The Southern Place and Racial Politics Southernification, Romanticization, and the Recovery of White Supremacy

A central dimension of a right-wing movement in American political life has revolved around the perception among many white people that because of the Civil Rights Movement and social policies such as affirmative action, the real victims of racism in America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are white people, white men in particular. This essay employs Aaron Gresson's recovery-of-white-supremacy thesis (the recovery movement) in relation to the Black South—especially the romanticization of the region—and the larger process of the Southernification of the United States. Using a critical theoretical/pedagogical base, such analysis opens new perspectives on Black politics in the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

keywords:

• Recovery movement
• Southern politics
• Southernification
• white supremacy

Notes

1. Gresson's work on these topics includes Aaron Gresson, The Recovery of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and America's Atonement: Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the Pedagogy of Healing (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); my work includes Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg, Changing Multiculturalism (London: Open University Press, 1997); Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, Nelson Rodriguez, and Ronnald Chennault, White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998); Joe L. Kincheloe, Getting Beyond the Facts: Teaching Social Studies/Social Science in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).

2. James Cobb, “Vienna Sausage, Faulkner, and Elvis.” Georgia Magazine, 2003. http://cobblog.blogspot.com /2005_03_01_cobblog_archive.html; Gresson, America's Atonement.

3. Manning Marable, “Living Black History: Resurrecting the African American Intellectual Tradition,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 6, no. 3/4 (2004), pp. 5–16.

4. Willie Morris, North Toward Ho me (Oxford, Mississippi: Yoknapatawpha Press, 1967).

5. Marable, “Living Black History,” pp. 13–14.

6. Aaron Gresson, The Recovery of Race in America; Nelson Rodriguez and Leila Villaverde (eds.), Dismantling White Privilege (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Gresson, America's Atonement; Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg (eds.), What You Don't Know about School (New York: Palgrave, 2006).

7. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and Aaron Gresson, Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).

8. Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

9. Joe L. Kincheloe and William Pinar (eds.), Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis: Essays on the Significance of Place (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991); John Beck, Wendy Frandsen, and Aaron Randall, “Will Southern Culture Survive? Three Views,” 2005. http://oit.vgcc.cc.nc.us/hum122/concl.htm

10. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books, 1996).

11. Gresson, America's Atonement; Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg, The Miseducation of the West: How Schools and the Media Distort Our Understanding of the Islamic World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

12. Farah Jasmine Griffin, Who Set You Flowin'? The African American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Valerie Grim and Anne B.W. Effland, “Sustaining a Rural Black Farming Community in the South.” Rural Development Perspectives (1997) vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 47–55.

13. Jacob Levinson, “Divining Dixie,” Columbia Journalism Review, vol. 2, 2004. http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/2/levenson-dixie.asp

14. Kincheloe and Steinberg, What You Don't Know about School.

15. Gresson, America's Atonement, 113.

16. Students for Academic Freedom, “Academic Bill of Rights,” 2004. http://www.studentsforacademic freedom.org/abor.html

17. Betty A. DeBerg, “Response to Sam Hill, ‘Fundamentalism in Recent Southern Culture,’” Journal of Southern Religion, 1998. http://www.as.wvu.edu/coll03/relst/jsr/deberg.htm

18. Kincheloe and Pinar, Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis; African American Migration Experience (AAME), “Return Migration to the South,” 2005. http://www.inmotionaame.org

19. Angelou quoted in AAME, “Return Migration to the South.”

20. Griffin, Who Set You Flowin'?; Beck, Frandsen, and Randall, “Will the South Survive?”; AAME, “Return Migration to the South.”

21. Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Griffin, Who Set You Flowin'?; AAME, “Return Migration to the South.”

22. Griffin, Who Set You Flowin'?; Gresson, America's Atonement.

23. Gresson, America's Atonement.

24. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Griffin, Who Set You Flowin'?

25. Morris, North Toward Home; Frances Jones-Sneed, “Memories of the Civil Rights Movement. A Review Essay of The Children by David Halberstam,” 1999. http://www.mcla.mass.edu/publications/faculty_publications/the_minds_eye_spring_99/sneed.htm Albert Murray, The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement (New York: Vintage, 1996).

26. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Random House, 1977); Griffin, Who Set You Flowin'?

27. Grim and Effland, “Sustaining a Rural Black Farming Community in the South”; James Cobb, “So Another Racist Finds Himself Behind BarsSo?” 2005. http://cobblog.blogspot.com2005/05/my-latest-rant.html

28. Morris, North Toward Home.

29. DeBerg, “Response to Sam Hill.”

30. Beck, Frandsen, and Randall, “Will the South Survive?”

31. Morris, North Toward Home.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid, 139–40.

34. Cobb, “So Another Racist Finds Himself Behind Bars.”

35. Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

36. Morris, North Toward Home.

37. Wright quoted in Griffith, Who Set You Flowin'?, p. 33.

38. Morris, North Toward Home; Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” in Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story (New York: Random House, 1977).

39. Morris, North Toward Home.