On the matter of Southern pride

[annathepiper]

I’ve seen a lot of reaction in the news to the events in Charleston, and in particular to the growing outcry to take down the Confederate flag from various places–South Carolina and Alabama being the ones I immediately noticed. I’ve also seen reports that Amazon and Walmart are removing merchandise with the flag on it from sale, and I’ve even heard that merch involving the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard is taking the flag off the car’s hood.

But, this being the contentious issue that it is, of course there are people shaking canes and yelling about this. I saw one particular report going around Facebook of an individual loudly pontificating about how removal of the Confederate flag from public display is tantamount to “cultural genocide”.

For the record: speaking as a Southerner born and bred, cultural genocide my ass. I mean honestly. Have you met the South?

I am for the removal of this flag. There are a whole host of reasons to be proud of being from the South, and that flag ain’t one of ’em. I posted about this on the social networks yesterday about several of my favorites, and got a flood of responses from others as well.

Music

Elvis freggin’ Presley. That man right there is singlehandedly responsible for most of my pride in being a Kentuckian, thanks to his “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “Kentucky Rain”. And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: he’s also responsible for the vast majority of my lifelong tastes in music. So damn straight I’m proud of that.

But it would be remiss of me to not mention the rest of the awesome musicians that hail from the South–white and black. Here’s a roundup of the names that came up in my Facebook thread! Johnny Cash. Loretta Lynn. Dolly Parton. The Oak Ridge Boys. Jerry Lee Lewis. Ray Charles. Aretha Franklin. Nat King Cole. Fats Domino. Charlie Daniels. The Big Bopper. Little Richard. Hank Williams. Buddy Holly. The Everly Brothers. Asleep at the Wheel. Austin City Limits.

There are many, many more I’m sure a lot of you out there could name, thanks to bluegrass and country music in general, not to mention rockabilly and the early days of rock and roll and zydeco (special shoutout for zydeco because hell yeah, Cajun and French \m/).

Also honorable and noble mention to the entire O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

Mmmmmm Key Lime Pie

Food

The South: land of food that is very, VERY bad for you but OMG SO TASTY. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Chicken fried steak. Okra. Key lime pie. Pecan pie. Sweet tea. Popeye’s Chicken. Cornbread. Crawdads. Catfish. Grits. Peaches. Sweet tater casseroles. Gator tails. Gumbo. BBQ. Tex-Mex food.

‘Cause yeah basically, if it looks like food, the South deep fries the hell out of it.

Writers

There’s a lot of Southern literature. Being, well, me, I’m specifically interested in the science fiction. Cherie Priest and Alex Bledsoe come immediately to mind as awesome SF writers from the South whose works I have deeply enjoyed–Cherie Priest’s Eden Moore books in particular, and I’ve rhapsodized in depth about Bledsoe’s The Hum and the Shiver.

Shoutout to Rachel Caine as well, hailing from Texas! ‘Cause y’all should know I love me some Rachel Caine, too.

And my aunt Teresa brought up Fannie Flagg who wrote Fried Green Tomatoes! (See below re: frying things being a critical part of Southern cuisine!)

Events

It was pointed out QUITE CORRECTLY that New Orleans has Mardi Gras. And while we’re on the topic, let us note that the Kentucky Derby was brought up repeatedly on my Facebook thread.

Also, while I historically have favored going to Worldcon, it is important to note that the South DOES have DragonCon–and a lot of other science fiction conventions as well. We DO represent in geekdom!

Places to Visit

Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Fort Boonesborough State Park in Kentucky. Bernheim Forest, also in Kentucky. Dollywood (see previous section on Music!). Busch Gardens in Virginia. Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. DISNEY WORLD, f’r chrissakes. What cultural heritage wouldn’t be proud of Disney World, I ask you!

SPAAAAAAACE

Kennedy Space Center. Astronaut training and mission control in Houston. Because SPAAAAAAAACE.

Language

Y’all know I’m a language nerd. This includes Southern-isms! “Criminitly”. Describing large quantities of anything as “a big ol’ mess o’ <whatever>”. If you’re in a reasonably good state, being “fair to middlin'”. Just off the top of my head–there are, of course, countless more examples.

And more…

Dogwood trees. Thunderstorms (because I do miss good and proper Kentucky thunderstorms, though I do NOT miss Kentucky tornadoes). Fireflies–or, as we called ’em when I was a kid, lightning bugs. Pussy willows. The chirp of crickets.

