Warning! White Liberal Guilt ahead!
A friend sent me an e-mail last week bemoaning the blank looks that he sees go across students’ faces when he turns the conversation to issues of race. I suspect that blankness is more a mark of defensiveness and paranoia than it is actual boredom—a fear of saying the wrong thing, offending someone, trying to say the right thing but then exposing some secret bigotry in yourself, and so on. I’ve seen this hyper-sensitivity in action, especially in introductory courses. I once got an evaluation back at the end of the term griping that the whole intro to lit course had been about race—a response which came as a surprise to me, since I had really only thought of myself as having done a few days explicitly on “race” here or there—when we discussed “Desiree’s Baby,” for instance, or “Everyday Use”—and had spent at least as much time talking about other social issues, as well, of course, as the texts’ aesthetic qualities. (I always ended the semester with a couple of weeks on Wolf Whistle, a novel that beautifully meditates on the relationship between the aesthetic and the social). But for this student, any time we even alluded to the issue of race, any time—I suspect—that we read a work by an African American author, period, we were coming too close to a subject that made him very uncomfortable.
This state of affairs is troubling, of course, because I live and teach in the U.S. South, where race is perhaps the defining factor of our history and continues to shape daily life in bizarre and unusual ways. But I know that, when I was a gangly freshman, I felt much the same as my student. It wasn’t that I or my classmates were particular bigots, though some of us were and are, but simply that I had no conception of what that history had to do with me. Or, more honestly: I believed that that history had nothing do to with me.
Not surprising, since for most of my teen years, it seemed that black people had nothing to do with me, either, nor I with them; the town I grew up is literally divided into “good” and “bad” sides by a set of railroad tracks. From kindergarten through the twelfth grade, I went to the local white-flight seg academy—founded, of course, about 1971 or so. Our mascot was the Rebels, as it was for several of the other schools in our athletic conference. The year we went to the state championship saw a record five Rebels v. Rebels Friday-Night match-ups. Mississippi’s history was not much dealt with, even, or perhaps especially, in Mississippi History class, which was taught by the most assistant of assistant coaches, who spent most of his time recovering from his hangovers and engaging in red-faced-rage-then-wet-faced-sorrow homoerotic shouting matches with our star football player.
So I never heard the names Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, James Cheney. In retrospect, that’s probably a good thing, because who knows what poisonous stuff I would have heard about them? I recall another history teacher, whose degree was, I believe, from Rush Limbaugh Tech, opining that a slave-owner would never beat his slaves, because, think about it, you wouldn’t go out an slash the tires on your tractor, would you? What’s horrifying, of course, is not that he said this, but that we all wrote it down dutifully in our little spiral-ring notebooks.
And I’d like to be able to argue, “Well, sure, the school was founded on segregation, maybe, but it’s grown beyond that, now, of course.” But then I think of this conversation between my brother and oldest sister a few years ago… (the usual euphemisms apply here):
Sister: …and like it or not, they’re never gonna let in any Jim Nabors to this school, it’s just a fact.Brother: Well, but if they were a real good football player—
Sister: Nuh-uh, not never.
Brother: Well naw, but I’m just saying, if one was real fast…
I don’t want to bash the school too much—I had good teachers who worked hard and had a good high school experience overall once my acne cleared up—or to over-extrapolate from this very limited sample. But I suspect that a whole class and generation of Southern white kids had very similar experiences—perhaps continue to have them. So, with Mississippi history either wholly omitted, grotesquely mis-represented, or perversely reduced to a funhouse-mirror version of itself—consider the radical unmooring of signifiers from signified evident in the “Rebels” facing the “Rebels” on the gridiron battlefield week after week—it’s no surprise that lots of us thought that race was something that happened somewhere else, somewhen else.
