Photography by William Bear Braswell

                                                    Personal Reflections and Experiences in the South

                                                           By Katherine Aberle 

                                                                   Fall 2017

        

The most striking feature of the South is its contradictions.  Our most celebrated alum, William Faulkner, once (allegedly) said, “to understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”  Although I had never heard that quotation before moving to the South, it largely sums up the major reason why I chose Ole Miss and why I chose to be a Southern Studies major.  I often tell people that what I have learned most over the course of my ongoing undergraduate education has been the remarkable complexities of the human race.  I am a mixed-race progressive from the Northeast who, at the age of nineteen, decided to move to “infamous” Mississippi at an institution that I felt I could be passionate about in the hopes of acquiring a better understanding of the world.  Mississippi was regarded as “infamous” among my northern friends, but I was fascinated with the South before I stepped foot in it and I wanted to experience it for myself.  My beliefs and knowledge of the South have shifted and evolved greatly over the four years I have spent in Oxford, particularly those involving racial relations in the South and how they may or may not compare with racial relations in the country as a whole. 

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My first introduction to the South was in my New Hampshire elementary school, when we were taught about the bravery of such individuals as Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Without the words being said, there seemed to be a clear though silent understanding in the classroom that our region, “the North,” held the moral high ground historically.  It was our region that offered freedom to Southern slaves as the final destination on the Underground Railroad.  It was unspoken, but insinuated that while black Southerners were forced to boycott buses and march for civil rights, the North was already a “post-racial society.”  There was no “Jim Crow” up North.  It wasn’t until later that I learned that the history of the South is the history of the United States in an exaggerated form.

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To many outsiders, the American South is one of the dark places of the earth.  Preserving and expanding slavery, seceding in order to protect the institution of slavery, causing and ultimately losing the bloodiest war in US history, and then celebrating the decision to do all of the above, are all unsettling aspects of Southern history and are a source of anger for many living both inside and outside the borders of Dixie.  To many insiders, though, the South is not a place of darkness, but lightness and warmth.  The region’s “otherness” continues to be embraced generations after Southern secession and the end of slavery in America.  Those that fought for a separate Southern nation were declared revolutionaries, not losers.   We are the Ole Miss Rebels, after all.  To many outsiders, the fact that the Deep South is statistically the fattest, poorest, dumbest, blackest, and hottest region of the United States is reason enough to ostracize the region and never set foot inside its boundaries.  Insiders claim this is the friendliest part of the country, with Mississippi claiming as its nickname, “the hospitality state.”  Northerners, many Southerners will discreetly claim, are cold and unpleasant.

 

I am an outsider that loves the South.  I love Oxford, Mississippi.  I love the University of Mississippi, which lies in the heart of Oxford, and because I love Oxford, I too love Mississippi.  I love the place that is responsible for producing talents like Robert Johnson and B.B. King, whose blues inspired every great rock and roll group in history.  Some of the most brilliant minds in history have belonged to Southerners, including Thomas Jefferson and William Faulkner.  The Greco-Roman-Revival architecture found in Antebellum homes and on buildings on college campuses throughout the South are some of the nicest architecture in the country, and reflects the refinement and gentility the South is so often proud of.  Poverty, however, also plagues the region.  Admittedly, the vast majority of my time in the South has been spent in Oxford, which has largely shielded me from so much of Southern culture.  However, going just a few steps beyond the Square and beyond the Ole Miss campus, Oxford itself is not without the severe poverty that affects the rest of the state.  That poverty is disproportionately borne by Oxford’s black population.   The poverty is here; it is just better hidden in our town. 

 

The contradictions abound in many other ways as well.  We celebrate the courage of Mississippi heroes like James Meredith, Medgar Evers, and Ida Wells.  The irony, of course, is that such courage was only necessary because of the viciousness of racism in the South.  My friends from home would ask me, “how’s Mississippi?  How’s the racism?” I would always reply that I hadn’t seen or heard anything really racist.  My freshman year at the University of Mississippi, however, I was confronted with my first major racial incident almost as soon as the semester began when some of my peers decided to put a noose and an old Georgia Confederate flag on the James Meredith statue in the middle of the night.  James Meredith was the first black man to integrate the university in 1962, and the statue is meant to commemorate his struggle, his determination and bravery, and how far the university has come since its days of fanatical segregation and racial discrimination.  The decision to put a noose around his neck and hang a confederate flag on his image was clearly meant to intimidate the black population in this town.  It is an act of white supremacy.  Prior to that incident, much of the rhetoric on campus proclaimed that this was a progressive institution, and that we were pretty much beyond racism, that part of our past was past.

