What is a Southerner? I think this is an important question because the stereotype of the ignorant trailer park red-neck is prevalent…and where that isn't invoked, the KKK is, and often under the Confederate Battle Flag. That damn flag is everywhere in the South: on trucks, outside of homes, on blankets and notebooks and posters and tattoos. I hate it. It not only represents one of the greatest mistakes the South ever made — seceding — but it also represents racism, classism, and being a sore loser.
For the record, the important points to remember, if not the only things to take away from, the Civil War are these:
- Slavery is evil;
- The Confederacy lost;
- Hence, the South lost;
- The past is Gone with the Wind. Watch the movie if you feel nostalgic.
The South has a tremendously long and proud history to claim, but slavery, jim crow laws, the KKK, and the Civil War itself are not the parts to claim proudly. Those are what are called "mistakes" and a smart person is supposed to learn from them and then GROW UP. Most Southerners (of every color) are still stuck at the pre-pupescent stage of "wahhhh." They are so caught up in misplaced tribalism that they burn down the forest for the trees.
The South is the birthplace of great American literature, great American music, great American archetecture, and great American cooking. What does the battle flag of a lost cause have to compare with all of that? Nothing. Without the South there would be no Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, Zora Neal Hurston, Flannery O'Conner, Louis Armstrong (or jazz itself), Muddy Waters, New Orleans (what's left of it), Savannah, Charleston, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, cheese grits or fried chicken. Or Oprah, or Paula Deen, and probably not even a United States of America. Without the slave culture of the South, the Blues would never have been born; without Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, racism would have continued unabated both in the South and North. You cannot have one without the other, and the challenge to every color of Southerner today is to reconcile it all.
To me, being a Southerner is about growing up in a turbulant, confused, rich, varied, magical culture. A Southerner is black, white, native American, hispanic, and everything else. A Southerner is sad about what went wrong in the past, proud about what went right, and determined to carry forth our shared heritage into the great big world. Everyone in the South carries the weight of slavery, racism, and tragedy in their hearts; being a Southerner is not taking pride in other's miseries, but in holding those crimes up for the world to see as a warning. Our blood soaked land — soaked from the War, from lynchings, from whippings, from murder, from crime — is rich with triumph, and even as some lessons are still being fought against by the ignorant and the evil people in the world, we must cling to our soil and hold it in our hands and say, "Here are my people, their blood in this land, many of whom died fighting for freedom and justice for all."
