Jena: The South, Politics And Race

In today’s NYTimes, Krugman writes:

Last Thursday there was a huge march in Jena, La., to protest the harsh and unequal treatment of six black students arrested in the beating of a white classmate. Students who hung nooses to warn blacks not to sit under a “white” tree were suspended for three days; on the other hand, the students accused in the beating were initially charged with second-degree attempted murder.

. . . Many press accounts of the march have a tone of amazement. Scenes like those in Jena, the stories seemed to imply, belonged in the 1960s, not the 21st century. The headline on the New York Times report, “Protest in Louisiana Case Echoes the Civil Rights Era,” was fairly typical. But the reality is that things haven’t changed nearly as much as people think. Racial tension, especially in the South, has never gone away, and has never stopped being important. And race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics.

Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races. . . .

Indeed. I wrote about this back in December 2004. I want to reprint what I wrote then.

From Clinton to Lincoln: About Winning the “South”

by Armando

Sun Dec 19, 2004 at 10:52:14 AM PDT

Daily Kos at its best is a place where Democrats (centrists, progressives and undefined) and other progressives can think about and discuss difficult issues in an open, creative and intelligent manner. A wonderful recent example is Aerthern’s latest installment of Understanding the South. This diary, as all in the series were, is wonderfully written, factually supported and well argued. The discussions generated were intelligent, vigorous and respectful. The conclusions drawn, in my opinion, were wrong. My view is best expressed in The Lessons of Lincoln. On the flip I’ll explain part of why I think so, based on my personal experiences and observations.

Aethern writes:

Our Strategy for Southern Success must begin with an understanding of Southern Culture. I am a native North Carolinian, my Tar Heel roots going back to the early 19th century, and my family was split pretty evenly during this past election. There was my country grandmother (her town, Bear Grass, has a population of around 200) who responded with a hearty “Hell No!” when someone asked her if she was voting for Bush. There’s my step-father, a man who loves both NASCAR AND fine wines, who was the first person I knew to sport a Kerry bumper sticker. Then, of course, there’s my uncle, a “sports minister” at a huge Charlotte Baptist Church who helped with Bush’s campaign. And there’s my father, a Rush Limbaugh fan who loves few things more than railing against “bleeding heart liberals” (political discussions with him are like walking blindfolded through a minefield with snow-shoes on). His father (my grandpop) is an old-school yellow dog democrat who can barely stomach the fact that his son is a registered Republican.

Even with all that political diversity, my family is very southern, and we have a deep and enduring love for our home state and for the South in general. People who are not from the South tend to be somewhat perplexed by the fierce regionalism of this part of the country, and too often tie it to racism, bigotry, and all the demons of the Old Confederacy. The truth is that it’s just not that simple. There are, unfortunately, many racists here, and certainly they are often more outspoken than in other regions, but that does not extend to saying that white southerners are racist by nature.

I guess this is true as far as it goes. But I think, politically, it misses the simple point, that race drives the White South politically.  and when devising a winning political strategy, ignoring this basic point leads to unwise choices.

For example, Aethern writes:

Now–and let me be exceedingly clear on this–competing in the South does NOT mean catering or compromising with racism, ignorance, or bigotry, or selling out our positions. In fact, it means just the opposite. By becoming competitive in the South, we can fight those evils much more than we can by writing off the entire region. All it takes is for candidates to understand the aspects of Southern culture which are positive and seperate from racism and bigotry, and to appeal to those aspects, essentially creating our own positive wedge issue.

This simply is disproved by the evidence. It is precisely the appeal to the baser aspects of Southern culture that have led the GOP to ascendancy. It has been the Democratic fight for our Values that have led to the Party’s demise in the South. Aethern writes of a conversation with Don, who I understood to be African-American, and how African-Americans are feeling abandoned by the Dem Party. Aethern doesn’t connect that the abandoned feeling springs from the move to shore up the Dem standing with the larger cultural “South.” That in fact, this comment argues against her analysis. I believe that what we need to do is in fact turn away from conscious appeal to the South and appeal to our values, highlight the GOP’s extremisim and hatemongering, and build a coalition against the GOP formula that wins the South and “values” voters.