Listening to Johnny Cash one day a few years ago, I was suddenly struck by how fatuous and annoying the persona speaking in “Hey Porter” must have seemed to the porter he was repeatedly accosting. The chances are pretty good, after all, that the porter is black, and the catalog of idyllic Southern images that Johnny is so exuberantly shouting at him probably don’t resonate for him in quite the same way that they do for JC. And it’s not just the images that Cash is invoking in and of themselves—it’s the assumption that every soul on the train shares his joy and excitement, shares his particular perspective on the South. Or if not does share, then should share: there’s something faintly coercive in Cash’s order to “ask everybody that ain’t asleep to stand right up and yell” when they arrive in Tennessee, as though he recognizes that some folks may need a little nudge towards jubilation, may need a little laminated card printed with the lyrics to “Dixie.”
The consequence of my sort of high school education was the production of this myopic mind-set, this blithe assumption that everyone loves the South, and there may have been some problems, yeah, but not now, probably, or if there are, they’re just the bad element. Even when Southern history was happening right in my face, I didn’t really see myself as a part of it. When I was in tenth grade, I guess, there was an altercation at a local convenience store. I still don’t know the truth of it—the store-owner, a white guy, may or may not have maced an African American woman, who may or may not have gotten violent when he refused to sell her cigarettes. Anyway, for months a largely—well, entirely—African American group of protestors set up shop across the street from the store and picketed. But, you know, it was the only store in town that had Street Fighter II, so I and my friends continued to go, not out of any feeling of solidarity with the store-owner, not to spite to protestors, but just because it never occurred to us that what was happening might have anything to do with us. We might have known the dictionary definition of “complicity,” but we certainly didn’t understand what it looked like in practice. Only a street’s-width separated us from the protestors, but it was more like they were inhabiting a parallel reality that had crossed over into ours for a while.
I’m embarassed to say that my undergrad experience didn’t do much to shake me out of my complacency. Sure, by that point I’d finally learned some Mississippi history, finally read some Faulkner, but there still seemed to be a vast chasm separating the South I lived in from the South I read about in novels and history books—I mean, I had a computer, after all! One of the reasons I’ll always love the work of Walker Percy is because of the way that it revealed the persistence of the “old” South in the “new,” the ways in which the structures and systems that I thought were gone had just taken on new shapes. I read The Last Gentleman in grad school; it chronicles the return of a young Mississippi man, Will Barrett, the scion of a prominent plantation family, from his self-imposed exile in New York. When he makes it back, he finds that
The South he came home to was different from the South he had left. It was happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic, and Republican…. The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain.
But Will finds that what appears to be a dramatic shift in the nature of the South—the Vaughts, the family that he travels with, own a car dealership and live in a purple-bricked house on a golf links, not a gothic plantation—is only superficial, and this book and the next, Love in the Ruins, are both very much about the persistence of the plantation in the suburbs.
So, I suppose I’m wondering how idiosyncratic my experience is; perhaps academies in more urban areas are different than academies in rural areas, and perhaps the public school experience is totally different. I’d be curious to hear.
Have you read A Confederacy of Silence by Richard Rubin? He’s a New Yorker who moved to Greenwood for his first newspaper job; his experiences with the battle of the Southern image versus Southern reality are very interesting.
No, I haven’t read that, but I need to check it out—looks interesting. Of course, half the fun was just in reading the defensive negative reviews on Amazon… Lousy outside agitators, you know.
This is a great post. I’m most intrigued by the idea of Johnny Cash “saber-rattling” the less inclined to celebrate Dixie. There’s a legal notion of how students, or others, can be intimidated into silence by such behavior. As in, you don’t WANT to stand and sing Dixie when when the good old boy is hollering to, but you feel compelled.
A wonderful reverse-version is the scene is Casablance when all stand to sing the Marseilles, in defiance of the Nazi occupiers.
Also: “Desiree’s Baby” is always such a crowd-pleaser. Shocking, twisted ending!
