What does it mean to be a Southerner? OK, first of all this is painful for me and isn’t going to be one of my best efforts because I hate the topic of identity, but I promised to discuss it in my post about Senator Obama’s race speech. Second, this is completely subjective. Third, structure-wise I’m going to use this post to describe what I think a Southerner is and then in get into how this might relate to race in America circa the Senator’s speech. Alright, here goes:

Southern Identity

I’m old school so I want to immediately cut out the people who claim to be true Southerners but are really just products of the New South. These New South people, as I see it, are typically preps who dress like 5 year olds who were dressed by their mothers and this fashion trend persists until they are old men. The Duck Head shorts with collared shirt tucked in and loafers. These people are typically products of a privileged white collar family who end up working white collar jobs like their parents but for more money (i.e. they become lawyers). That’s the New South, a sort of scaled back version of the upscale, disconnected, money seeking, elitist persona I would associate with Northerners. Have I pissed anyone off yet? Well hang with me as I make my point and then feel free to tell me what a douche I am in the comments.

Now that I’ve established what I think the Southern identity isn’t let me say what I think it is. I think Southern identity could best be summed up as an identity set in a proud struggle that is futile, but nevertheless refuses to change on the basis of principle, for better or worse.

To elaborate on my view of Southern identity I’d point out that it makes sense historically. From the beginning, the South was an agrarian society, constantly struggling to wrest a living out from the ground. This dependence on farming, which I believe was entrenched by the North’s colonizing of the South (we’ll save this for another time), meant that slavery and race would have to be struggled with since it was invariably tied to the agrarian lifestyle. As slaves outnumbered whites and as the North moved to rid the country of slavery, the South, knowing it was grossly overmatched struggled on to defend their way of life. I’m not saying that was a good thing; just that it represents a futile struggle and an instance where they refused to change despite the fact that changing might have saved them from their demise. Once modernization was attempted in the South the wealthy monopolists of the North stood in their way (for example, steel from Alabama was taxed higher than steel from Pennsylvania to preserve the interests of the wealthy Northern steel magnates). Thus, attempts to modernize in a distinctly Southern way were doomed to fail. And now in present day, the South has the worst schools and the lowest per capita income, and yet we still struggle on knowing that not once in our history have we been allowed to succeed. And what separates the New South from the Real South is that if the opportunity to succeed is presented to a Real Southerner; he/she will not take it if it necessitates the compromising of their principles whereas someone of the New South ilk will. There is a sense of pride in the struggle that success would negate. Thus, as I see it, Southern identity is defined by a proud struggle that is ultimately futile, but resistant to change on the basis of principle, for better or worse.

How this Relates to Identity and Race in America

Let me begin restating that I hate this topic of identity. I hate that my Master’s dissertation had a huge chunk of it devoted to Charles Taylor’s book Multiculturalism and Franz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. I was reminded of my dislike for ‘identity issues’ the other month when my special lady friend asked me to go to a talk on the subject of race in South Africa. That discussion pretty much broke down to the question: can a black person be racist? I thought to myself, ‘yes, of course.’ Thankfully I didn’t verbalize this thought because just about everyone else in the room thought otherwise. The general consensus was that black people cannot be racist, only white people can. That was so unanimously agreed upon by the bulk of the audience and panel that the only remaining issue was whether or not Jews counted as white people, because the speaker, a Jewish woman, thought that Jews, like black people were incapable of racism.

This has nothing to do with what it means to be a Southerner, but I bring it up to make the point that postmodernism/postcolonialism/poststructuralism/post-etc’s obsession with identity and the privileged position of minority groups is stupid. That gets me to Kwame Appiah.

Kwame Appiah’s dad is from Ghana, (I think his mom is an African America), he is black, and gay. He’s got a lot of minority groups covered. And as a philosopher studying identity his basic point is that group identity is important to an individual in the sense that he wouldn’t be the same person if he didn’t define part of himself as ‘gay’ or ‘black’; but those group identities do not define the individual in a deterministic way. Rather, the individuals inside the group define the group. Appiah points out that group identities too strongly defined squash individual identity and create consternation within the society they exist when they refuse adapt to other group identities and other individuals within a common society.

Think about Canada; Charles Taylor’s home. Taylor is sort of the father of multiculturalism, which just means letting everyone minority group fully express their uniqueness within the larger society. Nice idea, but Taylor’s own home country, and he admits this, presents multiculturalists with a problem. The French Canadians, who are free to celebrate their unique cultural what-have-you with in Canadian society, want to leave Canada. And there in lies the problem, if you get too focused on parochial group identity, you can’t coexist with anyone not in your own group.

In short, if you spend all day thinking about what it means to be black, white, gay, Christian, whatever, you’re not only wasting your time but you also end up impeding social adhesion and therein progress.

So how does this relate to Southern identity? Well remember when I dissed all the people who wear collared shirts and whatnot, they can still fit into how I ultimately defined Southern identity. In fact, I have qualities of both the Southern identity that I advocate and prefer as well as qualities consistent with my negative description of the New South (not in terms of fashion sense, but other ones). One’s idea of identity is not only subjective, but exists as a sort of Platonic form that even the person coming up with the idea can’t really achieve. So to define yourself totally and wholly within such a notion of identity pigeon holes you to the point that your interaction with people subscribing to a different identity can’t speak to you. If you define a group identity too broadly, it cedes its uniqueness. Conversely, if you define it too narrowly, it is so unique that is jibes with the rest of society. This is why postcolonial writers embrace the idea that ‘the subaltern’ can’t speak, which just means that people from one group can’t understand people from another group. Well that may be true to a degree, but if you embrace that unique identity too much there can’t be any cohesion. In my opinion, this is huge roadblock in South Africa because so much attention is paid to identity and protecting that ethereal idea that physically, on the ground, things are much harder to achieve.

The bottom line is that I am never going understand what it is like to be Senator Obama because I am not the same race, not from the same place, didn’t have the same upbringing, nor the same education, and so on and so forth. And while I think each of us should embrace own uniqueness, I wouldn’t advise that we embrace it to the extent that dialogue between us becomes impossible. Hence, I would say that race in America needs to be approached with the understanding that while it is an important part of a person and a part that can’t be fully comprehended by someone of a different race, it must not become an aspect of identity that negates dialogue or racial cohesion.

To me, the beauty of Senator Obama’s race speech is that he simply asked for greater dialogue concerning race and identity in America; and it is that very dialogue that will allow us to recognize the uniqueness of other racial or minority groups while engaging with one another, thereby ensuring that our group identities don’t hamper social cohesion and progress toward an America unified through the embracement of difference.