Everyone in ol' DIxie hears a familiar tune

[misanthrope]

It rings of minstrelsy, night riders and a big bird with black feathers. It also wastes the potential of things learned over the last half-century.

https://kevinblee.substack.com/p/crestfallen-to-be-newborn-again

In my youth, Lost Cause mythology and fever dreams of the valiant Confederacy were everywhere. Cars sported plates with illustrations of grizzled Confederate veterans and the slogan, “Fergit? Hell No!” Hoop-skirted high school girls acted as “ambassadors” for an antebellum home not far from our house.

SNIP

I once stirred trouble when I responded to a great-grandmother’s gripe that “coloreds don’t dance good like they used to” by saying “they want to be called Black people now.” She chased me around a bush with a belt trying to whip me.

Another time my Southern Baptist family elders sat around a table and discussed whether Black people had souls. One grandfather used the n-word with regularity. The other grandfather told me Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was “a Communist.”