That's ok, you made up for it with this guy
Posted on 04/19/2002 12:24:19 PM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
To preserve its illusion of national innocence, the United States projects its "dark" side onto the South, a Penn State geographer says.
For 10 years after his graduation from college, David R. Jansson worked in university towns – Boston; Ithaca, N.Y.; Madison, Wis.; Berkeley, Calif. – that deemed themselves "progressive" and "enlightened," i.e., left wing.
"These places had their differences," he told United Press International in a phone interview, "but one of the things I could count on was a common conception of the South, largely among people who had never been there but who had very consistent ideas about what the South meant and what it stood for. This was the standard list of negative characteristics and stereotypes."
Jansson enumerated those attributed traits in a presentation to the 98th annual meeting of Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles last month. He said that in American national discourse, "the South tends to be represented as violent, racist, poor, intolerant, xenophobic, and dim-witted, among other things."
This Bigotry Is P.C.
He told UPI that during the decade he worked before beginning graduate studies, he found that people indulged in one of the last forms of bigotry acceptable in polite society. Those who wouldn't dream of mocking other groups were comfortable making jokes about white Southerners.
Representing the South as backward endows America as a whole with the opposite qualities, he said. The vices associated by knee-jerk reaction with the South "become spatialized" and are held to be uncharacteristic of the nation.
By this means, the United States can claim to stand for the exalted principles of the Enlightenment unblemished by skeletons in its own closet. American history, Jansson told the geographers, then can be seen as "unceasing progress and selfless efforts to improve the lot of all humanity."
Southerners are often accused of being stuck in the past, but this comes in part from an external assignment from the rest of America to act as its foil, Jansson said.
Partners in Slavery
The American legend of innocence is built upon a shaky foundation, Jansson said. "Thus slavery is cast in Southern terms when it was more of a national experience than is generally acknowledged."
Citing an essay by Dan Georgakas in the 1998 book "The Meaning of Slavery in the North," Jansson told the geographers: "While most Americans have chosen to think of slavery as a regional aberration than a national phenomenon, in reality the so-called free states of the North were full partners in the viability of the slave society of the South."
Jansson said that University of Kentucky historian Joanne Pope Melish, in her 1998 book "Disowning Slavery," argues that the mythology of a free New England remains potent in academia as it does in American society as a whole. But Melish shows how even otherwise careful historians tend to date the end of slavery in the North earlier than its demise.
In his presentation, Jansson reviewed some of the salient thoughts of C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999), the eminent Yale historian of the South. Woodward's landmark work, "The Mind of the South," was published in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War.
Jansson said Woodward viewed Southern history not as the stories in dusty old library volumes, but rather as the collective experience in which the Southern people find their distinctiveness.
"This history includes Southern poverty in the face of American abundance," Jansson said. In 1969 the United States had never "lost" a war, but the Confederacy had been defeated and occupied. Dealing with tragedy had set the South apart. The myths of innocence, omniscience and "social felicity" were not operating assumptions in Dixie.
Woodward argued that America needed the sobering influence of Southern history, "a heritage that is far more closely in line with the common lot of mankind than the national legends of opulence and success and innocence."
But Jansson concluded his presentation with the observation that the United States, even with the reverses it has suffered since 1969, remained resistant to Woodward's message. "In fact, the chasm that separates the history of America from the history of the South cannot be crossed without causing a rupture in the American national identity," he said.
Give or take a few New Yorkers, have to make sure to get all of them. One thing for sure, go anywhere in the US, tell them you are from NYC and they immediately put you in the right category.
One thing for sure, go anywhere in the US, tell them you are from NYC and they immediately put you in the right category.
And what category would that be? Racist? Elitist? Snooty?
I've been down south plenty of times, and the people I met never put me in any of those categories.
Perhaps your problems in that area are self-inflicted.
Know why Teddy is sooooo LIBERAL? It's cause he's afraid some socialist nut job will shoot him too if he doesn't stand to the left of them. ;^)
I live in NC presently. Obnoxious is the usual trait tacked on NY ers. Having been away for many years, I would have to agree.
Ummm, I knew they tended to nail anything that moves, but that's the first I'd heard of them being rainbow warriors!
I have personally perused the journals of some of the New England and Oberlin Abolitionist Societies in the stacks of the Oberlin College Library, and it was obvious even to this one time (long ago) undergraduate, that most of those writing of the Old South had never been South of the 40th parallel.
Of course, there is another factor present today. The modern Fabian Socialists--such as the Clintons--have been using the Southern traditionalists in much the same way that the Nazis used the Jews, as a scapegoat for the problems of the mob. Thus we have the marriage of many generations of ignorance with 20th Century demagoguery of the worst sort.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
I thought he had it wrong. Yes, you are right. A history professor of mine in college talked about Wilber Cash and The Mind of the South in class a lot.
Sorry --- I just couldn't help myself. It was too easy.
If you want to lay blame for the welfare state, there are 3 presidents you need to go after. FDR for laying the foundation. LBJ for raising expectations. And Richard Nixon for delivering on those expectations. The Fed Budget went to 70% "non-discretionary" by the end of the 70s.
That's what gets me- I sure get tired of being tarred as a racist, homophobic, ( fill in the blank ) extremist by people who don't know a daggone thing about me except that I'm a conservative from South Georgia.
The guy across the street from me is a black guy who builds houses. He's a good neighbor...
The gal next door, ahem! preferrs women, if you get my drift. She's a good neighbor...
But those white folks across the street who like to get likkered up & hoot & holler.... well, I wouldn't mind if they'd move on down the road.
That's ok, you made up for it with this guy
My, my, my. All those famous sothron authors. How can we compete? I guess we'll just have to be content with northern authors like Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. James Fennemore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Washington Irving, and Henry David Throreau. Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane. Julia Ward Howe, Louisa Mae Alcott, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. And then there's Horatio Alger, Henry James, L. Frank Baum, Edith Wharton, and Upton Sinclair, and don't forget Sinclair Lewis. Jack London and O. Henry. Then there's Eugene O'Neil and Henry Miller and e.e. cummings, and, well you get the idea.
The rest of these United States blame us for alot of things, but they always leave out a few: Family values, Christianity, Respect, BBQ, NASCAR, Monster Trucks, Southern Rock, Blues, Folk Music, Honor, Fishing, Hunting, Cowboys, Farmers, tractors, flea markets, the Grand 'Ol Opry and just plain old Southern nights with twinklin' stars.
As Ernest Tubbs once said, "you can call me a hillbilly, but you better smile."
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