What do I know about it you may well ask. Am I a “son of the South?” No, I am a first generation Cuban-American, born in New Orleans, raised in a rural agricultural stretch of Florida on the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee, Pahokee, Florida a small town of 6000 souls, is where I grew up, went to public school and first experienced the South and the issues of race.

Pahokee had and has a population that is about half African-American, 30% White, 15% Hispanic, mostly Cuban.  Before 1960, Pahokee and the surrounding communities were the “Winter Vegetable Capital of the World” (I kid you not–the Bank of Pahokee, sadly now a SunTrust branch, had this slogan written on its checks).  Castro and the embargo changed that.  One of the world’s largest sugar mills was built in Pahokee in 1962.  My dad, who took my mom and brothers out of Cuba in late 1961, came there to work in a business Cuban refugees knew–the sugar business. This place became my home. I was less than a year old.

Pahokee had segregated schools, despite Brown v. Board of Ed. (“all deliberate speed” was pretty deliberate in Pahokee), until 1970. But the Democratic candidate in 1968–Hubert Humphrey–came to Pahokee in 1968, landed a helicopter on the high school football field, and brought Lorne Greene, for a campaign rally. It was exciting. I don’t remember if Humphrey spoke about civil rights or values or Vietnam. I was 6.

When I started my third grade year at Pahokee Elementary School in 1970, a significant change occurred. There were almost no black children in my second grade class. My third grade class was mostly black. Some of this was due to the inclusion of the black children in our now-integrated school. Some of this was due to the fact that most white parents pulled their kids out of the public school and put them in the new all white private school that opened in the neighboring town, which had also integrated its public schools.

In the fifth grade, I started intermediate school at the old black elementary school, East Lake, “across the tracks” (and yes, literally, the black section of town, referred to as N__r Town by white Pahokeeans, was on the other side of railroad tracks). My white neighborhood was a short walk to East Lake, so I walked to school–no bussing for me. In the sixth grade, one day I was taking my usual route to school and noticed that the streets were unusually empty. I arrived and found myself to be the only “white” (my consciousness had not yet absorbed that I wasn’t white) student in the school–there had been a race riot the night before–a white man had shot a well respected black man dead in a personal dispute. The police had released the white man, who claimed self defense. A riot had ensued. School was closed for the week. I walked back home and by then the streets had regained activity and I was chased out of the neighborhood with calls of “cracker” and thrown rocks bouncing around me. I was 11 years old.

Life goes on. Time passes and I made many friends of all races. I was athletically inclined and played sports throughout high school, generally the teams were nearly all black–the basketball team was all black except me. These were my best friends. Good kids, smart kids. After high school, some went to college on athletic scholarships and made good lives for themselves. Most ended up in jail or dead. My white friends went to work or college and made good lives for themselves. Was this a race issue? Yes, it was. A complicated issue, but race was at its heart.

What is the significance of my story? This could be a story about a Northern town as well. And I’m sure it is. But these conditions, these circumstances, these problems, they did not begin in 1960, 1954 or 1896; they began in the South–with slavery. That is why these problems, the problems of race, are a uniquely Southern story–a story that dominates the politics of the South to this day.

And this failure to accept this story as a national and regional disgrace, to fail to understand the indelible stain that this history places on the country, is central to understanding our 30 years of political failure in the South. The problem is not strictly a Southern one. But it is there where our political fortunes are most abject.

In an earlier diary I argued that Lincoln in 1860 is the guide for us. But, strictly speaking, this approach is not aimed at [all] of America, but rather is aimed at that part of America that is not radical, anti-science, anti-gay, or enamoured of the Radical Right Wing Agenda. Sure, this strategy would alienate a part of America. Coincidently, it will alienate a good part of the South. But, like Lincoln in 1860, I believe that Dems must present a stark choice for voters–in our case, the reactionary radicalism of the Right vs. the sensible enlightened policies of the Democrats.

