On Southern Culture

There are many genuinely good things about Southern culture. I appreciate its respect for the simple things, and its reverence for a slower-paced life where people have time to breathe is I think a healthy contrast to the mad pace of D.C. I find myself in.

Southern culture pays homage to the values of a bygone time. This is where I think the southern mindset is slightly off. Many of the virtues and ideals it venerates are genuinely good. The problem I see is that sometimes they are pursued not for the sake of their own intrinsic value, but because they remind people of a former way of life they see as ideal.

God, family, love, honor, patriotism - all these are worth keeping. Unfortunately traditionalism has a nasty habit of dragging in other values that are not so good. The ones most obvious in the South are racism and apartheid, which themselves stem from the South’s discontent over the result of the Civil War.

The antebellum Southern society was founded on the backs of slaves. This society was mostly destroyed by emancipation, although people found devious ways to subjugate the “free” blacks after the war, creating a stratified system of oppression paradoxical to the ideals of freedom the South still clung to. It was a slavery not recognized by deed or contract, but a real slavery nonetheless. This has fortunately been eliminated in large part thanks to the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others.

From what I have studied - and I recognize that if you are a Southerner you may disagree strongly with this statement - I believe the Confederacy was linked inseparably to slavery, if not directly, then indirectly through the economic system it intended to preserve. Thus, whether they care to admit it or not, would-be Confederates of today are engaging in involuntary, if not voluntary, racism. It goes without saying that there is absolutely no justification for one race to be the designated servile instrument of another. A society built on such an assumption is tyranny.

The most saddening remnant of this American tragedy that continues today is the segregation of so many of our churches. In the Church, of all places, there ought to be no racial boundaries.