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To the sweet sunny south, take me home...Oh, why was I tempted to roam?
I'm watching a movie on TV right now--I think it came out in '84. It's a TV miniseries about the Kennedy administration--Martin Sheen is JFK, some guy who played the prosecutor in the Farrah Fawcett TV movie about Diane Downs, "Small Sacrifices," plays RFK and Blair Brown is Jackie. What I like about this movie is what I liked about the movie The American President--they both show the sausage-making process of legislation and the executive position. How deals get made, how power is utilized, how an executive has to balance political concerns with what's right and must be done. The movie devotes a lot of time to the civil rights movement. They showed the Freedom Riders trying to get a bus out of some city in the South (Birmingham?)--Greyhound doesn't want to do it, and RFK literally has to order the Greyhound manager to drive them out. Grudgingly, Greyhound drives them to Montgomery where a bunch of whites, mostly male but some well-dressed females, are waiting, and just...savage them.
It's really hard to watch stuff like this. I love my background--I love that my grandfather was from Buhminhayem and my great-grandfather from Jackson, Miss'ssippi, and I have Hix relatives all over 'Tlanta, and Bartons in Magnolia, La., and Bartlett relatives in Nawlins. I love the food, the music, the accents, the land. I am proud to call myself a Southerner. But this...savagery...is part and parcel of that heritage. It's just awful to watch. I hate it that those people share anything with me. I know my grandfather was pretty evolved for his time--my mother tells a story about how when he was in the Army during WWII, he socialized with black Southerners because they were fellow countrymen to him. He got shit for it, but he'd rather hang out with another Southerner of whatever color than a Yankee. He was a hardcore Southerner but to him it was about regional pride and love of the homeland, not race. Growing up with that story, maybe that's why I can feel that love of the South doesn't have to equate to racism, or even love of the Confederacy. Grandpa John of course was also an actor, which can induce evolution, if that makes sense. Because Grandpa John didn't grow up in a particularly evolved atmosphere--he lived on a plantation, he had a Mammy, and as ashamed as I am to say it, my great-grandfather was in the Klan. I know that Grandpa John was born very late in my great-grandfather's life--my mother never really knew her grandfather because of that. Also I think there was some family rift--certainly Grandpa John didn't get any of that family money. *shrug*
I don't know. I don't know how much this stuff touches me. I don't believe in the concept of the sins of the father are visited upon the child, and a shared racial stain and stuff like that. But watching this, and watching the thing on Emmett Till on the History Channel a couple of weeks ago--I was just horrified, and very, very upset. I physically want to push those people away from me--because in some spiritual way, we are kin. We are white Southerners. I felt shame watching this stuff. I want to say, I am a Southerner, and I am nothing like you. That's not my heritage. That's not what I mean when I talk about the South. How can you do that? How can you treat other human beings that way? Especially Emmett Till--he was a baby, he was a child, 14 years old. That's a human being--he's your brother, we are all brothers and sisters under God.
It's really hard to watch stuff like this. I love my background--I love that my grandfather was from Buhminhayem and my great-grandfather from Jackson, Miss'ssippi, and I have Hix relatives all over 'Tlanta, and Bartons in Magnolia, La., and Bartlett relatives in Nawlins. I love the food, the music, the accents, the land. I am proud to call myself a Southerner. But this...savagery...is part and parcel of that heritage. It's just awful to watch. I hate it that those people share anything with me. I know my grandfather was pretty evolved for his time--my mother tells a story about how when he was in the Army during WWII, he socialized with black Southerners because they were fellow countrymen to him. He got shit for it, but he'd rather hang out with another Southerner of whatever color than a Yankee. He was a hardcore Southerner but to him it was about regional pride and love of the homeland, not race. Growing up with that story, maybe that's why I can feel that love of the South doesn't have to equate to racism, or even love of the Confederacy. Grandpa John of course was also an actor, which can induce evolution, if that makes sense. Because Grandpa John didn't grow up in a particularly evolved atmosphere--he lived on a plantation, he had a Mammy, and as ashamed as I am to say it, my great-grandfather was in the Klan. I know that Grandpa John was born very late in my great-grandfather's life--my mother never really knew her grandfather because of that. Also I think there was some family rift--certainly Grandpa John didn't get any of that family money. *shrug*
I don't know. I don't know how much this stuff touches me. I don't believe in the concept of the sins of the father are visited upon the child, and a shared racial stain and stuff like that. But watching this, and watching the thing on Emmett Till on the History Channel a couple of weeks ago--I was just horrified, and very, very upset. I physically want to push those people away from me--because in some spiritual way, we are kin. We are white Southerners. I felt shame watching this stuff. I want to say, I am a Southerner, and I am nothing like you. That's not my heritage. That's not what I mean when I talk about the South. How can you do that? How can you treat other human beings that way? Especially Emmett Till--he was a baby, he was a child, 14 years old. That's a human being--he's your brother, we are all brothers and sisters under God.