Dick, why do you think there aren't more black swimmers, suppose it could have been the chains?

http://www.emorywheel.com/detail.php?n=24448

Might I suggest that perhaps Wilson and his ilk should have only the Confederate Flag 'waving' at/in their offices and draped over their coffins!

I have yet to encounter a racist who doesn't extend their destructive idiocy to embrace chauvinism, condemn gays and even 'foriegners'.

I have realized that I too am prejudiced - Yes, full confession - I am extremely prejudiced against any and all ignorant bigots! (And all bigotry is mired in ignorance.) Now, I just gotta find a t-shirt and bumper sticker!

Well this is interesting, DD. I have tried to post a comment on this three times and it has not gone through. One of the SC publications I mentioned was Garden and Gun magazine...
Do you suppose that the "gun" word triggers some sort of hold while the content is analyzed by the manangment?

Not to worry, DD. Liberal southerners (not an oxymoron) concur with what you are saying, although we may be driven to point out the exceptions we can find, as well as pointing out the sources that demonstrate exactly what you are saying. All's fair when true.

Very good, Mr. Day.

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp#s=SC.

Perhaps one of your best DD. Thank you!

I think from now on it should be decreed that the generic term "southern" or "southerners" or "southern heritage" should be banned without the prefix of "white" coming before it lest there be some mistake that the term is somehow nonexclusive. It has always pissed me off that the unspoken meaning when refering to all things southern including the regional designation of "the south" in common parlance has almost always, even to this day, excluded a vast portion of southerners who are not white. The tentacles of slavery and white supremacy are long and hard to finally kill. We will certainly prevail over the perverse offshoots of those tentacles but the battle is not yet won. Until it is, I think making sure we say "the white south", etc... will help us remember just exactly what we're talking about.

Lincoln made a mistake. Should have let them go. They do not share in the basis under which this nation was established.

Such kind words on a Sunday Morn. Thank you.

We will certainly prevail over the perverse offshoots of those tentacles but the battle is not yet won. Until it is, I think making sure we say "the white south", etc... will help us remember just exactly what we're talking about.

Maybe even the Old White South. I do know this. This is a very pretty line Oleeb. Perverse offshoots of thos tentacles. Marvelous.

The post-WWII Germany analogy is apt. There were, and are still, Nazi sympathizers in Germany. But as a country, Germany has become a far more just and liberal place than the United States in some ways.

Not that the South has - sadly, far from it.

But I'm sick of people saying "oh, but I don't hate the Southern LIBERALS - just the South itself." In what culture do you think the Southern liberals whom you claim you respect grew up? They're part of southern culture too, and when you make the jump from hating the haters to tarring all Southerners with that same hate-slathered brush, you cripple your own cause.

And oleeb: I'd like to see racists who are white southerners have their feet held to the fire and forced to admit they're denying their own mulatto culture.

I'd like to see the term "Southern" (with no color coding) applied to everyone who's come from the region and who's contributed culturally. Southern cultures owe too great a debt to their African-American (and Hispanic, and - this is where i betray my own roots - French and Creole) members.

I should not post this comment in that I don't have time today to participate in the fray that will almost certainly ensue from the comment I am about to make. Nonetheless, I ask all of you to think about what I have to say, carefully, to see if you, too, might come to the conclusion that there is some validity to it.

Yes, I agree -- how could I not? -- that the old south mentality arrogantly voiced by a particular subset of white men through multiple generations shows every sign, at the moment, of continuing to manifest itself in gross rationalization of offensive thought as well as aberrant, abusive and markedly adolescent behavior.

This mentality is inexcusable -- it has endangered blacks of both genders from the advent of slavery to the present, as it has poisoned the attitudes of women and children of both races who soak up the hate and, in allegiance to their husbands, brothers, friends and fathers, perpetuate it until it is their own.

Yes, it would be a good thing, then, just as a start, for the CVA to disband and for the Confederate flag to be, once and for all, permanently retired (as Robert E. Lee recommended immediately after the Civil War ended). The proper place for it is an ill-lit corner of a museum dedicated either to thankfully lost causes, or at least to unnecessary mayhem.

But, after those important symbolic gestures have been made, it would also be a good thing if people, everywhere, understood that the current crop of vocal asshats in the south make it far too easy to label them as "the problem" -- when that designation conveniently ignores the same fundamental attitudes held and demonstrated -- as Flower pointed out -- by, say, all the white supremacist groups located on the SPLC map throughout the country as well as by the armed militia groups located in the West and Southwest...whose poster boys might be, say, W. and Dick Cheney, neither of whom is southern, both of whom were Ivy-educated in the northeast (well, educated at least in the sense that they both attended Yale; but whether they learned anything there is debatable.)
So when y'all -- and I do emphasize y'all -- start pointing fingers at the South, as if it is the only region of the country where willful ignorance and malice is extant, I start out trying to see things from your perspective, in which there is, in fact, more than a grain truth .... but I end up, after reading serial diatribes on the subject, thinking that it is not regional adjustment that will quench this fiery rhetoric, but instead -- take a breath -- a little soothing gender adjustment because the testosterone level is way too high..... which is the good 'ole boy problem to begin with, idn't?
Or is it? Maybe the problem is not a surfeit of testosterone, but just mebbe, not enough. Because underneath the rhetoric of the white southern male, and underneath the rhetoric of the male from elsewhere, lurks a fundamental fear of "losing" -- whether a war, an election, or an argument -- that men, of all ages of all persuasions -- seem to conflate with concepts and degrees of "manliness."
I'm referring, forgive me, to the small dick fear syndrome, personified, imo, by Dick Cheney and W. and echoed by southern white males, militiamen from the west and southwest and men everywhere, in every country, in every culture who must apparently dominate and "win" to feel manly.
Give it a rest, my valued male friends, please? We love you, just as you are. We do not measure your value in inches; we measure it in merit. So I don't want to write the blog that examines the sad Freudian projection of penis envy onto women (Really? You actually think we want one of those of our own, to deal with every day, instead of just warmly welcoming a beloved visitor?) I don't want to write the blog that examines other male projections; for example, the one in which we might discuss which gender is actually motivated by physicality versus thought process, or which gender has actually accrued power by wearing skirts ( how do you spell clergy?)
But I won't write those blogs. Because if I did, I would guilty of the same emotional over-reaction, the same need to blame "the other" for my own transgressions and mistakes that I see in this wholesale vilification of the south.
How, my dear friends, is a wholesale vilification of the south different than the Republican vilification of the Democratic party, or their vilification of all Muslims throughout the world.
Temperance, please, before I both lose and loose my temper.
Tendered, if not tempered, with love.

I'm glad you mentioned Boaz. When Carlton Putnam wrote his letters dismissing Boaz's theories and were published in every publication in the south after the Supreme Court decision was made to segregate schools, the Charleston Newspaper Editor made it his calling to spread Putnam's message of bigotry to the North by taking out advertisements in Northern papers.

Putnam's theories of white racial superiority became the new "gospel" of the south and so much of this thinking still prevails. Currently Jared Taylor has taken up the cause and made the comment after Katrina that when blacks are left to their own devices, any type of civilization is abandoned. I am always flabbergasted that this type of thinking still exists. I would be willing to bet a month's pay that Wilson is a huge fan of Putnam and Taylor.