The South's collective unconscious?

I'm not sure if I buy this, from Garry Wills (New York Review of Books):

[W]hen I went back to Atlanta to see my beloved grandmother ... [s]he told me not to hold change between my lips while groping for a pocket to put it in--"That might have been in a nigger’s mouth." Once, when she took me to Mass, she walked out of the church when a black priest came out to celebrate. I wondered why, since she would sit and eat with a black woman who helped her with housework. "It is the dignity--I would not let him take the Lord in his hands."

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe--that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

My skepticism arises from a Rumsfeldian known unknown: Had Hillary Clinton defeated Obama in the 2008 primaries and gone on, as she would have, to beat McCain in the general, the white South would have despised President H.R. Clinton with at least equal intensity. It's what the political South does. It hates with inextinguishable vengeance, one born, most likely, of its antebellum paranoia.

Carl Jung speculated about a collective unconscious--one buried deeper than the personal--and in the South we see evidence of such a universality, one steeped in circumscribed ignorance: Governor Rick Scott's rejection of $2 billion in federal money for a jobs-creating, high-speed rail system; Southerners "begging to secede again from the Union"; tepid tea partying elsewhere, but "fermenting to a more toxic brew in the South"; Southern governors rebuffing expanded Medicaid and refusing sex education ("though [the South's] rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England"); and "fight[ing] federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution."

In the 1830s the Southern slavocracy managed to impose "gag rules" on Congress--even discussions of slavery petitions were impermissble. The South as a whole also conspired to repel all unwanted written material from its borders: imposed, regulated ignorance became regional law. Assorted Northern conspiracies being hatched against the virtuous South were the currency of the latter's parlor rooms, and no molestation of Abe Lincoln's actual political beliefs could be too viciously distorted to go unbelieved. The South created its own, very unreal world, and in prolonging its antebellem delusions through the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, the South remained content in its impeccable, hateful ignorance. 

Hate Obama because he's black and thus inherently undignified? No, there's hate there all right, but it's hate for hate's sake. The deep white South just has to hate something, or somebody. It's what it does, simply because it's done it for 200 years. It's tradition.

Comments

[Peter G]

I see a musical in this, The Klansman On The Roof.

[japa21]

Respectfully disagree. But only in the sense of degree. Hate, yes, but only Democrats. And I think that, for the most part, it is a reflexive hate.

So would an HRC presidency also have been stridently opposed? Probably. After all, unlike her husband, she is totally a Yankee.

Yet, there is also little doubt in my mind that a fair share of the virukence of the hatred is due to the President's skin color. That, plus the fact that he talks "white."

Oh, and not everybody in the South falls under the description you provide.

[Robert Lipscomb]

In my limited interactions with friends and acquaintances from Great Britain, I have beenn struck by what I infer as their sense of heirarchy. It seems there is always someone higher up, more aristocratic or noble.

In the South, that seems to be inverted. There is always someone who is lesser, baser, less human. To the Old South mindset, people of color are not so much hated as despised.

Being asked to treat them as full humans is like asking me to kiss your dog after he just finished licking his ass. It is a humiliation. I have no metaphor for placing an African-American over the whole country (and yes these Southerners live in a world that is ruled from the top).

So, I disagree it is different. Yankees are hated for being different, for being outside the tribe. Hillary will be fully hated, but as anenemy.

I apolgize to all for the offensiveness of the words I used to describe something I hate and despise so much. The good news is that, as bad as it sometimes is, things are not one-tenth as bad as they used to be.

At least not on the outside.

[JD]

Read a history of Jim Crow. Then tell me that Pres. Obama's skin color means nothing to the white South.

[shsavage]

Japa, it isn't reflexive hate for Democrats per se. They were mostly Democrats in the Antebellum period, and throughout the Reconstruction Period, Great Depression and the Post WWII era. It was the combination of the Civil Rights movement and Nixon's "Southern Strategy" that turned them into Republicans. And why? Racism, pure and simple--hatred for the people they had enslaved for 400 years. This is, essentially, a deep-seated guilt complex transformed into self-loathing, and acted out against the "other".

[Ansel M.]