In other words…

All of this is just barely scratching the surface of the rich culture of the South–none of which will be threatened in the slightest if states stop flying the Confederate flag. If anything, hopefully it’ll help Southern culture take stock of itself and realize that it wouldn’t be what it is today without both white and black Southerners–because yeah, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.? SOUTHERNERS.

Go back and look at that list of names under Music further up the post, too. Lots of black artists there–and I wouldn’t be a truly conscientious Elvis fan if I didn’t acknowledge how he was influenced by the black artists who came before him.

Fellow white Southerners, I put to you that we should not be this guy:

Pro Tip: NOT THE HERO OF THE MOVIE

Because let’s get this straight: racism has stained the honor of the South for long enough.

And pulling that flag down from being publicly displayed is a good first step to fixing that. Let’s keep it up.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[hederahelix]

I've been kind of writing a response to this in my head for a few days now, but I'm clearly not going to get to it in a timely fashion, so I'll take a stab at the half-baked version.

My time in the South was not voluntary and not exactly fun, largely due to the fact that I was in the Deep South and was very much, in the eyes of Southerners, about as Yankee as you can get (my mother and I were both born in New England, and my father was born in the midwest--the really far north midwest.)

Nevertheless, when I finally graduated from high school in the south and then ended up back in New England, I was taken aback both by how people outside the South stereotyped the south and how southern they thought I was. (I may have spent a few months utterly baffled by how much apparently the entire country thought I was from somewhere else; that reaction may have played a formative role in me deciding to move to the West Coast to get away from all of that.)

Anyway, aside from the fact that I think the word y'all is the best clearly plural second person in use in American English today, without the South we wouldn't have Faulkner. Without Faulkner, we wouldn't have Toni Morrison (who did her dissertation on Faulkner, which made so very much sense when I learned that).

Dorothy Allison once said that no Southerner is ever unaware of class or race, and I'm inclined to think she's right about that. I was struck by something a reverend from South Carolina said in interview I saw in the last week. He said that he hoped people who wanted to fly the Confederate battle flag would put it on their businesses so that he would know where not to shop, and that statement rang true to me in a way I'm not sure I can put into words. It embodied something that I sometimes have a hard time explaining to people who know nothing about the South beyond stereotypes--something I still can't put into words.

I've lived in California for 20 years now. It's home--the home I chose. And people ask me all the time whether I miss seasons, to which I usually respond "Hell no" and mean it. One winter of shoveling my car out was more than enough for me. I can still go visit snow--in the local mountains or in other parts of the country--if I want to, but I prefer to live somewhere where the weather is predictable enough that I can plan in advance to go mountain biking on any given day three weeks from now and be relatively confident that my plans won't get rained out, thank you very much.

Like you, the only weather I really miss is real thunderstorms. We barely get thunder and lightning at all here in southern California, and every summer I get more than little nostalgic for the real bottom-drops-out storms that would happen nearly every summer afternoon where I grew up. If I hear rumbling in the sky at night, I'm more inclined to think I'm hearing the fireworks at Disneyland than to wonder whether I need to grab a rain jacket.

I absolutely want to see a new definition of the South that includes all of the history--that includes the stories of the people of color and the white anti-racist allies--as as integral to the definition of Southern as the version that's been allowed free rein for far too long.

I've been on edge waiting for the SCOTUS cases to come down, so I've been teary eyed a lot today, but the thing that made me weep harder than anything else this week was watching the flag come down from over the Confederate monument in Montgomery. Lord knows, Gov. Bentley has pissed me off more than once (LGBT rights, for example, brought up by Tim Cook).

But I never, ever thought I'd see a sitting Alabama governor just up and take that flag down without asking the legislature first. Hell, I never thought I would see it come down at all. I saw too many bumper stickers that had that flag and all kinds of jingoist, provincialist slogans all over them.

It's not going to, say, single-handedly undo generations of damage. It's still going to result in people neglecting to include a writer like N. K. Jeminsin as a southern SF writer--not right away.

But it'll go a good way to putting us in the right direction.

[mmegaera]

May I add the entire Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace Parkways, please? And the Smokies and Shenandoah? And the Mobile Bay ferry? Heck, the entire Gulf of Mexico, where I once waded in bathtub-temperature water in *late October*. You need a whole category for natural loveliness, too.

And to add to the cultural, don't forget the Alamo in San Antonio and the Cabildo in New Orleans.

Oh, and Callaway Gardens in Georgia and redbud just on general principles.

And this all from someone who dreads her annual visit to east Texas every year [wry g].