The Unvanquished, Part 3: After the Storm

I have a few more things to say about the South before moving on. And of course the “issue” sans pareil when it comes to any discussion of North and South – whether historical or current – is that of race. And the convenient fiction – the tale told by the victors, if you will – is that, whereas integration, voting rights, civil rights, affirmative action, and so on were embraced with open arms in the North, they were fought with demonic and atavistic viciousness in the South. That's one stereotype. And the other is that there are countless lingering traces of racism, both institutional and everyday, in the South, whereas the tide of liberation washed over the Northern regions, sweeping all before it and leaving not a trace of non-enlightenment.

But of course real history always turns out to be more complicated, and more subtle, than the tale told by the victors, which is by nature fraught with stereotype, not to mention justifications after the fact. Everyone on the “coasts”, for example, knows full well that, if you give the South its way and lift the boot of civil rights enforcement from its neck, it will revert, in the twinkling of an eye, to the antebellum pastorale of cruel overseers whuppin' slaves in the cotton field while the “massa” lounges on his whitewashed, columned porch and sips mint juleps. I mean, isn't this basically what the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton say every time someone suggests doing away with affirmative action and quotas? We're going to turn the clock back decades, and all the “progress” that has been made in the meantime will have been for naught!

Now, there is no doubt that the South of old was a highly stratified society... as is the South of today, and the North of today, and virtually any other place of today or down through history. If the poor will always be with us, then so will social class and status, and stratification. This seems to be one of those things that is hard-wired into human nature (as it is for many animal species – and, after all, our Darwinists always claim that we're no different from other animals, so I don't see what their problem is). And it is notorious that, even after the Civil War and up until recently, the best-educated black man in the South was still on a lower rung, status-wise, than the most abject knuckle-dragging white trash. But it would be more germane to point out that, in today's South, blacks and whites have separate and distinct social class structures that are fairly rigidly adhered to, within each respective race. Things only get confusing when you're talking about a “mixed” marriage, or a “mixed” household – and, not surprisingly, people in those situations tend to gravitate to large cities, where they can either hide in the anonymity of the masses or live out in the open, provided they're in the “artsy” part of town. (This, of course, is no different than the situation in the North. Try having a mixed marriage in some small town in the Alleghenies and see how far you get.)

But there's another factor at work here as well. Blacks and whites have been living together – intimately, if you will – for many generations in the South, going back to way before the Civil War. All it takes is reading a bit of Faulkner to bring this point home. Blacks and whites were not equal... but they weren't separate either, except for formal institutions like schools and some (but not all) churches. When you have a “master” class and a “servant” class, they're hardly likely to live in separate enclaves miles apart. Black and white babies nursed at the same breast... and the inextricable bond simply extended itself from that point to a lifetime. Whereas, it's a truism (but true nonetheless) that the vast bulk of the civil rights “workers” who invaded the South in the 1960s were white, urban, and had never had a single black person living under the same roof, or black friends, and their fathers did not have any black employees or, still less, black business associates. In other words, you had people who had grown up in a totally segregated environment preaching the merits of desegregation to people who grown up in a totally non-segregated environment -- “non-segregated” by Southern standards, that is. Blacks and whites in the South had, in other words, a working relationship – a symbiosis – which had its “social” (not to mention psychological) aspects – but they did not “socialize”. So there was a bond there which the civil rights movement and its ancillary features – affirmative action, quotas, “black power”, etc. -- served to break. Or, at the very least, the bond had to be re-defined and re-formed in a way that was satisfactory to all concerned (and not just to one race)... and was also satisfactory to the occupying forces, i.e. the Northern/Yankee power structure's agents and enforcers who had their sights trained on the South (and continue to have to this day).

And yet, out of the ruins new bonds were indeed formed... and part of the reason, I'm sure, was that people hardly had a choice. The South is still a profoundly biracial region – and, unlike the North, there are not vast tracts that are either all white or all black. Each race is larded through the tissues and sinews of the other – and, in fact, it's that reconfigured symbiosis that enables the South to still work... and, in some cases, to work better than in the past.

Now, this is not to deny the persistence of economic inequalities, as well as inequalities in education, training, and so on. It is also not to deny the existence of black vs. white neighborhoods, parts of town, etc. (we tend to forget that segregation can also be voluntary). But what I saw down there recently – and, I admit, it was in a fairly small town that I saw it – was, at least relative to the North, a kind of ease – a relaxation or naturalness, if you will. The tide of federally-enforced integration and civil rights washed over the region, like a Mississippi spring flood of old, but what was left was far from a ruin. And what I definitely did not see was any of the strained, awkward, contrived interactions between the races that one encounters every day in the more “enlightened” cities of the North – with the all-too-familiar nervousness and pasted-on smiles that accompany them. Whites in the North suffer from “the paralysis of analysis” when it comes to interacting with blacks -- “If I'm too friendly they'll think I'm faking it, or patronizing them. But if I'm not friendly enough they'll think I'm one of those people who resent all the progress blacks have made.” And so on. And how do you joke with a person of the “other” race? (Especially if they're also of the "other" gender?) How do you avoid all those taboo “code words” -- you know, that list that the Jackson/Sharpton crowd keeps adding more to each day? And how do you discuss crime, and cities, and drugs, and... well, just about anything? How do you discuss sports or music without implying that blacks might have “rhythm” -- which is, for some reason, considered racist? So Northerners at the racial interface are reduced to conversations of a level of blandness and insipidity that would do justice to a Mormon cooking show on PBS. And all because, in the North, blacks and whites never lived in close contact and still don't. In other words, they had no baseline, and had to dream it up from scratch – whereas in the South, whatever accommodation was made to the new order had to be made quickly, and it had to work, or the whole structure would fall in a heap.

I hope you can see that I'm trying to paint a picture of multiple ironies here. The North forced its world view when it comes to race on the South – but what part of the country has the most racial strife, the most hopelessly anarchistic inner cities, the most intractably segregated (but legally, mind) schools? What part of the country spends vast amounts of time, energy, and wealth trying to “solve” racial problems, to no avail? Where do the race hustlers tend to operate? (And where do they live?) And where are relationships between the races the most strained, awkward, and artificial? If you guessed, north of the Mason-Dixon line, in the victorious Union, you'd be right. Whereas in the South, there is – at least in the places I visited – an almost eerie tranquility... and I don't think it's because the blacks down there “know their place” and still live under oppression and threats. I think it's because everyone down there – not only whites – was forced, starting back in the 1960s, to play by a new set of rules – a set every bit as radical as the set imposed by the victors after the Civil War. And they rose to the challenge because they were determined to salvage the best from their land and their culture – and what they came up with seems to work. Not only does it seem to work, but it would make a good example for the North if people up here were not so blinded by the chronic dysfunctions of race and the interface between races. The South turned defeat (in the Civil War and 100 years later as well) into a kind of victory... whereas the North, when it came to race, did the opposite. The South started out with a biracial culture and turned it into a different kind of biracial culture... whereas the North acquired a biracial culture and has yet to develop the slightest clue as to how to manage it. Thus, the ironies of history, and the idea that it may be too early to declare victory even 100 years after the last bullet is fired.