Why will this strategy not work in the South? To put it plainly, the South has not worked through or accepted its past. For nearly 140 years, different forms of apologists have fought to alter history: the “Lost Cause” brigade is the archtype, that sought to innoble a war to protect the institution of slavery–a mythology still not fully beaten back; the creation of the Marble Man, Robert E. Lee, as a National Hero, a neat trick for a man who committed treason; the misleading historiography of Reconstruction; Birth of a Nation’s mythologyzing ode to the KKK; Gone With Wind; Daughters of the Confederacy; State’s Rights; Nascar Dads; the Silent Majority; Law and Order platforms; and yes “values”–are all, in different ways, attempts to deflect and deny the critical issue: race and our disgraceful history.

Are White Southerners, as a group, bad folks? Of course not. They are human. As many Southerners here rightly point out, racism is a national problem. I worked for the David Dinkins Reelection campaign in 1993. Both in ’93 and in ’89 a lot of Democrats didn’t vote for Dinkins. Was it conscious racism? Mostly no, but it was racism nonetheless. These Dems were quicker to think Dinkins stupid, lazy, incompetent. But, these are regions we do win in and will win in. We do not and cannot in the South. Not without relinquishing our values.

My brother lives in Atlanta and is married to a wonderful woman from Montgomery, Alabama. I’ve spent a lot of time with them in both Atlanta and Montgomery, where I met many wonderful, cultured, intelligent and educated people. I remember in particular the good people of Montgomery, Alabama, my sister in law’s family and their friends–a highlight was spending a good deal of time with Scottie Fitzgerald, a family friend. Surely these folks are not demons? They are not. But they do not face their history, our country’s history, and how this history’s stain is upon all we do. They accept the new myths–the “values” divide, the myth of the radical left. They see a discussion of race as an attack on Southern culture. These are good people–but they cannot be convinced, not now, not yet. The Peculiar Institution and its 140 years of reverberations still impede us. In short, we cannot win here with our values.

So we are left with these stark choices–abandon our values or build a winning strategy with those who can accept and embrace our values. I believe the only choice is to win with our values, to win without the South, as Lincoln did in 1860. And this does not mean a Civil War or even a civil war. We are not their choice, but neither are we so abhorrent. And that is progress.

60 comments

Skip to comment form

    • LoE on September 24, 2007 at 15:41

    I know very little about the South, but do have a memory from visiting there as part of a big road trip to explore the country back in 1979.  Not the 21st century certainly, but not exactly the Civil Rights Era any more either.

    Slept at a state park somewhere in the SE corner of Arkansas, which had a laundromat.  Washed everything, only to find out the dryers were all not working.  Swell, it’s July in the South, 95 degrees, 95% humidity, and everything’s wet.

    So I went into a nearby small rural southern town (not far from Jena in fact) to find a laundromat.  Saw a (white) letter carrier, and assuming he’d know where stuff was, asked for directions to a laundromat.  He pointed down the road a short distance, and said “There’s one there”. 

    But then proceeded to give some long complicated directions to another one.  Which I ignored, and went to the laundromat that was right there.  Of course, that one was the “black” laundromat.  A white girl from Oregon (my license plates at the time) was something decidedly different there, and everyone was very curious and friendly, and a good time was had by all.

    I can only assume the letter carrier figured I’d only want to consort with whites.  One wonders if the same thing might not still happen under the same circumstances today.

    One must wonder about the authorities who called the business with the noose a “prank”, like it was devoid of significance.  Lynchings occurred within living memory in those parts, and everybody knows it, too.

    • Armando on September 24, 2007 at 15:43
      Author

    the piece, I did not transfer the links contained therein.

    If interested you can get the links in the original piece, which is linked.

  1. just jumpin’ right in there on a monday, huh?

    pardon my rudeness, but this essay from last night describes a hate site that is targeting the as-yet-unincarcerated ‘jena 5’ for some old-style southern justice…and contains an additional link in the comments with more info. 

    armando i totally loved reading this essay, but i lost the political point somewhere…my brain glazes over when i start thinking about sports… 

    are you suggesting that the dems run AT the southern racist undercurrent?  bring racial and economic issues to the fore?

  2. I am not a “real” southerner, because I was born in Canada, but I have been here long enough to recognize that race is still a driving factor in how white southerners frame both their own resistance to change and defend themselves.

    But a part of me is pissed off, not rational, in response to the “dump the South” approach. As a white non-moderate, progressive type, I expected this would be the strategy all along and feel cut off. It raises a lot of class issues for me, about who is and is not essentially “worth the effort” in terms of change and potential for change.

