Compass Points: The American South and the American Left

Today on the Hippolytic blog, I encountered an intriguing post by fellow Yale undergraduate Adda Birnir on the "re-emergence of the South in contemporary American photography." In the course of a few paragraphs, Adda proceeds smoothly from a discussion of these photographs (by Sally Mann, Alec Sloth, William Christenberry, and others) themselves to a meditation on American -- and particularly Southern American -- history. In particular, she warns of the dangers of "southern worship," of romanticizing the American South and its sordid history, and asks, "What happens when we so highly regard these images? What sorts of violence -- racial or economic -- are we implicitly condoning?"

Interesting post, but, in my mind, somewhat problematic. Putting aside the photographs themselves -- I have not seen most of them and do not, in any case, know much about photography -- the post speaks in broad terms about American, and particularly Southern American, history and warns of the dangers of romanticism. Certainly, romanticism, especially of the Confederacy , is quite dangerous, and something to which many otherwise well-intentioned people, including some progressives, fall prey.

At the same time, while racial inequality and racism persist as our country's most severe domestic problems and must be addressed, Northern, and especially Northeastern, leftists must come to grips and make peace with American history and allow their Southern compatriots to do the same.

There is a virulent strain of anti-Americanism on the American left which seeks to find the root of all evil in the United States, and especially in the South. But, although not entirely unjustified, the persistence of this attitude and rhetoric among leftists has effectively cut us off from our own history and preempted the formation of any uniquely American and organic left movement in this country. In fact, it is precisely because of our condescencion towards ordinary working-class American men and women -- in both the North and the South -- that we have been, for the most part, banished to academia.

While, as I have said, the point about romanticizing the South is well taken, treating the South as a monolith -- essentializing it, in other words -- is itself dangerous. Our insistence that racism is rooted in the South blinds us to its persistance in the North, just as international leftists' insistence that the United States is the source of all of the world's problems has blinded them to their own domestic problems. And as for the economic violence which Adda fears we are "implicitly condoning" when we admire images of the South, wage slavery persists today in all parts of this country -- cutthroat capitalism was never an isolated Southern phenomenon.

Finally, although I of course oppose all forms of discrimination and institutionalized racism, and I consider apologists for slavery and segregation morally reprehensible, it is nevertheless important -- perhaps more so precisely because of my strong condemnation of Southern race politics -- to recognize that not every Southerner was a slaveowner nor a supporter of that brutal system of humiliation, discrimination, and exploitation. On the contrary, while, according to J. Morgan Kousser, "the dominant familiar myth [of the South] has been conservative, its characters the cavalier planter, the happy slave, the valiant and romantic Confederate cavalryman, the evil or just ignorant Yankee Reconstructionist, the paternalistic New South industrialist, the cosmopolitan, forward-looking Progressive politician or newspaper editor," there is another vision of the South:

The competing, less well-known tradition, crafted initially by Yankees, but since the 1920s, primarily by dissenting Southerners, black as well as white, serves different purposes and has different stock characters, more villains than heroes: the brutal slaveholder and postbellum bossman, the rebellious slaves, the anti-aristocratic, populistic, hill-country small farmer, the exploitative capitalist and his brutal minions, the long-suffering but rebellious sharecropper or miner or lint-head, and the idealistic organizer who seeks to help in the liberation of the underclass...It is an attempt to create a usable past for Southern radicals.

It is important, then, to recognize that many in the South, white as well as black, fought valiantly against slavery and then segregation. In fact, "the rebellious slaves" and the white "long suffering but rebellious sharecropper or miner or lint-head" were natural class allies in the struggle against economic exploitation in the American South -- only the propagation of racist ideology by the plantation aristocracy prevented this potential alliance from ever reaching fruition. The point, then, is that racism has a material, economic basis, and has been and continues to be employed by the exploiters to divide the exploited. Racist attitudes among workers are a prime example of "false consciousness," but why, if racism weakens their struggle against the bosses, do so many white American laborers, especially in the South, fall prey to this pernicious ideology? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I believe the appeal of racial hierarchy to white sharecroppers, for example, was the stability it granted in an otherwise unstable world of economic exploitation: as tough as life got, the white sharecropper could still feel superior to the black slave, he could find consolation in the fact that he, at least, was not at the very bottom of the social order. We see the same phenomenon among, for example, recently arrived immigrants in the United States: rather than unite, each successive wave has battled those that came before and after for scraps from the exploiters' table. Divide and conquer tactics are a prime tool of the American capitalist in the class struggle.

In any event, understanding racism and its strong ideological appeal in certain regions and among certain sectors is necessary if we are to effictively combat it. Adda's caution against romanticizing the South is appreciated; her implied "essentialization" of that same South, however, is not, and does a great deal of damage to our efforts to truly understand and come to terms with the region's history. She claims that we need "to seize this opportunity of national reflection and push for true introspection," but nevertheless seems to have already come to the conclusion that there can be no redemption for the South, that on the contrary Southerners should be made to wear the stain of their history forevermore. Without reconciliation, however, there can be no progress; the South has a bloody history, but so too does the rest of our country, and I believe it is high time that we as American leftists begin -- for our own sake, as well as that of our Southern compatriots -- to come to terms with our history as Americans and learn that, in order to build a better future for all, we may need to forgive, although never forget, the sins of our collective past.