Unabashed

One last post on the political front before I retire my post as resident political pundit:

The New York Times has once again labeled the South racist, crediting the shocking tendency of the South to vote Republican. This time, it’s obvious because, in various locations, the South voted as much as 10% more in favor of the Republican party than in ’04’s election. The title of the article is “For South, a Waning Hold on Politics,” but it should have been “The South, Now With More Racism!” because it was nothing more than a thinly-veiled attack against Southerners, with skewed statistics and an agenda the author didn’t even attempt to conceal. Once you read into the article, you’ll realize how thinly veiled it really was, too, if it was veiled at all:

Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats.

I don’t know who to be mad at with this, the NYTimes for stirring up something that’s less an issue here than it is even in New York–I’ve experienced the haughty New York bias against Southerners, and it’s uglier than any form of prejudice now in the South, my friends–or my fellow Southerners, who, if this article is true, have finally broken my spirit, because they are backwards. My tendency is to blame the author, because he chose a tiny hamlet in western Alabama as representatives of the entire South. Sure, there are pockets of racism alive and well, in Vernon as well as in other places all over the country. Possibly even (GASP!) New York City. Does Ocean County, New Jersey, who voted 58% in favor of McCain, represent your political values, Mr. Author? I doubt you’d like that very much at all if your political values were criticized because of a nearby town’s voting preferences, especially if those preferences happened to be the opposite of your own. So hey, New York, why don’t you work on your own prejudices and leave us alone? Or, better yet, why don’t you help educate some of these areas you’re indicting instead of tattling on them to the rest of the world?

For the article, the author didn’t visit quaint Montevallo or stately Huntsville, the home of this nation’s space program, for a sampling of reactions to Obama’s election. No, they visited Vernon, populatin 1,900 and change. A small, isolated town that I’m imminently familiar with, where the high school graduation rate is low. The people swell with Southern hospitality, but, isolated as they are, you might say they’re behind on the times. I’m not saying they’re backwards, they’re isolated, and there’s not much cultural diversity there, so they have fewer experiences in relating to minorities than many of us do. Maybe that sounds like I’m making excuses, and maybe I am. The point is that the majority of counties in Alabama increased their votes for Democrats this election compared to ‘04, but this author chose Vernon to represent the entire state–the entire South, even.

The article isn’t an outright lie, but in it the author does misrepresent a large geographic area by using skewed statistics. He reveals only the statistics that will paint the South in an ugly fashion, and conceals the others. This article could just as easily have been written about the numbers of people who did vote for Obama (myself included), and the massive amount of progress overall.

The article even points out the fact that Virginia and North Carolina:

made history in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama.

But did they use Virginia or NC as representative of the whole South? Did they focus on positives or progress? No. They chose Vernon, Alabama. They didn’t even choose nearby Shelby County, Alabama, in which I live, which voted (according to this map), 5% higher Democrat in this election than in ‘04, with a population that’s 87.8% white. Sure, McCain still won the county, but he would have won it no matter who was running on the Dem ticket. And that’s not the point of the article, which only wants us to focus on percentage points gained or lost as compared to the Democratic voters of 2004.

So why not pick Shelby County to represent the entire South? Well, because you can’t pick one spot to represent an entire geographic area. Not if you want to be fair and balanced, which this article obviously did not want to be. It wanted to present the South as a bunch of backward racists, so it found the spot where it could present the message it wanted to deliver.

Of the people I know of who voted for McCain, they did so because of Obama’s policies, and argued their points with competence. For instance, as one friend of mine pointed out, isn’t it possible that middle income families will feel the tax crunch when the taxes on the wealthy are raised? Sure, Obama’s plan calls for a hike in taxes only for people making over 250k, but the people who make that much are the owners of a lot of businesses we middle and lower-class folk work at. Isn’t it possible, seeing their taxes go up, that they might hire fewer people, offer fewer pay raises, and essentially constrict our earning potential?  

In the end, this is just another jab by an ignorant bigot, who unfortunately has published this misleading misrepresentation in one of the most widely read periodicals in the world. One more slap to the face of every Southerner who has worked to overcome the past, to embrace the future and try to make right.