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In reality, I have heard plenty of racist rhetoric from other Ole Miss students and other Southerners in my years here.  I have seen a white sorority girl scream “Nigger!” at a black man who allegedly touched her on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  I have heard multiple students describe the difference between “Niggers” and other black people, while asserting that they themselves were not, in fact, racist.  I have heard many women express their fears of seeing a white girl with a black male in public when integrated groups were in public.  I have heard many other racist remarks about “Mexicans” and Indians.  I have read thousands of racially insensitive posts on the anonymous social media outlet Yik Yak, a discourse which is as offensive and demoralizing as anything could possibly be. 

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But these are not specifically Southern in character.  Is the South more racist than any other region of the country?  I still don’t know.  Yik Yak posts are racist all over the country. Black students are targeted pretty much every year in my town of Exeter, New Hampshire, oftentimes by young, white males yelling racial epithets from their moving vehicles (a typical occurrence in the South).  I have never thought this country as a whole had moved past its racist history into a post-racial society as so many wanted us to believe after the election of our first black president and prior to the rise of Trump and his numerous supporters.  After our last election, I think most would agree we are hardly a post-racial society.

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My own racial identity has been tested while living in the black and white South.  I am half-Nicaraguan, half-white.  I have black hair and tan skin and as a result I am often asked if I am Mexican (if they don’t just assume that I am). I consider myself Latina, but not comfortably.  Am I white?  Some of my friends have been quick to tell me that I am.  They have told me I look white, so I’m white and because I look white, I embody white privilege.  But more often than not, I am asked “what are you?” or “where are you from?  You have such a beautiful skin tone.”  I believe I do benefit, in many ways, from light-skinned privilege, although maybe not as much as an even fairer-skinned, blonde individual might.  However, I am proud of my Nicaraguan heritage and choose to identify as such.  It is not out of the ordinary to be the only apparent Latino in a given class or in any given room.  The typical Latino experience in Mississippi does not resemble my own.

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The fact that I am not truly a Southerner, however–despite being a Southern Studies major at arguably the most Southern university in the nation–is a fact that shapes my education at this Southern school, as well as my perceptions of the South and my overall experience living in the South.  Even my inclination to fight and protest against injustice has been consciously impaired because of my status as an outsider.  I oftentimes feel that my opinions, as someone who is not a born and bred Southerner, are easily dismissed because of that status as an “outsider” and worse, a northerner.  Even the largest student movement we’ve had on campus in my years here, the decision to fight to take down the state flag which has the Confederate emblem, is an inherently Southern one.  So many times, I heard those who wanted to protect the Confederate symbol ask, “Are the people that call the flag racist or want it down EVEN FROM MISSISSIPPI?”  The hospitality state does not like feeling threatened.  You are not, in fact, welcome to have an opinion about the South if you are not a true Southerner, according to some whom I have met.  While I am someone who does not deny the racism behind the symbol and agrees that the flag should be in a museum, and not flying on the grounds of our public institutions nor should it be our official state flag, I do not believe we can erase history, and I understand the power of that history.

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Does the Confederate symbol oppress black students here?  Does having a class in a building named after a white supremacist somehow affect the value of the education of the student taking that class?  I don’t know.  As someone who identifies as neither white nor black, I honestly have no strong convictions about changing the names of buildings or streets or mascots.  The “Old South” is everywhere on this campus.  I love the nickname “Ole Miss” and I love being an “Ole Miss Rebel.”

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I love the South dearly, and I believe I always will, but the more time I spend here, the more I sympathize with Southerners who felt so compelled to leave and never come back.  I understand the ambiguities inherent in loving the region without wanting to embrace the darker elements of its past.  I also know how that past also inspired the region’s finest qualities as well.  The tragedy of the South is that so much of what we love is embedded in what we abhor.  Jefferson’s genius was unlikely without his wealth in slaves.  The stunning lyricism of blues would not have been possible without the tragic suffering of those who developed the art form.  The beauty of so much Southern culture, its elegance and beauty, its soulfulness and richness, was born and borne on the backs of slaves and poor whites who were constantly exploited and humiliated.  Now at the end of my senior year as a Southern studies student, my relationship with the South has in fact become more complex, more enriched, more strained, more fragile.