What’s the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee?
A Yankee comes to visit the South. A Damn Yankee stays.
This is a real joke that I’ve heard told in a southern drawl, and a pretty accurate description of me. I grew up in rural, northeastern Ohio, and I’ve been living in Atlanta, Georgia for over 20 years. Between here and there, I also had family in Alabama that we visited regularly, and I went to college in Virginia. I’ve written a separate piece about this topic and Sweet Briar.
When the people that I know and love up north weigh in on the current controversies surrounding the statues and flags of the confederacy, I want to tell them “You know not of what you speak.” When my heart hurts for the city of Charlottesville and people I know who have never walked in that cobbled streets of the historic downtown mall want to talk about free speech, I want to erupt into rage.
Aside from one teensy rant on Twitter, I’ve done pretty well at keeping my peace. But my peace isn’t meant to be kept. It has to be spoken. The benefit of having lived half of my life in Ohio and half of my life in Georgia is that I can see other people’s blind spots. I just have to be able to explain them clearly enough, and with enough compassion, to bring them to light.
Let’s start with the obvious, shall we?
I’m pretty doggone white. Lest there be any fraction of a doubt, here’s my ancestry DNA report:
I grew up in a town with 28 houses in the zip code, flanked by a military installation and a state park. In rural Ohio, I considered 4-H to be a legit way to meet boys. There were three black kids in my whole high school, and two were part of the same family. There were a couple of mix-raced kids, but seriously, “Token” in South Park hits pretty close to home when you look at the demographics.
Sure, there is a ton more diversity in Ohio’s larger cities, but I wasn’t exactly hanging out there. (I didn’t learn how to properly cross a road with a traffic signal until I was 17 and visiting New York City on a school trip. You can insert any country bumpkin assumptions you wish. My parents didn’t realize this to teach me otherwise because I just faked it when I was with them and let them lead.)
In all honesty, I saw more black people when my mom and I drove south every Spring Break to visit her family in Birmingham, Alabama. I can still remember the time when I was seven or eight when the neighbor girl about my age came over to tell us that the family was still at church. Then she asked if we were my youngest aunt’s family from up north. When we affirmed her suspicion she nodded sagely and said:
“Ah could tell y’all were Yankees just bah the way y’all tawked.”
Please pardon the dialect spelling, but her drawl was intense, and I want to really underscore how alien it was for me. After she went back to her own yard to play, I asked my mom “What’s a Yankee?”
You Keep Using That Word…
Northerners have no concept of how present the Civil War still is down here. It’s probably the first of many culture shocks that I had to adjust to. It was absolutely common for me to be called a Yankee, often jokingly, sometimes with a little rancor. I was a foreigner. An outsider.
I remember studying the Civil War in 5th grade. We had to memorize the Gettysburg address. It was one unit among many in American History. We spent more time on Ohio history and Geography later on in middle school than we did “the War of Northern Aggression.” It was brief, informative, and not any more important or impacting on our current lives than the unit on the Revolutionary War.
My mom liked Patrick Swayze so we watched the civil war miniseries he was in. I remember watching Gone with the Wind once.
There’s one place that when we pass it on the highway, I remember someone saying once that it was part of the Underground Railroad to hide slaves and sneak them to freedom.
That is pretty much the sum of my personal informational input about the Civil War, and I’m going to hazard to guess that anyone who didn’t discover sweet tea until it crept across the Mason-Dixon line in the 90’s will have roughly equivalent exposure.
Privilege Writes History
There’s this misconception that there were no slaves or lynchings in the North. There were, just not as many. Because the local narrative focuses on the Underground Railroad and the moral superiority of the North, it’s pretty easy to just say “We won, get over it.”
The thing is, the North is no less racist than the South. It’s just less honest about it. Northerners were the ones who have been silenced by “political correctness” because they were the ones who tried to hard to hide their biases instead of facing them head on. In some ways, those are harder to dispel.
Worse, in the North, racist bias is often layered over with a patina of “white savior.” With the narrative of the Underground Railroad, with the nobility of the Civil War having freed slaves, the North tends to dust its hands off and say “our work here is done” ignoring the complicated systemic problems that those freed slaves faced.
In my all-white classroom, we didn’t really talk about the Jim Crow era until we talked about Rosa Parks. That’s 68 years of history-lesson white privilege. We didn’t need to talk about segregation or how it impacted the day to day lives of millions of people, because it wouldn’t have impacted us. An opportunity to learn and understand empathy lost, in my opinion.
I dug into the 1941 Green Motorist book in my Sweet Briar post, and I’m going to do it again for the area I grew up in Ohio. There are 19 towns in the state of Ohio with services and amenities available for African American travelers. 19. It includes a lot of towns in Northeastern Ohio – in the area where I was born and raised. Akron had a longer list than Columbus. Cleveland’s was comparable. Also listed were Canton, Alliance, Youngstown, and Warren. Only Springfield, Columbus, and Akron included service stations. What was gas mileage on cars in 1941?
