The South Carolina-based Southern Legal Resource Center is dedicated to “defending the rights of Southerners to honor their culture and heritage” (i.e., suing schools that prohibit Confederate battle flag gear). Now, the group wants all Americans of “Southern ancestry” to identify themselves as “Confederate Southern American” on their census forms.
“The SLRC suggests you check ‘Other Race’ and in the space below write ‘Confed Southern Am,’” says SLRC honcho Kirk Lyons. “This will tell the Census that your families (sic) National Origin was the Confederate States of America, for four years a nation independent of the United States,” he continues. Lyons says the census ploy is a way for any Southerner who has been “called a racist simply because you are proud of the Confederate Battle flag — the symbol of your ancestry and heritage,” to stand up and be counted.
Ah, yes, those poor, put-upon white racists. The world changed somewhat over the past, oh, 150 years, and left them all confused and feeling like outcasts. They’re suffering from what we call Angry Southern Martyr Complex, a remarkably tenacious disease that’s still hanging around despite most of the region having moved on.
It’s important to remember that people like Lyons & Co. are a minority among Southern whites. Many, many white Southerners had their eyes opened and their hearts won over by the civil rights struggle and the changes it brought to the region; you just don’t hear about those folks as frequently as you do the neo-Confederates, largely because tolerance and living with others in peace doesn’t create attention-grabbing headlines.
The sadder thing here is that Southern whites have historically been crapped on — by exploitive industries that moved here to avoid paying decent wages up North; and by cynical politicians like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and their predecessors, who used race-baiting as a method of getting elected while diverting whites’ attention from the big, white industrial boot on their collective neck.
This article appears in Mar 23-29, 2010.
Maybe you have your head in the sand or maybe stuck up your southern posterior, but if you havent’ noticed, here in the south there is a reverse discrimantory process going on. It’s ‘acceptable’ to have a Black Political Caucus, an all Black College, Black only TV and the list is almost endless. It isn’t a matter of equality, it’s what can be guilt tripped out of peoples hearts over an issue long dead. You tolerate liberalism, Muslisms, Catholic Priests, Porn, and Video Game war, but you cannot stop your mouth from running off regarding someone whose heritage is important to them? Sounds like prejudice just wearing another hat to me.
“The sadder thing here is that Southern whites have historically been crapped on”
— this is true. Funny it really took off when the Republican Lincoln virtually destroyed their culture in the War of North Agression.
1. Slavery was really a massive gov’t subsidy program that artificially depressed wages for poor whites.
2. When the republicans took over after the civil war, they taxed the heck out of the south. they forced them to pay the pensions of the union veterans for decades while they were not allowed to take part.
3. Federal minimum wage laws forced many low skilled southern whites and blacks out of the work force.
4. Poor southern whites go to fight to bring socialist central-planning states to far off lands, dying for lies.
not even counting all of the numerous regulations and free market restrictions enforced by the Federal and increasingly more state governments….
Race is used as a diverstion for the ever increasing Nanny-State.
Hardy har har! Looky at those racist bigots! WTF are they doing?
Confederate Southern Americans? No, the Creative Loafer crowd!
Yes, all y’all holier than thou uber intelligent folks hurling rocks at the suggestion that some may desire to claim an identity not common in y’all’s tight nit little circle of comrades is actually a logical step. We do exist.
My GGGrandfather was born on August 27th, 1862 in Fulton County, Georgia. As such, he was born into and could claim the birthright of a Confederate American. His decendants – of which I am one – also lay claim to that same heritage, the decendant of an actual Confederate American.
Others are decended from Confederate Americans who either went into Confederate Service and took an oath to protect the Confederacy, but didn’t/refused to take the Union parole oath, the remainder were average citizens who didn’t fight or hold office, but didn’t surrender like Lee and Johnston and gave no oath to the Union.
The Census Bureau considers every ethnic and national group on this earth a race (except of course Confederate-Americans), whereas there are only three true races: Caucasoid (White), Mongoloid (Asian), and Negroid (Black). All people are one race or some combination of two or all three races. That being said, if the US Census Bureau considers for example Taiwanese, Chinese, Egyptian, Columbian and Jewish to be racial categories (which BTW have far less reason to be classified race than Hispanic, which the US Census Bureau does NOT consider a race), then Confederate-American should, by their logic, be a race. It is only because Confederate-Americans are White, by and large, that the Census Bureau does not classify us to be a racial category. The SLRC should sue the Federal government to force them to consider us people.