Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

Southern

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For ten years I have been writing this piece. It resists. For exactly the reasons I want to write it, it won’t be written. Its very mattering comes from the tongue-tied complexity of its point.

 

So let me leave it at this: When you hear my voice and think, ‘White US Southerner’, also think, ‘Anti-racist.’

 

I would appreciate that.

 

Then consider the Hugh Howard article below. And take a day to learn what you can about the history of the South that was not written by the North. Read the story of 250 years of Southern Black and White alliance for race equality and equity.

 

That would be great.

 

And maybe also keep this in mind: All Whites are racist. But none of us is born that way. Racism happens to us. As we grow up, we resist, incredulous, wailing, for as long as we can. Standing for Black liberation our entire lives, most of us never cave in.

 

But some of us do. Some of us hate. Some of us belittle and bully and brandish, storming, spilling the pain of our own humiliated exclusion.

 

Regardless, it matters that none of us is born racist. And it matters that we now are. All of us. If we are White, we are. That’s just that. No matter where we live or come from, no matter how concretely we loathe oppression, we, because we are White, carry the messages of racism. We navigate them and subjugate them and rush to hush them to death. But they are there.

 

Racism infests and infects every White life before it can think, before it can say no. Racist lies migrate through us. We breathe them in, then out, then in. We retch. They regroup. We retch again. They regroup.

 

This tail-eating spin begins because we arrive in this life not just into now but into then. And it is then, it is history, that produces the lore that infuses the child that sculpts the adult that sustains the system. And however defanged by education and experience and resolve-to-change-it-all an individual life may be, its history lurks. Racism seeps. Even as we fight to destroy it, we house it.

 

We defy it; we vilify it; we decry it; we pass on a lighter version of it than our parents and their parents did. But we are still its hideout.

 

Right here, even as I write this anti-racist polemic, racism is in me. And if you are White, it is there in you as you read.

 

In every campaign for human rights, however massive or minuscule, in every diversity policy and programme, in every mixed marriage, in every activist clan, in every temple of free-them ideology, in all new inclusive lingo there is a cacophony of shredded but still-there assumptions about race, and about region, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion – all of it.

 

Strapped to its back before we can walk, we ride the societal beast of untrue assumptions about groups, assumptions that buck and block our seeing, our reacting, our choosing. Fearing the fall we grip harder; we stay on. We plunge. We jerk back. But still we ride. We ride with more finesse, able soon to balance while roaring our rage against its indignity and savagery, holding our placards high as the reins drop. Over time lawmakers listen and laws respond. The public applauds. We don’t look up. Still astride, we strive still, next steps; allies – for the end of racism, for the end of prejudice, the end of all of it.

 

Actually, no. Not quite all of it.

 

And this is why I write today. One form of prejudice sits unconfronted because it confounds, disallowed because it dismembers. It has no name. I call it White Southernism: the assumption that all White Southerners are racist, and everyone else isn’t. White Southernism. This mythical monolithic single depository of racism which is the White Southern life. It is not to be opened.

 

But we sense it even in the slight disturbance of air that says, ‘racist’ when you first hear my Southern voice and its trailing of the voices of my parents and of theirs, and of theirs, and of theirs.

 

So what I ask is that you remember that history is murkily non-linear. And most of all, it harbours hidden stories of the truth of love in bypassed places, stories that simplistic political forces fear and forbid. What you learned in school about me and my people is likely wrong. And whether or not you know that the first African slaves arrived as British cargo into both Virginia and Massachusetts – into the South and the North –, just know that we were there in the first fights for freedom, and we are here in the ones today. Racists/Anti-racists. Just like you.

 

If you can, when you hear my Southern voice, rejoice.

 

Hear first the anti-racist speaking.

 

That would mean a lot to me.

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Hugh Howard, The Washington Post, ‘Opinion’, July 10, 2015:

 

To a surprising extent, the way the North remembers the Civil War is…deeply flawed and misleading.

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Recall that when Lincoln took office, slavery had the official sanction of the U.S. government. Like it or not, slavery was a part of the economic history of the North as well as the South. Much of the nation’s cotton, its largest export, was taken north of the Mason-Dixon Line to be processed; for that matter, many of the South’s most successful planters were Yankees who adopted with alacrity the practice of slavery on their way to wealth.

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In the antebellum years, there was nothing resembling an anti-slavery consensus in the North. America’s greatest philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, hesitated for years to decry what he called “the habit of oppression.” When he finally did so from the podium in Concord Town Hall, he was called a fanatic and worse. The word “abolition” made his neighbors angry. The idea rang radical even in Massachusetts, where many regarded those who espoused such views as dangerous.

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It’s simply wrong-headed to presume that average, mid-19th-century farmers and factory workers in the North harbored abolitionist sympathies. They didn’t.

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Even Lincoln’s racial thinking evolved in a slow and ambiguous manner. Until the very end of his life, the hero of the age resisted the notion that the black and white races were equal. In his famous 1858 debates — and elsewhere — he repeatedly rejected the idea of permitting black men to vote, serve as jurors, hold office or intermarry with whites. “There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.”

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That meant that, at its outset, the war for Lincoln was explicitly about union — until it became expedient to make it about emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation was primarily intended to hobble the Confederacy’s war effort, which relied upon slaves for provisioning and other support.

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Even among those who recognized that human bondage must end, few thought blacks were equal to whites. In the South, where 95 percent of the nation’s African Americans resided, slavery had been a fact of life for generations, fixing the black man’s inferiority in the minds of most whites. In the North, where less than 1 percent of the population was black, relatively few whites interacted with men or women of color; there, anyone of African descent remained very much other.

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The past is no more a fixed destination than the future is, and we need to question constantly the history we’ve been handed.

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