  3. Have you reprinted this before?  It’s clearly from before my time at dK but it seems familiar.

    LBJ was an asshole in many things, but he was right about civil rights, and courageous too.

  4. since you wrote that Lincoln piece. I remember that, although I was still a newbie and was too askeered to say anything, I agreed.

    I have a lot of elderly family members with strong Southern roots and the values and attitudes are so deeply ingrained that nothing will change them.

    I read recently about a memorial statue of Lincoln that the National Park Service erected in Richmond in 2003 at a site that was considered to be a Confederate landmark. It caused a huge controversy with the Sons of Conferderate Veterans. They likened it to putting up a statue of Hitler in Paris.

    Here is a brief article about it.

  5. and, paraphrasing Medgar Evers, ” I don’t know if I’m going to Heaven or if I’m going to Hell, but I know I’m going FROM Alabama.”

    Armando, I think we are mistaken in looking at the South as a monolith. With the changing demographics the south is NOT the same.

    I’d love to say that minds are being changed, but the white south is Republican. Conservative. And yes, racism does exist. But is it the main motivator? Unimportant UNLESS we look at the south as a monolith.

    Without compromising values, we can pick up seats, slowly and surely. This won’t be a fast process. There will always be pockets of racism and sexism in the south.

    If you are speaking of electoral votes, Florida and South Carolina come to mind, possibly Tennessee…these three states could flip. But perhaps not.

    Let’s look at the local level, for instance, here in Alabama. Democrats control more city councils, mayorities (is that the correct term?), and the state house… Race still is an issue– as is an inherent conservatism among whites and African Americans in the area.

    So… if you are only speaking of the presidency, I’d say correct in most states, with a few opportunities. However, hearts and minds are changing. Slowly.

    Those of us on the ground here face an uphill battle. Sometimes it’s one step forward, two or three steps back.

    But the dynamic is changing, thank God.

    I am more hopeful than you on this issue. Some areas will remain firmly in Republican hands– the Sand Mountain area of north Alabama, for instance, and probably Montgomery, but the monolith is broken, changing as people move here, businesses relocate, and the latest generations are brought up with a subjective reality that does not match that of parents or grandparents.

    For some, there appears to be no change. But there IS change. Slow but sure.

    Before enlightenment, hew wood, carry water.
    After enlightenment, hew wood, carry water.

    Working here for social justice is a marathon, not a sprint.

  6. for me.  I was pretty upset in my son’s kindergarten year when I was given a calendar of school holidays and MLK had to share the day down here with Robert E. Lee.  I scanned it into my computer and put it up at Orange and holy shit what a storm.  I was told that I was only seeing the bad things in the South and not the “good things”.  I was accused of scrounging around for trash and finally finding something trashy representative of some strange little Southern town……I didn’t have to scrounge, it was given to me on my way out the door one day on a fresh crisp piece of paper and this is a town in America and my son’s public fucking school down here! Robert E Lee never said one fucking thing that moved me to the very depths of my being and united my soul with all those around me!  Fuck Robert E Lee, he was WRONG…….no pony for Robert E Lee!  The kids outside Enterprise High School segregate themselves, you should see it, it’s a thing of beauty how human beings have been raised to automatically do such things. It works great till you throw the Army brats in there but if you frown hard enough at them and exclude them all enough you can get them to play ball too at a time in their lives when fitting in is utmost important.  I’m sick of this shit and I intend to help the South.  It’s too easy to give up on yourself down here if you are white, give up on your education, eat like a swine and balloon to 300 lbs.  They are destroying themselves because they believe that they are somehow better than someone else, more chosen than someone else, they get paid shitty wages and run around feeling kingly and queenly…….wake the fuck up fools!

    • robodd on September 24, 2007 at 17:39

    In fact it is a lynchpin (if you will) of neo-con philosophy through its professed, if subtle and coded belief in the failure of the great society and ineffectiveness of the civil rights movement to improve the black condition. 

    We may not stop this until we rethink whether liberal society was as a whole really a failure.  Whether the civil rights movement was ever really given a chance.  Especially compared to its current alternative.