Do your students refuse to believe that Desiree dies? My poor little students always tried to argue that she emerged on the other side of the swamp with her baby and went home to her mother’s.
this is a great post. it brings to mind a parent-teacher conference at myrtle high; i had a mother who asked me why her daughter had to read all these “black books,” refering, i guess, to the richard wright, alice walker, and toni morrison novels on the summer reading list. “uh,” i said, “well, considering your daughter is one of only 6 white students i teach here at myrtle (enrollment 1,468), we don’t call it african-american lit., we just call it lit.” “oh, she said, “well, then why does she have to read these jew books?” she was refering to the diary of anne frank.
Yeah, gorj, I usually like to imagine JC as a bit more progressive than all that, and of course “Hey Porter” is super-early in his career, if not his very first single, so there’s room to grow. Sal, I do indeed get students who want very much to believe that there’s a silver lining in Desiree’s gloomy little cloud; a couple of times I’ve tried heading that off at the pass by saying things like “And of course she dies; I don’t know why people try to suggest she lives,” but that just seems mean.
Vendy: Oh my. Oh my.
I grew up in Seg academy-land (not very long) until my mom got sick of my education seeming more like sunday school than real school. it was public from then on. I’ve lived in a handful of places that were majority white. However, that being said, when i went to High School it was in a very republican suburb (let’s call it Oyster High) and that place was just not overly political yet. the kids weren’t raving GOP loons like they are now and i have to wonder what that’s done to race relations there now. back then, the black population was pretty small, but we had OUTSTANDING race relations…O.H.S. was pretty out of the ordinary in some ways. we had male and female cheerleaders when NO ONE did that (not in Miss…that is) and with a 15% black population we elected a black home coming queen my senior year (she was actually quite homely and quite hil-air-e-us. she was also a jehovah’s witness and her mom made her wear skirts which she’d wear on the track competing in the triple jump and on the court when she went on the U. of Georgia !)
Anyway, i digress…I find it somewhat shocking that we learned NOTHING of the civil rights era. i mean, we learned that it happened, but we spent MUCH more time on DeSoto’s travels in the region. they talk about it as if it were some crazy thing that happened long ago in a place far away. i swear to god, it was treated as relevent to us as the Whiskey Rebellion. I’m firmly convinced that i didn’t ever learn a damn thing until i bought a Public Enemy CD. about 1989 i got “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back” and it exploded in my head. I remember learning about how to do research because of that album. i found out that there were books that would catalogue article in various publications and you could look up topics of interest to read up.
I was amazed.
I took my cassette’s lyric sheet and marched straight to the library. i got permission to step out of class to work on science fair projects or whatever excuse i could find so i could understand what the hell had been happening in america for the last 90 years. my head buzzed with names i’d never heard of:
H. Rap Brown
Huey P. Newton
Marcus Garvey
Adam Clayton Powell
Malcom X
Bobby Seale
Eldridge Cleaver
Louis Farakan
Angela Davis
Jesus! what were these people teaching me here and why is it i never hear about THESE people
you know, i never EVER blamed my teachers. they were teaching for the AP exam and that’s that. i understood. what i didn’t understand or like was that NO ONE in my world told me about those people. I bought a copy of “Seize the Time” and started to get mad.
Now, i think its all about denial. if we don’t talk about black people and we don’t put ourselves around them, POOF! we don’t have anymore problems. it’s the Idaho answer to race relations.
Well, Prof, I went to a similar white flight school in Charlotte, NC, and my experience was exactly the same…I don’t know if that answers your question about rural white flight vs. urban white flight, since Charlotte is more aptly described as suburban throughout…maybe we could call it, in that mildly annoying but always tempting way: (sub)urban. Our mascot wasn’t a Rebel—it was a Charger. Not of the San Diego variety, either. We were more like a knight on horseback with a lance dressed head to foot in white “armor.”
Since I graduated, they’ve switched over to just a horse logo—one of those that’s supposed to look like it’s going real fast, in the spirit of recent expansion professional teams (Jaguars, Panthers, Devil Rays, etc.) I hate those…
Tupelo, MS has the worst mascot of all time.
The Golden Wave.
jesus. they named themselves after Pee.
