The Southern Paradox

To be Southern is to inhabit a paradox.

We live in a territory designated as America’s Kingdom of the Weird, a sort of stage for the great national dramas of race, religion, class, and gender. We occupy a region equal parts European and African (with a dash of Native American), where the white folks eat okra and yams and speak with soft cadences that owe as much to West Africa as Scotland; where the black folks borrowed the guitar and the horn of the Europeans to make music that rocked the world, and took the religion forced on them by the masters to make it an instrument of their own liberation.

In the South, we were multicultural before multi-culturalism was cool.

Over the past 25 years, the South has become even more so, with Latinos and Asians added to our rich gumbo. In some ways, the South has changed utterly since 1973: no one is shocked that the University of North Carolina’s football team has a black quarterback or that Alabama’s governor-elect beat the Baptist-endorsed incumbent who championed school prayer.

In 1973, the Republicans’ “Southern strategy” looked invincible, even with a Republican president in the White House who cheated on the Constitution; in 1998, the Republicans’ “Solid South” is cracking, even with a Democratic president in the White House who cheated on his wife, with Democrats rebuilding their bi-racial coalitions.

Yet we live with the old dangers, the old symbols, juxtaposed with our shiny triumphs in equal rights, education, and economic growth. We are told how prosperous we are — all those banks in Charlotte, all that Coca-Cola in Atlanta — yet we still have the nation’s highest proportion of people on food stamps. And we still have the lowest-achieving schools.

Blacks are moving back South, Southern cities are more integrated than those in the North and the West and, thanks to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Klan has even been litigated right out of Alabama. But the Confederate battle flag still flies high over the capitol in South Carolina and blemishes a corner of the Georgia state banner.

Over the past 25 years, many in the South — Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, John Lewis, Morris Dees, Virginia Foster Durr, Fred Shuttlesworth — have labored to shake up the old class, race, and gender roles that made the South the least democratic part of America.

Countering their efforts even now in the 1990s, cultural vigilante groups like the League of the South thunder that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, that the real South is white and “Anglo-Celtic,” that feminism is unnatural and the only hope for the South is for it to secede from the Union once more and do it right this time.

The great strength of the South is that it is not, and never has been, homogeneous. Southern culture is gloriously miscengenous in every sense: the new DNA evidence says yes, Thomas Jefferson did have children with his slave Sally Hemings. Jefferson wrote the most beautiful words imaginable about freedom and equality and signally failed to live by them.

This is the curse and the blessing of the South: that we must live with the paradox and burden of our history. We must fight the battles, old and new, acknowledging that, as Faulkner said, here “the past is never dead, it isn’t even past.”