to see that two people had already taken issue with these vicious comments on the list, so I went back and cut down my comments a bit in an effort to make them somewhat calmer and more lucid. As I said to the list:

I, personally, have had it with attacks from self-styled vanguards of the revolution who insult people in the most cruel fashion for not living in one of their oh-so-trendy white-washed upper-income progressive-chic communities. It’s nothing new, to be sure. The student Left of the 1960s and 1970s was full of classism and racism from white college boys—ranging from patronizing attitudes towards the Black liberation struggle, to overt ignorance and hostility against many working-class white people, especially those in the South. But it’s no less frustrating and hurtful.

Southern politics has been tightly in the fists of the reactionaries since the end of Reconstruction. From the late 19th century through the beginning decades of the 20th, new state governments were constructed by elite white Southerners, under the auspices and with the complicity of the Northern white elite (remember, during Reconstruction the South had been under military occupation from the North, so whatever governments they formed were entirely with the consent of the feds), with the express intent of shoring up centralized power and white supremacy. The reapproachment between Northern and Southern elite whites resulted in one of the most horrifying convulsions of racism this country has ever experienced—in the form of Southern apartheid, murderous race riots throughout the North and Midwest, overt segregation imposed by Northern landlords, anti-immigrant nativism, thousands killed in lynchings, and so on. By the 1920s, Ohio Republican Warren G. Harding was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan on the White House lawn. It has also led to a long legacy of corrupt machine politics across the South, where reactionary elites maintain pretty much absolute power over our so-called representative government. The enfranchisement of Southern Blacks has cut against the Good Ol’ Boy system, but not much: while Blacks can now participate in elections, the form of the government itself is elitist and centralized and made expressly to protect the interests of the Good Ol’ Boys.

The blame which is directed against the South for the rise to power of the reactionary Right over the past 30 years is counterhistorical scapegoating at its worst. Our so-called representatives have always been reactionaries, and the only thing that’s changed in the past 30 years is that they’ve ditched the Demopublican party for the Republicrat. Rather, the rise to power of the Right has been a phenomenon primarily in the North. Reagan won the South, but he would have won the South anyway. What as changed in the past 30 years to elect reactionaries such as Reagan and the two Bushes is the growing power and influence of the Right in the North, Midwest, and West Coast (even New York City has elected two Republican mayors in a row), and also the ever-increasing anti-democratic subversion of the electoral process all across the country.

They have yet to answer for their atrocities dateing back before the 1860s to this present day. To wit, crimes against humanity and crimes against nature.

Statements such as these ignore a simple fact. Not everyone who lived in the South has been white. Or male. Or rich. Or held power in the centralized political elite. In my own state, Alabama, 1/4 of the population is Black. The usual 1/2 of the population is female. The state government, which holds nearly all political power vis-a-vis local communities, is well under 100 people. A lot of us have not apologized for the crimes committed by Southerners because we were too busy fighting back against them. And we are Southerners too. Thank God for the South: it is primarily through our struggles that the country has begun to even talk about and deal with race. In the South, a revolutionary struggle for Black liberation is a fact of recent memory. In the North, American racism is something that is simply not talked about at all in many of the more insular communities.

It was Southern Blacks, who launched slave revolts of unprecedented scale, and poor Southern whites, who resisted the power-grab of elite Confederate slaver-planters, who defeated the Confederacy in the Civil War. Southern women such as the Grimké sisters fought the enslavement of both Blacks and of women, which was enshrined in the law not only of the South, but of the whole United States. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee were created in the South, by Southerners, for the benefit of Southerners struggling for justice. Gainesville Women’s Liberation played a crucial role in the re-emergence of an autonomous feminist movement in the United States. Fannie Lou Hamer spent her life in the heart of Mississippi. Ida B. Wells was born in Mississippi, and fought for women’s liberation and racial justice from her home in Memphis, Tennessee.

Meanwhile, a number of elitist liberals and progressives have spent a long time denigrating and blaming the South. We’re rednecks, we’re hicks, we’re stupid, we fuck our sisters, we fuck animals. This is nothing more than overt classism and scapegoating that ignores the long history of brutal male supremacy and white supremacy in the North. In point of fact, Northern rhetoric about hillbillies in the 1920s, is nearly indistinguishable from 1920s racist rhetoric about immigrants and Blacks. And too many modern-day elitist progressives are perpetuating the same rhetoric. It’s really interesting to see how class solidarity gets flushed down the toilet when someone starts speaking with a drawl.

I’ve lived most of my life in north Florida, Texas, and east Alabama. The culture I live in told me that I was living in the midst of irredeemable rednecks and that the only way out was to physically leave. It wasn’t until I had left home to a Northern progressive liberal arts college that I began to realize that (1) the South is my home, and I have been horribly cruel to myself and my friends in denigrating it; and (2) the North has plenty of problems of its own, and complacent progressive outposts are doing very little serious work toward improving the world.

What I realized is that the South loses 90% of its potential for change because we are bred to be hopeless. The cultural landscape is haunted by caricatures of the South—the redneck, Rastus, the plantation slaver, Uncle Tom, the mammy, the hillbilly, the poor white trash, the Southern Belle. Eventually it drives us mad, especially those of us concerned with social justice. We are constantly told by Northern liberals and progressives that we live in the midst of everything that’s wrong with the United States. And because history of the South is taught as a history of elites, not as a history of people’s struggle against power—because we’re taught to believe that the great victories of our struggles for justice were benevolently granted by the federal government Great White Yankee Father, rather than won through decades of hard struggle against both Northern and Southern elites—because the atrocities and crimes of the North and the complicity of Northern elites in racial and sexual terror is simply not mentioned—eventually we come to believe it. But in the end, it is nothing more than a convenient ideology: Northern elites have a convenient scapegoat to protect their complacency, and Southern elites have their interests protected as Southerners who yearn for justice either flee or give up because they feel hopeless and isolated.

Many of us in the South have had enough. We’ve been fighting hard for a long time down here, and we don’t need to fight a two-front war against both the domestic reactionary power structure, and self-appointed vanguards who think they are better than us because they have trendy coffee shops and independent record stores.

The Southern Girls Convention is part of the ongoing resistence against hopelessness, and the ongoing struggle for social justice. Our aim is break the isolation and the grip of the caricatures with which we are bombarded, and to work towards making our own home the kind of place that we want to live. Why? Because it is our home, because justice is our birthright, and because moving away only shifts the problem without solving it. So, instead, we are working to honor and celebrate the heroic work that was done across the South for human dignity and justice. We are working to acknowledge and undermine the historical legacy of hatred and oppression. We are building networks, organizing campaigns, empowering ourselves, and taking it back to our own communities. And if there is hope for anywhere, there must be hope for the South, because there is no part of the country with a deeper and more powerful tradition in the struggle against oppression.

If there are those who think we are too backward, too irredeemable, that it’s our own fault for staying, and therefore want no part of the South, then I say: good. I want no part of the condescending, patronizing, complacent anti-Southern, anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-worker bigotry that an unfortunate number of people try to pass off as liberalism.

For further reading:

• GT 2001/11/14: Auburn University Fraternity Racism is not unique to Deep South
• GT 2001/03/16: Anti-Southern Bigotry and Elitist Yankee Faux Liberals
• GT 2001/07/27: Southern Girls Convention builds pro-woman community in the Deep South
• How I learned to stop worrying and love the South while at a Northern school