"WHITE SOUTH RISING"

 “WHITE SOUTH RISING”

When I was growing up in the Arkansas Delta of the Mississippi River, my only friends were classified as white.  I didn’t have Black friends;  I didn’t even know  that was possible.  In those days, we used a saying that reflected our white Southerness:  “Save your Confederate money, boys, the South’s gonna rise again.”   I heard it and I said it.  I think that I even sort of believed it.  In those years after Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the “white” Southern way of life seemed under threat, though it was hard to imagine any big changes coming.  Our imagination was truncated – we had not anticipated the creativity, the courage, and the dedication of the sea of the civil rights movement.

Things did change, but my own individual and communal history remind me that the White South is never far away.  It is never far away because it has been with us since the European beginnings of the nation.  The White South shaped the US Constitution, with slavery allowed to stand (though the word “slavery” is never mentioned in the original Constitution).  The White South shaped the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 – notice that the language of the law shapes our thinking – those escaping from enslavement are not called “human beings” but rather “slaves.”

    It shaped the horrendous SCOTUS decision in 1857 in the Dred and Harriet Scott case, where the Court denied that people classified as “Black” were human beings at all.  Even after the death of over 700,000 people in the Civil War to end slavery, the White South made its comeback to re-establish slavery as “Jim Crow,” or as it should be known – “neo-slavery.”  

The White South tenaciously held on to neo-slavery until the Voting Rights Act dealt it a severe blow in 1965..  The White South was not eradicated in 1965, as many of us thought that it might be.  It has been biding its time and once again establishing its rootedness in American culture.  The White South is rising again. When I use “White South,” I do not mean it as a geographical term, although its base is in the old Confederacy.  The “White South” describes a spiritual force that is taking hold in all parts of the country, a phenomenon that believes in white male supremacy and seeks to enforce it, all the while keeping an eye on the demographics.  My state of Georgia has passed many laws intended to limit the opportunity for voting, with the knowledge that the demographics are pushing us quickly to the time when there will be no majority racial category in the state or in the country.  Eighteen other states have passed such laws, and obviously these are not all in the South.  The voice of the White South spoke in the SCOTUS decision Shelby v. Holder in 2013, which gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.  The White South spoke in the presidential elections of Richard Nixon with his Southern strategy, of Ronald Reagan with his distrust of government, of George W. Bush with his “Don’t Mess with Texas” approach, and of course of Donald Trump with his overt emphasis on white supremacy. 

One main difference so far in the current rise of the White South is that most of the vigilante violence, that made the “Mississippi Plan” of the 1890’s so horrible and powerful – most of that has not been re-ratified -YET.  The guilty verdicts in a south Georgia courtroom for the killers of Ahmaud Arbery tell us that at this point only police violence against Black and Brown people is tolerated.  Let us work to make sure that stays the case, and let us work to end the police violence.

The pressures are rising, however.  The White South violence on the Capitol on January 6 remind us that the life of the White South pulses through us as a people, and that we can never assume that it is over and vanquished.  The election of Donald Trump was a clarion call to the White South raiders, and whether Trump runs in 2024 or not, the White South has heard the call and is responding.  

What can those of us who believe in the idea of equality do?  There are several steps that I’ll be looking at in future blogs, but for now, three steps stand out.  First is recognition – recognize that the White South is rising and that this rise is not an aberration but rather is part of the DNA of American culture.  Remind everyone you meet of this fact.  Second, testify and contact your reps in state legislatures (like mine) that are considering banning the teaching of this kind of American history, banning what they are calling “critical race theory.”  Such a ban would mean that no public school or college can teach what you have read in this blog.

Third, remember that this is fundamentally about voting at this point, so register yourself to vote and make sure that you find ten people who are not registered to vote and get them to register and to vote.  The elections of 2022 are fundamental in slowing this rise of the White South – if their candidates win, there may not be many more viable elections.