    • pico on September 24, 2007 at 18:06

    But these conditions, these circumstances, these problems, they did not begin in 1960, 1954 or 1896; they began in the South–with slavery. That is why these problems, the problems of race, are a uniquely Southern story–a story that dominates the politics of the South to this day.

    Couldn’t disagree more with this.  Our race problems don’t derive from slavery: slavery was the most glaring instance of our race problems that stretch back much further, and have much deeper roots than slavery alone.  Normally I wouldn’t care much which way you framed it, but the prescriptions are so very different depending on which way you formulate it.

    If our race problems stem from slavery, then the way to ‘deal’ with them is somehow to reverse the effects of slavery, whether by economic, social, and/or political means.  This kind of thinking is why people can convince themselves that the Civil Rights movement ‘solved’ everything: now people have rights, freedoms, and property, so how come we can’t get along?

    If slavery was only the most glaring instance of our more fundamental race problems, then we have to burrow to a much deeper and much more uncomfortable core, buried somewhere in our language and worldviews. 

    And I’m running the risk of a too-long comment, so I’ll stop there – but I hope you see what I’m saying.  Apart from that, I mostly agree with everything here.

  7. But good luck getting the Democratic Party off the tit of the Southern White Male voter, be he/she from California or Louisiana. The cultural myths and political fictions serve them well as they enable both sides cover from actually addressing or offering policies and agendas that would move social progress forward. Both parties covet this voting block for the very reasons you have stated, those living a myth have more interest in regression then progress, and are more easily swayed to authoritarian rule. 

  8. But good luck getting the Democratic Party off the tit of the Southern White Male voter, be he/she from California or Louisiana. The cultural myths and political fictions serve them well as they enable both sides cover from actually addressing or offering policies and agendas that would move social progress forward. Both parties covet this voting block for the very reasons you have stated, those living a myth have more interest in regression then progress, and are more easily swayed to authoritarian rule. 

  9. until elections (if even then).

    So what’s new?

  10. These are good people–but they cannot be convinced, not now, not yet. The Peculiar Institution and its 140 years of reverberations still impede us. In short, we cannot win here with our values.

    Southerners will never be convinced of Progressive values so long as short sighted strategists write them off as hopelessly racist and thus not worth the bother.  As posters have note above, the South is indeed changing, and while sowing the seeds of Progressive values may not see electoral success in the short term, a long term commitment to the region is the very strategy needed to begin to finally change attitudes for successive generations.

    Your single issue argument also discounts all of the other Progressive values that are likely to appeal to Southern voters.  Southerners, like everyone else, want affordable health care, good jobs, and an end to this War.  So while the time may not yet be right for a Kumbaya moment on race, there are plenty of other issues with which Progressive candidates can appeal to Southern constituencies.

    Politically, aggressively running Progressive candidates in the South also helps us win in other areas of the country by forcing Conservatives to spend resources competing on their own turf, while giving Conservatives a free, uncontested base only hurts Progressive chances elsewhere.

    What’s more, your monolithic characterization of Southern politics completely ignores important pockets of Progressive value voters in Southern cities and colleges where we can win.  These are the places where we should be actively promoting the growth of the Progressive movement so that it can eventually spread to other Southern areas.

    Bottom line: the only way to change attitudes is by challenging them, and I for one refuse to abandon non-Whites and Progressive whites to the tyranny of the status quo while you impotently wait for Southern Whites to change themselves.

  11. and an excellent essay. Thanks for reprinting.

    • Aethern on September 27, 2007 at 06:15

    Just kidding… 

    It’s been interesting to revisit our little debate of several years ago.  I hadn’t thought about it in a while.  Looking back, I still stand by the overall gist of my analysis, though I think I also came a little too close to buying into the ‘values voters’ DLC bullshit as well.  And from reading this posting and subsequent comments, I don’t think we’re that far off from each other.  I don’t think Alabama is going to go blue in 2008, by any stretch (NC, VA and TN might), but over time, things can change, but only if we work to change them (and not by pandering to whatever demographic the consultants are sucking off this week). 

    As far as the Jena 6 go, while it is definitely a glaring injustice, I tend to agree largely with Ted Rall on this issue. 

    Anyway, good to know you’re still writing!

Comments have been disabled.