Compare and Contrast
There’s a definite country-mouse city-mouse contrast with my life in Ohio and the one I live in Atlanta. I haven’t owned a car since 2002, so in this autocentric city, I have tended to live intown, in areas that are historically more heavily populated by black people than by white people. I have taken transit and walked midtown for years.
The experience of Atlanta’s suburbs would be vastly different. I know many white people who live far from the city center who have never taken the train anywhere, or who are afraid of driving into the city limits. Where my in-laws live, or where my stepson lives with his mom, is another world entirely from mine.
In my adventures and explorations, I’ve also driven a large swath of the Georgia countryside and visited innumerable small towns along the way.
The town where I live now is a “naturally occurring retirement community” for older black people. Because the zipcode is 65% black, I get mailings targeted to me as a “strong black woman.” Because our area is largely elderly, my husband is plagued by AARP notices long before he’s eligible to join.
I don’t pretend to be “street” or anything because of all this. I’m just saying that I’ve seen more of this world than I could have imagined growing up.
Only the Civil War Matters
I wish I could find the data about the historical markers that dot the roads across the country. I wish I could find numbers of the confederate statues versus the revolutionary war statues, versus the monuments and markers put up for the Native Americans who were displaced when the European colonists showed up and moved in. I wish I knew how many of those markers talked about colonialism. And I wish I knew how many streets, towns and high schools were named after figures from those various times and phases of history.
I don’t have the raw data. Maybe someone else does. But what I can tell you from my own interest in history and my own observation, that the Civil War outnumbers all of the other eras and events 10 to 1. You’re more likely to find a Civil War memorial than a cross with flowers on it where someone died on the highway.
Those statues people are complaining about – that barely exist up north – are everywhere down here. They are in the middle of town right in front of the town hall, not tucked in some shady corner where nobody cares. they aren’t in museums or cemeteries where they belong to honor those who fought and died, and yet not take the whole thing out of context.
In Ohio, there are three monuments in cemeteries and three roads named after civil war heroes. That’s it!
In Georgia, there are 2 buildings, 48 “courthouse monuments”, another 48 “other monuments” most are in town squares, and other prominent areas of cities. This category includes Stone Mountain Park. The names of nine counties, 55 roads, three schools, and three “private monuments” in cemeteries and churches. I know that the wikipedia list I’m using is incomplete because it lists neither the confederate obelisk at Oakland cemetery or the Confederate monument at Westview cemetery here in Atlanta. Oh, and the state flag still has symbols of the confederacy.
Ohio = 6, Georgia = 161 (at least). We could take down half of GA’s monuments and still have a 1:13 ratio over Ohio’s.
But It’s Erasing History!
So is all of the genocide of the Native American people. So was the Dakota Access Pipeline.
So is the fact that schools still gloss over 68 years of segregation like it was no big deal – as if “separate but equal” was actually pretty dandy.
So is the massive number of black people, hispanic people and women who are missing from the core curriculum of history classes to this day.
History is as malleable as memory, and just like memory, sometimes you have to write things down to remember them properly. And sometimes it matters how you word what you write down. It’s not erasing history to move or take down monuments that were put up as symbols of hatred.
But Our Heritage! Our Culture!
The South has a far richer and more interesting heritage beyond the Civil War. The heritage and culture people are actually protecting is that of white supremacy.
Things besides the Civil War that the South can and does have the right to consider part of their heritage and culture:
- Sweet Tea, Lemonade, Mint Juleps
- Southern Food in general really
- Hospitality
- Gentility and Good Manners
- Rich native american history
- Colonial history
- Appalachian mountains – the Smokies, the Blue Ridge… boy, I need to go hiking.
- MLK / the civil rights movement
- Slower paced, less stressed way of life
- Front porches that you can call verandas without sounding silly
- Amazing Produce! (oh, that goes back to the food)
- Music – Jazz, Blues, Country, Rock
- The useful linguistic invention “y’all” which is far superior to any American plural second person alternatives
If we latch onto the Civil War as the only heritage worth preserving, we give up all of these other things.
I might be a damn Yankee, but I didn’t hang around for 20 years because of the Civil War.
But Free Speech!
Okay, I’ve written about this before. Constitutional rights mean freedom from government interference.
As a refresher – here’s the first amendment:
Amendment 1: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Our “first amendment rights” guarantee that we are protected from governmental interference in
- starting a religion
- practicing a religion
- saying what we want
- printing and reporting the news
- peaceful assembly
- petitioning the government if we feel we’ve been done wrong
You know what that doesn’t say? That anyone besides the government can’t interfere with your right to say whatever you want. Of course, they can’t break any laws in that interference. I’m not condoning violence. I’m saying there are consequences for actions and words.
Take Stone Mountain for example – it has a long and storied history with the KKK. It’s also a privately owned park that receives no tax money. That means if people stop going there until they stop hosting white supremacy rallies and add racial context to the museum, then the park might have to make some tough financial decisions.
White supremacists are starting to speak up. In a way, this is a good thing. Now we know who to unfriend, fire, boycott, and show the door.