Hey, gbs! Actually, Charlotte is a perfect example—supposedly one of the South’s more “enlightened” cities, right? Wealthy, not past-obsessed, et cetera. So that’s interesting.
Polly: there’s a school in Arkansas—I can’t remember which one and am too lazy to do a google search—whose mascot for it’s men’s teams is (or was as recently as the mid-90s) the Boll Weevils. Which is pretty bad in and of itself, but consider: their WOMEN’s mascot was the Cotton Blossoms. Freud much?
Well, Hueytown, Alabama is the “Golden Gophers.” Which? Is just embarassing.
I went to an all girls’ school, and our mascot was the Chipmunks. Um.
my friend went to high school in louisiana, and they were the dufrock ducks. that flat out sucks.
in natchez, they had to re-desegregate the schools ca. 1990. it was awful, but i was proud that the principal of the catholic school refused to let in any transfer students that year from the public high school.
when they had originally “desegregated” the schools in natchez in 1968, they made the public high change its mascot. it had been a “colonel reb” exactly like ole miss’s—they were, of course, the rebels. the powers that be made them paint over the mascots adorning the walls and floor of the gym. but, as soon as the “powers” were gone, the students painted the mascots back, only they called themselves the colonels. now, they’re the bulldogs. how original.
golden gophers? you were a golden gopher? jesus. that must explain a lot.
I face a lot of the Southern “charm” of happy that you are talking about. I sit in courts where only one black judge resides out of seven. Most people ask me if the majority of people that I have on probation are (black) – say it in a whisper, and I tell them no, I have just as many white people that are criminals. And? that really upsets them.
Me and gorjus were fortunate to have parents, not a family as a whole, help to teach us that skin color doesn’t make the person inside inherently good or bad. We went to a school where we were some of the only white kids there. I was denied access to go to school with gorjus once, know why? because i was white. they had met the white/ black ratio and no matter how smart i was, they couldn’t have me there.
granted, we have come a long way from Sandusky, AL and the very backward way it still is, but i feel, nearly every day, the strain that the South bears trying to move through the sludge of misinformation and bigotry. People still want to believe that everything is “okay” and that there aren’t still silent lines drawn in the streets where blacks and whites can go.
last thing: one of my good friends asked me if she would be “let in” to my wedding because she is black. that wasn’t 30 years ago folks, that was Friday.
The all girl’s school I went to was the Honeybees. Don’t know if that’s better or worse than the chipmunks, Lucy!
I realize now how difficult it must have been for my parents to shield me from all people of color in MEMPHIS of all places. We spent a lot of time moving because you just simply could not stay in a neighborhood once it started to “turn.” It was totally ridiculous. My parents are unfortunately not getting any more enlightened as they age.
Memphis has one of the worst white flight situations I’ve seen. The suburbs keep growing as more areas of the city are nearly abandoned and eventually even razed. Anyone remember when the Mall of Memphis was a decent mall? From what I can remember when I was last in Memphis that area is now a field or parking lot. I think the Hickory Ridge Mall is on it’s way to the same fate. Not that I’m that sad about a mall closing, its demise is just an indication of larger problems with the area, I guess.
Pinky, you are the awexxome. And yeah, we totally got the best parents in the world when it comes to that. I never, ever heard my parents say one racist or homophobic comment.
Um, the thing about your friend sucks. And jp!, I didn’t go to Hueytown, doofus. Me + Pinky were Spartans.
Contessa, that’s so funny that you talk about the “bad malls.” We’ve of course got the Metro Mall here in Jackson, and in Birmingham the order growing up (from blackest/poorest to “nicest”) was Western Hills (where there were gunfights!! But, our friends all worked there), Century Plaza, and the Galleria.
Oh yes. My father did everything but arm us with a pistol when we told him we were going to the Metro Center Mall back in April. Still, my folks were never overtly “racist” racist; it was more of a racial paternalism type thing.
[...] am relating troublesome stuff I’ve participated in directly. But here’s the story: so, I’ve written once before about a summer of particularly thick racial tensions in my hometown. Every Southern memo [...]