My name is Matt Mitchell. I am a white male. I live in Montevallo, Alabama, and I voted for Barrack Obama.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: bias, bigotry, Black, Democrat, mccain, Modern, New York Times, obama, racism, Republican, south, southern, White

Southern culture on the skids…

I don’t really like the term “The New South” because it suggests progress, and as I drive around the South I don’t see a lot of progress. Economically, yes; the industrialization of the post-Civil War South has given us jobs and money that during antebellum times only a tiny percentage of Southerners enjoyed. But culturally, the New South has digressed. Now it’s just carbon copy sprawl. Sure there are some cities that are doing good things–Huntsville, Mobile, Atlanta, Miami. But for every good example it seems there are five bad ones–Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson, even Savannah, where you could say the only true southern culture exists to this day outside of maybe Charleston, but even there it is meticulously cultivated. Some would offer New Orleans, and I would agree to a certain extent, adding that New Orleans has a culture all its own and, proud as I am that it is a southern city and a city that I dearly love, it is unlike most any other place you can visit.

What I see when I travel around the South, and I do travel extensively throughout the “Deep South”–Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida–is a loss of identity. I see culture flying out the window. There’s no architecture to be proud of, and the restaurants are at least 90% chains. Churches are going up in metal buildings now, springing up daily it seems, and trailer parks–despite good interest rates for mortgages over the past ten years (or so)–have surged to heretofore unrealized numbers. What does it all mean, though, when you get right down to it? It means that being southern doesn’t have any romance any more. Where once there was a culture, now there’s just sprawl and loss of identity. Sure, I’m the first to admit the culture we had was founded on the backs of slaves, and I’ll tell you that even though I am deeply ashamed of that, in one way I am grateful for it–because those people who were brought forcibly here from Africa brought their culture with them. They made our food worth eating, our music worth listening to, and our entertainment entertaining. There are parts of my heritage I am deeply ashamed of, but there are other parts that I, like most southerners white and black, cling to, and how I wish that part of it could remain. But it seems to be floating away on a magnolia-scented breeze.

I’m not saying it’s all bad. Things couldn’t have been much worse if you were a black person living in the slavery states, or even in the segregated South. And for that progress I am glad, and the term New South does ring true there, but racism still exists (and not only in the South). Maybe it always will, but there are those of us who believe MLK was right in many ways. Still, though, there are those who don’t, and there still exists a separation of class, despite desegregation’s best intentions.

Granted, southern culture wasn’t all peachy even at its height (can any culture ever be?). But it was distinct to the region. It was our own, and we were proud to live here, and to talk the way we do. It wasn’t all Tara, no. There was a lot of poverty, but there was a lot of family, too, and in the South there weren’t very many things more important than family. From our great familial bonds came southern hospitality, probably what we’re most famous for, but even that trait seems to have gone by the wayside. How can I tell? Because twenty years ago you couldn’t pass another vehicle on the road and not get a friendly wave. Seriously. But not any more; maybe it’s because there are so many more vehicles out on the road today–you’d be waving the whole time you were driving, today. Or maybe it is indicative of the situation, that Southern hospitality is just another fading relic of a bygone era.

So where is our culture now, and what happened to the cool, halcyon southern solitude? We once had uniqueness–in our architecture, our food, our style. We once felt noble and proud. Shouldn’t desegregation only have freed up that pride for all Southerners, white and black? The fact is that the Old South was built on farmland and steel mills, tobacco and king cotton controlled the economy. If you weren’t in one of those two vocations you were probably a very hungry person. And today there are no farming communities left. The steel mills have all, for the most part, shut down and moved away. Today’s economy is driven by the same paper as every other corner of the nation, all rolled up into the petrodollar. And all those things that made the South unique and grand are withering away, fading into obscurity. 

Is the South a better place? Sure it is. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I have my job. I’m glad the Southern economy is what it is–even with the country in recession, the gripping poverty that once ruled in the South has become, comparatively, a miniscule thing. I’m glad I can be friends with a man who is black without white elitists whispering insults at me. I’m glad for all those things, yes, but I sorely miss the things that were embedded in our culture and made the South unique.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: antebellum, Culture, deep south, desegregation, economy, halcyon, petrodollar, recession, segregation, south, southern