My State Flag. Pretty, right?
No belated Sunday roundup this week – I’ve got something else instead. I’m going to explain my home.
As many of you may already know, I am originally from South Carolina. Aiken, South Carolina to be exact – the golden gem of that fine state, in my opinion. Unsurprisingly, I grew up a proud, albeit unusual southerner: I sport seersucker shirts as if they were a completely normal piece of attire; I used to teach southern dances as a job (namely “the shag” – Google it); I drop “y’all” with confidence and style; I have multiple articles of clothing adorned with the South Carolina state flag (EDIT: to clarify, that’s not the Confederate flag); and I can trace my family history back to South Carolinian patriots who fought in the American Revolution. In short, I love the South and I am particularly proud to call myself a South Carolinian.
Well, usually.
In recent weeks, my home state has come under a good deal of scrutiny, and for good reason. First, our governor made himself look like a love-sick, public-funds abusing romantic in front of the entire country. Then the apparently temperamental Representative Joe Wilson made sure the whole country knew that he had virtually no respect for the office of the President of the United States. Finally, South Carolina Senators Lindsay Graham and Jim Demint have made their opposition to health care reform the center of the Republican debate, never mind that 19% of South Carolinians remain uninsured.
As you might have guessed, I disagree with my elected officials. A lot. In response, many folks have recently forwarded me the scathingly accurate New York Times article by Maureen Dowd (I’ve read it, and while Dowd is known for having an “acid pen”, it’s a fairly accurate article). In light of this, many of my friends – be they here at Harvard, from home, or friends from other parts of the country – have asked a very simple, logical question: “If the South is really that bad, why don’t you just disown your southern heritage and move on?”
My answer is very simple: I can’t.
Let me explain. I feel like I come at this from a slightly different angle than most. The general conception of the south – now proudly propagated by my own elected officials and the media – is that of a backwards, racist, uneducated place where progressive views are looked down upon if not ignored outright. As a progressive who grew up in the South, I’ll be the first to admit this can ABSOLUTELY be true. But I can ALSO say with full confidence that there is much more happening in my little state than one might think. Granted, I come from a somewhat unusual southern family: although my father’s side of my family has deep Southern roots in Camden, South Carolina, my dad grew up as an Army Brat before enlisting into his own twenty-three military career. As such, he has lived most of his life as a nomad, and usually departed from any given location every three to five years. Thus, my father’s life has been a slideshow of the globe and although his values and patterns of speech are rooted in the South (and he is adamant about his status an Independent voter), his perspective has always been global. My mother, on the other hand, has always maintained her deep ties to the Southern Aristocracy of Putnam county, GA (that’s a joke), but she also possesses an uncommonly liberal political consciousness. Case in point: both of my parents were so adamantly opposed to the Confederate Flag that once flew over the S.C. statehouse that my father even exchanged words (via multiple submissions to opinion section of The State newspaper) with an elected official named Glenn McConnell. In the end, my father embarrassed the Civil War-crazed politician into silence. My mother laminated the exchange and plastered it to our refrigerator, much to the chagrin of some of our more conservative houseguests. They are, according to the stereotypes, an atypical set of Southern parents.
But see, they’re actually NOT that unusual. Progressives and progressive thought abound in the South, they’re just frequently out-shouted – in Joe Wilson’s case, literally – by the more stereotypical “southern” views. Heck, even South Carolina republicans are universal in the condemnation of both Governor Sanford and Joe Wilson. Generally speaking, Southerners are a hospitable people who pride themselves on their kind spirit, pleasant manners and the polite way they conduct themselves (which may explain why Rob Miller – Joe Wilson’s democratic opponent in the upcoming election – managed to raise $1 million in campaign contributions within 48 hours of Wilson’s outbursts, many of the donations coming from inside the state).
That said, I should clarify: I do NOT believe that good manners and hospitality make up for hate, and it is the discussion of hate – be it racially motivated or otherwise – that has become the topic of choice regarding South Carolina. Make no mistake, South Carolina has a dark history of race relations (one of the worst days of the Civil Rights movement – the Orangeburg Massacre – was barely even covered because local papers barely blinked), and it has been one of my greatest frustrations, especially given that I worked for, you know, Barack Obama for over a year. Much of this emanates from the state’s obsession with that whole war we started, and the Southern tradition of harping on that loss. Admittedly, the South is sometimes so entrenched in the past that reliving it – even to the point of reenacting battles lost – has literally become a way of life. Rather than deal with the issues of today, there is a Southern tendency to retreat to yesteryear, sending our fake soldiers to enact imaginary scenes of bravery rather than mustering the courage to tackle the all-to-real problems of the here and now. At our worst, we are people obsessed with what we once were, and never what we could be.
But whatever my misgivings, I am obligated as a human being – nay, as a Southerner – to try to find the good in my culture, and if I cannot find it, I must work to put it there. Giving up and leaving would be the easy thing, but that’s not what this country – or really, my state – is about. Yes, the South can be backwards, hateful, poor, uneducated and everything else that that the media/its own elected officials paint it as. Still, the South would not be the South if it were not also insightful, courteous, forgiving, progressive, compassionate, intelligent, and most of all beautiful. This is the South that barely peaks through today, but which glowed brilliantly the day Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary. It’s there, friends, it’s there. Yes, it’s going to take a good while to bring it to light, to push back hundreds of years of entrenched racial, cultural, and socio-political tension…
But that never stopped us before. Southerners have always been scrappy fighters, so just imagine what could happen if we started fighting the right fights.
Things are gonna change down there. Y’all just wait.
