Ellington

Attention, world: Southerners are not stupid.

Admittedly, we have a rough history of treating each other badly sometimes, and we stubbornly act against our best interests too often and—perhaps worst—we are notorious for sending up the wrong people to speak on our behalf. And we might possibly have the lowest self-esteem, especially here in Mississippi, than on any patch of geography on the planet.

Why? Well, it has something to do with being used and abused and confused, starting all the way back during slavery and the Civil War days. It didn't help any that, about at the point where our ancestors might have started seeing the light, Union troops burned and pillaged, and even destroyed our printing presses. We might not have been right on the question of slavery, but the yanks didn't set a good example for us, right about the time that we needed to see the good side of freedom.

So stubbornness set in, and that led to continued evil on our soil: from Black Codes to Jim Crow laws to the Ku Klux Klan to the White Citizens' Council, all those upstanding townsfolk who made the redneck Klansmen feel justified in doing the dirty work. And, oh, the lies and excuses our people had to come up with to justify all that evil. "They" commit more crimes. "Those" people just want to take away what "we" have worked hard for. It's our manifest destiny, our God-given right, our privilege as good, white Christians to be in charge and to wield power over the resources and the instruments of wealth. After all, we got to it first. (Well, not really, but why quibble?)

Then came the Civil Rights Movement. Violence, tears, shame, soul-searching, more violence. Federal tanks and New York Times reporters. The worst among us broadcast to the world to make us all look like stupid, evil, violent dolts.

Finally: Resolution. Integration. Peace. Contrition.

Not so fast. Our demagogues weren't through with us. About the time poor whites and blacks should have found common ground, there came The Dividers with their clever Southern strategy to keep us marching in place. To destroy public schools. To keep us ignorant and angry.
So what if it's to benefit the very rich, about which most of us will never know anything, much less be? They talk a good game, convincing us that God cares more about whether our kids are praying in homeroom than helping the needy. More about who gets to love each other than about us loving our neighbors. They convince us to believe, somehow, that one can have freedom of religion even as one religion is established as the one to trump all the others.

They tell our younger folk to go along with the program or get the hell out and go hang out with other communists and beatniks and just come home for Christmas. (And they don't bother to ask them if they actually believe in communism. They must.) They teach us that our vote, if it's not the "right" one, doesn't count, so why bother anyway. They tell the world that all Southerners think alike, that we vote as a bloc, that we're not worth the time of candidates or believers in more progressive ways to think and live. They convince us that the key to happiness, or at least salvation, is moving backward, not forward. They instill fear in us—of other ideas, cultures, each other, "those people."

Then they speak on our behalf. "Our values!" they declare to the world while bashing this person or that idea. To hear our demagogues—or is it demi-gods?—we Southerners must fear everything, especially education and ideas and, of course, homosexuals. They show the world that we fear God's wrath more stringently than we follow his loving-kindness principles.

They should not speak for us. I am a Southerner, and I am surrounded by people who do not fit their stereotype of who we are. I talk to people every single day who love God and their fellow man—including those who worship a different god, or those overcoming challenging home lives and challenges that our past placed on them through no fault of their own. Or who haven't had the same opportunities as many of us. I am surrounded by intelligence and compassion right here where Medgar Evers was killed.

But our spokesmen will keep trying to use us Southerners as pawns in their game, that of corporations and power-hungry politicians who are more worried about oil interests than poor American soldiers and their families back home. They tell each other—wink, wink—that those of us who don't agree with them don't vote anyway. We, they think, do not believe our vote can make a difference, or that we can build a progressive New South. We are the minority. We are powerless.

They don't believe we read widely, or that our thinking crosses the Mason-Dixon line. Most insulting, they believe that we don't care if we are seen as mean, racist or plain ignorant of our own history. They don't think we have much of a memory, that not many of us believe that it might take a generation, or three, or four, for our people to overcome the difficulties of the past, or that God would like it if we tried harder to make up for lost time. They want us to—wink, wink—say we shouldn't talk about the past, even as we obsess about it way too often, and make bad decisions based on its legacy and its lies.

They go on national TV and thrill the folks still hankering for the past and embarrass the rest of us. We can look into the angry, contorted face of an apparently unreformed Dixiecrat from Georgia and see demons we haven't yet excised in the South. We see a Southerner, an American, standing up and telling us it is un-American to exercise our rights as Americans.

I thank God for men like Zell Miller, though. They remind us why we can't stop talking about the tough stuff, not yet anyway. And they show us just how important it is for Southerners to stand tall and show the world, and ourselves, and our children, that we're not who they say we are.

We are not stupid.

Previous Comments

ID

69393

Comment

I know he represented Oklahoma, technically not our south, but I sure miss Senator Fred Harris, now a professor in New Mexico. He was a shining light during the 1970s.

Author

corrosiongone

Date

2004-09-18T12:52:23-06:00

ID

69394

Comment

Clarion-Ledger today: Visitors to next month's Mississippi State Fair may gawk at their reflections in the Fun House, witness the Mississippi State Championship Mule Pull or shake hands with the key suspect in the Klan's 1964 killings of three civil rights workers. Learned lawyer Richard Barrett, who heads the white supremacist organization known as the Nationalist Movement, said Edgar Ray Killen has agreed to make an appearance at his organization's booth in the Agricultural Building. Barrett plans to gather signatures there in support of Killen, who is under investigation but has never faced state murder charges in the June 21, 1964, deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. "He can possibly sign autographs and meet the crowd," said Barrett, whose booth will be between those for the secretary of state's office and the Mississippi Library Commission. Killen could not be reached for comment. Here come the stupid brigade again, trying to bury any good work that's being done by the non-stupid people and get all the media attention for back-ass bigots of Mississippi. Now, my question is: Is this really any worse, though, than keeping your mouth shut about the need for justiceóor in arguing that, well, it's been 40 years and those men are old now. Why open up old wounds? It's easy to ridicule the Richard Barretts of the world, but what about the enablers? (Kind of like what the old White Citizens' Council did for the Klan: enabled them to do the really hateful work.) I hadn't read this story when I got an e-mail this a.m. from a very prominent Jacksonian suggesting that we have a table about this issue at the Voter Rally. She wrote: Please tell me that Our Side is having a similar booth and a BIGGER card for all of us to sign--saying that We Are Not THEM and WE Want THEM to Finally Go to Prison for What They Did--Not Only to The Murder Victims and Their Families, But Also to ALL OF US! Can we please collect a gabillion signatures to refute these sick bastards? Maybe people could register to vote at the same time? That there's the new South, boys and girlsóthe one that isn't afriad to stand up to the buttwipes. :-D

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2004-09-20T08:28:33-06:00

ID

69395

Comment

Yep, one headstone at a time, the old south disappears. Let us not allow them to poison young minds via recruitment efforts. Barrett is a slick character who would make me break out in hives if he was worth my histamines.

Author

corrosiongone

Date

2004-09-20T16:17:33-06:00