-Caveat Lector-
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 21:50:43 EDT
Subject: The Kids in the Back of the Room /From the Brattleboro Reformer
From the Brattleboro (VT) Reformer, 9/17/99
(I thought of calling this "Fools Rush In...." :-)
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THE KIDS IN THE BACK OF THE ROOM
by Marty Jezer
Two weeks after the school board meeting dealing with the
issue of the Confederate flag, the kids who spoke up in behalf of
the flag remain in my thoughts.
A group of students, members of AWARE, were sitting towards
the front of the Learning Center that night. They had issued a
very intelligent statement that looked beyond the distraction of
banning the flag towards the more substantial goal of getting the
educational community to take concrete steps against racism. They
had worked hard to get a diverse group of students to endorse
their position -- the captains of the football and the girls' and
boys' soccer teams, the presidents of the Chorus, National Honor
Society, and the Student Council, even a young Republican. They
did themselves proud.
In the back of the room was a smaller group -- five or six
in number -- that had come to defend the symbol of the flag. "The
kids in the back of the room" is, I recall, how they referred to
themselves and how others described them. In many other school
districts, they would have represented the majority sentiment
(and kids like the AWARE kids would have been dismissed as
troublemakers), but at this meeting -- and in this community --
they were a distinct minority, and I respect their courage for
publicly stating their position.
When they came forward to speak, the kids in the back of the
room each denied having racist sentiments. If they had any
understanding of American history and what the Confederate flag
has stood for -- slavery, the Klan, terrorism, and segregation --
they effectively hid that knowledge. I want to be a rebel, one
girl asserted, and the Confederate flag was, to her, a symbol of
the image she had of herself as a rebel. Being a bit of a rebel
myself, I wanted to listen.
The styles of teen-age rebellion often mask deep-seated
class issues. We're just learning to talk about "race" in this
country; we're still in denial when it comes to conflicts of
class. I'm not sure I can shed any light on the murky currents of
race and class in these 900 words -- or 9000. But we ought to be
looking at what's happening here and so I'm going to try.
Is the word "redneck" politically correct? It's a term that
pushes people's buttons. To me, the kids defending the rebel flag
were, whether they knew it or not, expressing some of the
attitudes of redneck culture. "Redneck," the word, has come to
mean more than the sunburnt necks of hard-working farmers. It's
often taken as a synonym for good-old-boy white Southern culture,
but it's distinct, or should be distinct, from Southern slave-
holding culture, for Southern slave-owners produced no culture --
no music, no literature, no crafts, no nothing. Rednecks, on the
other hand, have contributed greatly to American culture, most
obviously with country music. They have also produced a
frustratingly hopeful populist tradition which, at every turn,
has been cursed and compromised by the Confederate legacy of
racist politics.
The redneck rebellion is complex. It's Southern-wing
absorbed the Confederate mythology of a heroic-but-doomed lost
cause. Plantation society did little for the majority of Southern
whites except assure them that, however poor and miserable they
were, they'd always have higher status than Southern blacks. Jim
Crow was a legal-system designed to keep the non-slaveholding
white majority one-step above the segregated blacks. Many
Southern redneck bought into this system and, against their own
best interest, enlisted to keep blacks down.
The white South often assumes an attitude of victimization.
A chivalrous civilization (which is the way the plantation South
mythologized itself) was outgunned and outmanned by the
industrial and immigrant North -- by foreignors! After the Civil
War came scalawags, carpetbaggers, and, in the 1960s, civil
rights workers -- all determined to trash the white Southern way
of life .
The civilization may be myth, but the victimization is often
real. It's not the blacks or the civil right movement that
victimized the redneck fragment of white working-class America.
It's the global economy, the marginalization of small business
and small farms and the loss of manufacturing jobs. Rednecks, as
Nashville singers often remind us are a people living in
declining communities and dead-end jobs. The country is changing
but they are going nowhere. Economics, as well as racism,
inspires redneck alienation.
Racism is pervasive in our society. This past week PBS
featured "An American Love Story," a remarkable documentary about
an inter-racial family. The tightly-knit Wilson-Sims family is
turned inward for self-protection. When the family goes out into
the world there is a sense of going out into hostile white
territory, a hostility that the white wife often perceives first.
There's no comfort zone outside their home. Some blacks see them
as betraying the African-American community; even the most well-
intentioned whites are unsure of how to act natural with them.
Race is the great American minefield through which we all must
traverse.
I don't know what to say to kids who think the Confederate
flag is a symbol of rebellion. They are rebels without a clue
more than they are rebels without a cause. But attention must be
paid. This country -- our schools -- needs to work for everyone:
the children of people who once had to ride in the back of the
bus as well as the kids who now, taking pride in a symbol they do
not understand, stand in the back of the room.
-30-
Marty Jezer welcomes comments at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Visit my Website (under construction): http://www.sover.net/~mjez
Copyright (C) 1999, by Marty Jezer
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