A popular narrative has emerged among progressives in the past weeks: that the right wing anger since President Obama's inauguration is really all about race. Like most progressive narratives, there is at least a germ of truth behind it. Still, I think it may oversimplify a more complex story. For me, the talk of secession in Texas and Georgia points to a slightly different focus, where racism is more a means than an end. It's a story of regionalism and ruralism that runs deep in my family's roots.
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Is Right Wing Anger All About Race?
Non-Cynical Saturday has become a regular edition of Morning Feature, a time to examine some narrative that has emerged in recent weeks, and ask how much of it is grounded in reality. We explored narratives this week, beginning Wednesday with a discussion of media-fueled myths that arose in the wake of the Columbine tragedy, then Thursday and Friday with a two-part series on politics, religion, and what I call Big Narratives.
The narrative of racism being the driving force behind the right wing anger at Obama is an example of a Big Narrative. As we explored yesterday, Big Narratives work like a statistician drawing a "best fit" curve, and for the same reason: they draw a arc through a set of events, and that arc tells a story about those events. But in most Big Narratives, comparatively few of the events in the field fall directly on that arc. The "best fit" curve works as a description of "reality" only if you ignore outlying events. In politics, those outlying events are real people with real motives, and they may resist being shoehorned onto an arc of narrative convenience.
Yes, there are people who dislike President Obama, and even reject the legitimacy of his presidency, for no other reason than race. But I doubt they are the majority, and it's probably a mistake to completely ignore their other stated reasons. The narratives of regionalism and ruralism may provide a better "best fit." Racism exists in those narratives, but it is a means rather than an end.
"The South gonna rise again."
That's a phrase I heard often in my childhood. Though I was born and raised in the Northeast, I was born to Southern parents and raised among Southerners in the churches we attended. Any perceived social slight was attributed to our being outsiders, and to some extent that was true. In tightly-knit New England towns where family roots trace generations or even centuries, there can be a "not quite one of us" feeling toward new arrivals. That can include people who move in from a neighboring town, but in our family the perception was that we were outsiders because we were Southerners. From accents to imputed historical attitudes, there were times when that difference was noted, and not always in jest.
It was probably a historical accident that 9 of our first 12 presidents were Southerners. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were military and/or philosophical heroes of the revolution, so-called Founding Fathers. Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison were heroes of the War of 1812. John Tyler was dubbed "His Accidency" as the first Vice President to rise to the presidency through the death of his predecessor. James Polk had been Jackson's lieutenant and ran on a platform of expansionism appealing to "manifest destiny." Zachary Taylor was a hero of the Mexican-American War.
None ran on a particularly regional platform, yet by Taylor's time there was a sense in the South that, population notwithstanding, America was a "Southern" nation. But that changed. The next four presidents hailed from the North or Midwest, and by the fourth of those - Abraham Lincoln - the South was ready to secede. Slavery was an issue, but not the only issue. Some of it was a sense that the political center of gravity had shifted irretrievably northward, and a fear that the South would become a political hinterland. Southerners saw the slavery issue as a symptom, rather than the cause, of Southern relegation to political irrelevance.
Regardless of whether that relegation would have happened without the Civil War, after the war it was probably inevitable. Andrew Johnson was born in North Carolina and hailed from Tennessee, but he would be the last Southerner in the White House for nearly a century. Woodrow Wilson was born and raised in the South, but moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton and hailed from that state in his candidacy. Not until 1963, when Texan Lyndon Johnson succeeded John F. Kennedy, would America see another Southern president.
The scars of Reconstruction had not then and perhaps have not yet fully healed, and from time to time every Southerner would hear the phrase "The South gonna rise again." It was for Southerners like the Passover toast offered by Jews through the centuries, "Next year in Jerusalem," looking both back and forward to something better than a disheartening present.
And the South did rise.
