By Jason Coker
Several years ago when I was working at a church in Dallas, I was wondering if Texas was part of the South or not. I am from the Mississippi Delta, so it was a real question. I asked one of the pastoral residents at the church, who was a born and bred Texan, this question. He immediate fired back a big Texas answer: “No, y’all are losers! Your whole identity is wrapped up in losing the Civil War. We [Texans] are winners. We beat Mexico and became our own independent republic. That’s what defines us.”
I’ve never been able to forget that, or forgive him, but I think there is something profoundly true about what he said. Texas bravado is real, however unfounded — that’s my only jab at Texas (some of my best friends are Texans). The other part is equally true, however buried deep down in the (white) Southern conscious.
These past couple of weeks have been incredibly exhilarating and utterly devastating. I am terribly happy for friends of mine who will be able to get married for the first time in their lives. I’ve always thought of marriage equality as a civil rights issue. I’m not entirely sure how this will destroy my heterosexual marriage, but I have other friends who are pretty convinced that this will be the result. In any case, that made me happy.
On a completely different front, nine Christians were murdered in their own church as they studied the Bible and were seeking to grow closer to God. They were killed because they were African Americans. Since then, seven African American churches have been burned to the ground. This is unimaginable at every level. I am reluctant to celebrate “love wins” in the face of this kind of racial hatred and killing. Which brings me back to the story above.
As a child of the South and son of Mississippi, it has been disheartening to see all the media attention the Confederate Battle Flag has received, and the lack of political will on the part of elected officials — and even worse, the outright insistence that this flag somehow represents something noble. Mississippi remains the only state in the country that continues to have this symbol as part of its state flag. The insistence by some to keep it as sacred heritage, however, is not surprising. It plays into the psychological identity crisis from which so many white Southerners suffer — whether we know it or not. The Confederate Battle Flag represents for many of these white Southerners the last vestige of any pride whatsoever, and they feel like they are finally losing that, too. Losers yet again! The more they are pushed, the more they are called bigots, the more they push back — but why do they push back? Why do they take so much pride in a symbol so synonymous with hatred and violence? For the rest of the country, it looks despicable.
Growing up in Mississippi, I never heard anyone on television that sounded like me. Even the local anchors on the local news stations cleaned up their accents. Later, in some televised programs, Southerners we given subtitles as if they were unintelligible to the rest of the country. In my first year at seminary in Connecticut, we had the prestigious Peter Gomes come and deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures — probably the most distinguished preaching lectures in the world. During one of his lectures, he took on the persona of a straw character to show how dumb his antagonists were. When he did it, he used a thick Southern accent. Dumb and stupid equated Southerner.
Years later, I was at a contemporary rendition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the shepherds all had Southern accents. After the play, the director took questions from the crowd, so I asked him why he gave them Southern accents — I asked him with the thickest Mississippi accent I could muster. The crowd gasped a little. I don’t think he was expecting to have a Mississippian in the audience at Shakespeare on the Sound in Rowayton, Conn. He apologetically said that he wanted them to sound “rural” since they were shepherds. I’ve never met a shepherd from the South. Again, dumb equals Southern. Losers again.
A “Bubba” from the South is an easy thing to disparage, and even easier to make a scapegoat. If “good” white people can project all their racism, sexism, homophobia and bigotry onto this stereotypical figure from the South, then they can feel good about themselves and distance themselves from “those” racists. It’s comforting to have such a point of comparison; it’s comforting to have such a scapegoat. We are not them, are we! Are we?
I am no proponent of the Confederate Battle Flag! I wish Mississippi would change its flag. I wish so many of us white Southerners weren’t so defensive and self-debasing. And don’t hear me claiming some “persecuted” or “oppressed” status for white Southerners — God forbid! But so many of us actually have, whether we are aware of it or not, a loser pathology. I think this is the main reason behind so many white Southerner’s insistence on the “heritage” of the Confederate Battle Flag. Of course, heritage is mostly nothing more than not-so-subtly shrouded racism.
I’m saying all this because I believe flags will come down when walls do. The United States is still so segregated it is embarrassing. Blacks/whites, rich/poor, North/South, educated/uneducated — the list goes on. Relationships change lives and we cannot be in relationship with others when we systematically isolate ourselves. It’s easy to look at Rebel Flag waving folks in disbelief, but that self-righteousness doesn’t change anything — relationships do. It is in relationships where we can talk about our differences and talk through our differences. It is in relationships where we can begin to affirm the humanity in the other and accept it as a gift from God.
If we don’t, we are all the biggest losers.