I don't often disagree with you, PM, but President Obama's skin color DOES account for the preponderance of hatred and resentment directed at him by a high percentage of white southerners. As japa21 wrote, however: "not everybody in the South falls under the description you provide".

[nathkatun7]

Here is my question that I wish both PM and Japa would address: How come the White South, which was predominantly Democratic before the passage of the !964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, became predominantly Republican?

[priscianus jr]

"It is the dignity--I would not let him take the Lord in his hands." You have to remember that when she made this comment there was no Obama.

You have to realize that in making this statement she was showing contempt for the entire church, since that priest was ordained by a bishop same ase any other priest.

[japa21]

nathkatun, you answer your own question. The Dems passed that legislation, not Republicans. As LBJ said at the time, this cost the Dems the South for over a generation. Actually, LBJ was probably too optimistic.

[Jim Milstein]

I have to agree with PM.

The White South is belligerently ignorant and hateful simply because it's a tradition and because they enjoy it.

It's kind of cute . . . in a hateful way.

[majii]

I've lived in the South my entire life, 60 years. Race invades every aspect of southern life. I was still teaching high school when Sen. Barack Obama won the election in 2008. The day after the election, I went to work as I usually did, but there was a palpable change in the building. Those who I'd thought I got along well with would not look me in they eye, and many of the female employees looked as if they'd been crying and hadn't slept all night. My co-teacher decided to miss work that day--she didn't seem able to face me.

The event that let me know how much race still mattered in the South, especially in small towns like the one where I worked, occurred when I entered the cafeteria that day to go through the line of a woman I thought accepted me for whom/what I was based on my character, she looked at me with narrowed eyes and turned her head away. I was stunned and hurt, so I went through another lunch line. Even some of the kids displayed extreme disappointment that McCain wouldn't be our new president.

It was in this same school that my kids had watched every address a president had made since the early 1980s welcoming kids back to school and encouraging them to work hard. The BOE and administration stopped this practice after PBO took office. All of a sudden, the parents were "concerned" about a president using a "Welcome Back to School" speech to "indoctrinate" their kids with "socialism."

Also, every article about President Obama that appears online brings out the racism. These people make no attempt to watch what they write on blogs. I've witnessed the ugliest racist language I've seen in a long time. I thought race relations had gotten better in the South since the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed, but I was wrong. The racism had only taken a covert form. It was there when one tried to get a job in some professions based on one's field of study in college, when one tries to buy a house in certain areas. It pops up in something as simple as your kids playing with other kids in a neighborhood.

The election of Sen. Obama to the presidency brought out the racism, not only in the South, but in other regions of the country. It became quite acceptable to say racist things out loud again and feel no shame. Unless one has lived in the South as a Person of Color, I can understand how he/she wouldn't think race played as big a role as it does in the way some Americans view President Obama and anything he says/does. For someone like myself, it's something I've had to co-exist with all of my life, so I know racism when I see it in all of its forms.

[Robert Lipscomb]

@majii: My election night 2008 was an invert of yours.

As you can probably imagine, everyone who knows me, including my Republican family and friends, know I am a Democrat, a socialist and a vehement anti-racist. As Obama took the stage on election night, I was watching it in my man cave with my very good friend. I am 6-2 and 270 lbs. He is 6-8 and 300 lbs. We were crying like school girls.

So keep that picture in mind when I tell you my phone began ringing off the hook. Two-thirds of the calls were from Republicam friends and family. In the most cloying tone posssible, they asked if i was STILL HAPPY that I was a Democrat. The implication was that seeing a black man taking the stage as president-elect would surely have shaken me to my senses. I assured them that I could not be happier.

Then James and I went back to crying.

I agree with PM that theymight hate Hillary as much, but it will be a different kind of hate.

[M. C. M.]

I can't say that I'm surprised, Majii, but it breaks my heart to know that such hate still thrives in this country. People I know have tried to say it's nothing to do with racism, it's all about Obama's being a socialist; I've always suspected otherwise, and your comments leave no doubt. May you have some peace in knowing that we are not all such hateful human beings. And, yes, I was raised in the deep South--by truly Christian parents.

[jaylemeux]

Like button.