Richard Nixon was not a Southerner, but he ran on the "Southern strategy" of peeling the South away from the Democratic Party on the issue of civil rights. Jimmy Carter was a Georgian. Ronald Reagan ran on the "Southern strategy," and George H.W. Bush claimed Texas as a home state. Bill Clinton was from Arkansas. George W. Bush adopted Texas even more fully than had his father. By 2005, even many Democratic strategists took it as a given that no one could win the White House without winning at least part of the South. The sense of Southern dominance reached the point where Bill Maher quipped that "Americans need to be willing to vote for candidates who don't pronounce all five syllables in 'she-ee-ee-ee-it.'"
And in 2008, Americans did. President Barack Obama ran on the antithesis of the "Southern strategy," appealing to young voters who were born after Jim Crow was dead, minorities of all descriptions, and enough middle-aged and older whites to make up the difference. He won three Southern states - Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida - without winning the "Southern" vote in any of them. In Virginia, Obama won in the transient northern tier. Florida is a cosmopolitan state, filled with immigrants from all over the U.S. North Carolina also has a big immigrant population, known as "half-backs" because the joke is they moved first to Florida and then "halfway back" toward their northern origins.
What the elections of 2006 and especially 2008 made clear is that the "Southern strategy" could no longer deliver elections for Republicans, nor was it even necessary for Democrats to run a Southern candidate. For many in the South, the scent of regional irrelevance seems to waft from those ashes, with memories of the many ways Southerners came to be widely pilloried as ignorant, tobacco-spitting, racist rubes for the better part of a century.
Is that "all about racism?"
For many who've never lived in the South, that regionalism can seem like it's "all about racism." I suggest racism has been more a means than an end, something for some whites to agree about in conversation, even if they had little else in common. Southern cities and states have elected black mayors, legislators, and even governors. Racism still exists in the South, certainly, but it also exists elsewhere. I saw its virulence in the mid-70s when the Boston schools were desegregated. So did many Southerners, and they wondered why Bostonians and other whites in the North weren't demonized in the same way Southerners were during and after the civil rights movement.
It seemed to many Southerners, and still does, as if racism were treated as an individual exception in the North, but a universal characteristic in the South. When a childhood friend in Massachusetts was snapping a rope against a rock, she turned to me and said "I should let you show me how. You Southerners know all about whips." She and other friends grumbled about busing in Roxbury, but that was "different."
The regionalism of the South, somewhat mirrored in ruralism elsewhere in the country, is less specifically about race than generally about class. Traditional Southern culture was and remains very class-based. You could argue it's about knowing who you say "yes sir" or "yes ma'am" to, and who should say "yes sir" or "yes ma'am" to you. If your daddy was a doctor or a lawyer, your family were entitled to "yes sir" or "yes ma'am." If your daddy was a dirt farmer or a roughneck, your family said "yes sir" or "yes ma'am" more often than it was said to you. It was not wholly dissimilar to military culture, where everyone's rank is known and lines of authority are clear. Race was part of that rank structure, but not all of it.
That class-based culture, and a solidarity born of the Civil War and Reconstruction, birthed a regional solidarity in the South that I've not seen in other parts of the country. Natives of Texas and South Carolina share a common identity in a way that natives of Maine and Connecticut, or Ohio and Iowa, do not. People in Michigan or Wisconsin probably did not think of Barack Obama as "one of us" simply because he hailed from the Midwest. But many in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama thought of George W. Bush as "one of us" simply because he was from the South. To attribute all of that to racism is to miss the many other common elements of Southern identity.
A new secession movement?
John McCain was not a Southerner, nor was Sarah Palin. They tried, and some in the GOP will still try, to transform that Southern regionalism into a broader ruralism, a "real America" of "small towns" facing political oppression from urban and coastal "elitists." It failed in 2008, and demographics suggest it's not a viable electoral strategy.
I'm also not sure there's much impulse for a new secession movement in the South, or at least not yet. To the extent that President Obama and the Democrats govern in ways that neither insult nor exclude the South, I doubt there's much populist support for a new era of hard line Southern regionalism.
Still, we progressives need to be reminded of that history and that impulse, and we need to be more careful in our language. Every time we talk about the South as a "rump region," or say even in jest that we should exclude the South from an infrastructure plan, we add fuel to still simmering fears of a new Reconstruction and another century of Southern irrelevance. And that's not all about race.
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Happy Saturday!