Media and academic elites prefer to focus on the old South while a new one marches on.
By Lee Habeeb
Over the years, my African-American
friends have shared with me stories of the senseless traffic stops
they’ve endured for nothing more than driving while black. There’s an
acronym for it: DWB. They admit it happens less than it used to, but
it’s wrong, it’s bad, and Americans should not face a presumption of
guilt for being who they are.
Which is why Paula Deen and the recent U.S. Supreme Court case
involving the Voting Rights Act make for an interesting counterpoint.
Both stories involve what’s perhaps the last socially acceptable form of
bigotry left in America: bigotry against the South. It’s a brand of
bigotry reinforced by our nation’s biggest media outlets — and by
justices on the Supreme Court.
Let’s start with Paula Deen, who admitted to having used the “n” word —
30 years ago.
If it had been, let’s say, Alec Baldwin instead, the media would have
quickly given him a pass, because, after all, he’s one of them. Alec is a
media guy. He’s smart and talented and thinks what they think about
life. He’s also a northerner. He was born on Long Island! And my God,
there’s no racism there.
Racism is a disease people catch when they cross the Mason-Dixon line.
Paula is from Georgia, and from that one slip, which she admitted and
for which she apologized, was imputed all kinds of guilt. She was
guilty of being born Southern, plain and simple. And the punishment
she’s facing is so disproportionate to her three-decade-old lapse that
it cries for someone in the media to defend her. No one has. No one
will.
The Food Network will soon learn that their knee-jerk decision to
fire her without any proof of discrimination, any proof of a racist past
or present, will backfire. And fans who know she was fired, and canned
by sponsors, for being born in the South, and for being proud of it —
they’ll be waiting for her return, and will reward the network that
hires her.
That brings me to the ruling in
Shelby County v. Holder.
What the Supreme Court essentially told the nation in that case was
this: The states in the South used to do some really bad things a long
time ago when it comes to elections, but they don’t anymore, so we are
taking them out of the penalty box and treating them like any other
state. As Justice Roberts said succinctly for the majority, “History did
not end in 1965.”
It turns out that the decision by the court last week came less than a
year after an African American was reelected president for a second
term, an election in which African-American turnout in the southern
states was well above the national average. Moreover, African Americans
in the southern states registered at higher rates than did white people
in those same states.
Mississippi, my home state and once the worst of the Jim Crow
offenders, had the highest rate of African-American turnout in the
nation. And Mississippi has more elected black officials than any other
state. Not just more per capita — more, period.
Judging from the hysterical reports in the media, and from the
headlines of the lead editorials in America’s biggest newspapers,
someone could have easily concluded that the court had overturned the
entire Voting Rights Act, not just one provision — and that it was now
open season for white racists in the South to bring back poll taxes and
literacy tests and to make a push to return not to the 1950s but to the
1850s, to slavery itself.
“An Assault on the Voting Rights Act,” shouted the headline of the
New York Times editorial.
“A setback for voting rights,” declared the
Los Angeles Times.
Where did the media elite’s sense of outrage come from? It’s simple,
actually. To admit that the South had changed would mean letting go of
their own cultural and moral superiority, of their sense of regional
superiority with respect to the issue of race. Media and academic elites
believe that, but for proper adult supervision, the South will return
to its racist roots and that they alone can protect helpless black
southerners from the perfidy rooted in white southerners’ DNA.
In his questioning from the bench back in February, as George Will
pointed out, Justice Breyer revealed not only his distrust of
southerners, but his disdain: “Imagine a State has a plant disease, and
in 1965 you can recognize the presence of that disease. . . . Now, it’s
evolved. . . . But we know one thing: The disease is still there.”
Breyer’s disease metaphor was not only crude and condescending, it was
rank regional bigotry — and from a sitting Supreme Court justice, no
less.
That the southern states had now surpassed many northern states on
the issue of electoral fairness did not matter to Breyer. That’s the
thing about progressives: They don’t really care for progress, or facts.
And here’s a fact that Justice Breyer didn’t care about: Massachusetts,
as Chief Justice Roberts noted, now has “the worst ratio of white-voter
turnout to African-American turnout.” Can it possibly be that
northerners are more racist than Southerners?
Does Breyer not remember the Boston busing riots in the 1960’s? Or
Newark’s? Some of the Irish and Italian racism in northern cities was
especially ugly. But from Breyer’s lofty perch, only the South is still
susceptible to this virulent “disease” called racism, so much so that it
still needs a great big regional timeout.
Perhaps someone should send Justice Breyer a link to Joel Kotkin’s
piece in
The Daily Beast
on the rise of the South, which included facts media elites either
refuse to believe or willfully ignore. Over the past five decades, he
reported, the South has seen dramatic gains in population. It was once a
major exporter of people to the northern states. Today, Kotkin noted,
the migration tide is flowing the other way. “The
hegira to the
sunbelt continues, as last year the South accounted for six of the top
eight states attracting domestic migrants,” he reported.
Those six states, Justice Breyer might want to know, were red states:
Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia.
The top four losers? Blue states named New York, Illinois, New Jersey,
and California.
And it wasn’t just white folks heading South. The nation’s
African-American population grew 1.7 million over the past decade — and
75 percent of that growth occurred in the South. The percentage of the
nation’s African-American population living in the South hit its highest
point in half a century, as more black people moved out of declining
cities in the Midwest and Northeast.
If the South is such a racially backward place, Justice Breyer, why are so many African Americans moving here?
In response to the latest census figures showing that Texas was home
to eight — eight! — of the 15 fastest-growing cities in America, did
media types commission some reporting on the subject? No. What you
instead got was snide commentary like this from
Gawker: “What
is it that makes Texas so attractive? Is it the prisons? The racism? The
deadly weather? The deadly animals? The deadly crime? The deadly
political leadership?”
It would be funny if it wasn’t so willfully ignorant — and so
emblematic of how liberal thought leaders think about the South. They
refuse to acknowledge that the region has changed, let alone that it has
become an economic powerhouse. Alabama and Kentucky are two of the top
auto-manufacturing states in the country. The Gulf Coast corridor
between Louisiana and Florida is now the fourth-largest aerospace hub in
the world. Boeing’s Dreamliner is being assembled in South Carolina.
It’s quite a story. Black and white Americans are moving in record
numbers to a part of the country that liberal elites think of as
backward, where taxes are low, unions are irrelevant, and the locals
cling to their guns and their faith.
And yet Americans heard almost nothing about this great migration. We
know why. The ideological prejudices of our media and academic elites
won’t permit them to admit the obvious. They’d prefer to focus, as
Breyer did, on the old South because they are more comfortable with that
narrative and more invested in it, while a new one marches on right
under their upturned noses.
In the downtown of my hometown of Oxford, Miss., sits a statue of our
local hero, William Faulkner. “The past is never dead,” he once opined.
“In fact, it’s not even past.”
The line has some truth. But if I had told Faulkner in his time that
Mississippi would soon have more African-American elected officials than
any other state in the nation, he would have laughed me off.
If I had told him that a Japanese auto company would be making
American cars in Tupelo and employing thousands of locals, he would have
thought I was crazy. And yet there a new Toyota plant sits, near the
birthplace of Elvis, less than an hour’s drive from Faulkner’s home.
The fact is, white Yankees migrants like me (I moved from Jersey),
and African-American migrants from Chicago, and businesses from all over
America — and the world — are investing in the South, and investing
with our most precious capital: our lives. We are moving South because
we see something here that academics, media types, and our most
progressive Supreme Court justices can’t.
The future.
