Jonah Goldberg takes a look at northerners’ attitude toward the South.
There are few subjects that ignite more casual, uninformed bigotry and condescension from elites in this nation than Dixie. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote last year.
How then to explain the tens of thousands of South Carolinians, white and black, marching in unity across the Ravenel Bridge on Sunday night? Did the city bus in decent Northerners?
As a child of the South who has lived in the North for the last 15 years, I’ve witnessed a lot of rank ignorance and condescension from Northerners – especially regarding race relations. The notion that leaders from one of the most segregated and violent cities in America (Milwaukee) would be pretentious enough to lecture folks from the South about race relations is laughable. I’ve witnessed far more casual and real racism in Wisconsin than I ever saw growing up in Texas.
This makes sense because the South is much more diverse. There are far more black and brown people south of the Mason-Dixon than there are in the Midwest or Northeast. When you live with people of different races, seeing them and treating them as fellow humans isn’t all that hard. You all go to the same stores, churches, schools, workplaces, birthday parties, sporting events, etc.
It ain’t about a flag, folks. It’s about the culture.
Owen,
The above post (@11:21am) is not me. I would love to get a bead on this guy.
“You all go to the same stores, churches, schools, workplaces, birthday parties, sporting events, etc.”
Really? Forty years ago I lived in the North Carolina, we had just started the process of going to the same workplaces, stores and sporting events, but definitely not the same churches. By the late 1970s, Sunday was called the most segregated day of the week. Maybe N.C. churches have integrated since then, but when I returned to visit my grandmother in the early 1990s, she lived in a racially mixed neighborhood, but she took me to a Bessemer Baptist Church that was 100 percent white.
I hope you’re right about churches becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Can you give me examples of churches where you lived that had integrated memberships?
My experiences with the South have shown a still divided and segregated population especially in rural areas. I went to a nieces graduation in Mississippi a few years ago and was told about their “two” proms. I saw a documentary about this exact issue. My best friend was raised in Slidell, LA and told me horror stories about his youth and young adult life. He moved to WI to find a better life and to get out from under the oppression. He would visit every year and always complained nothing changes. Unfortunately, for many the flag is part of the culture. A culture of oppression.
The South were traitors whose government used human servitude as a backbone of their economy .
The Old South that celebrates those 2 things are not part of any culture I would be proud of or steep my kids in .
PS- I grew up in Indianapolis Indiana, home of the head of the national Ku Klux Klan and mayor of Indianapolis
DC Stephenson in the 1920’s
I don’t see any Klan “” culture ” on display there , no stores with klan memorabilia on the side roads .
So can my state lecture the South because we evicted that “culture ” of hate from our state grounds and the public eye because we saw it for why it was – racism ?
Yeah, I think we can .
“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
No where do I see another flag included in that pledge.