#the american south

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

de Adder

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 09, 2024

Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. 

There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.” 

After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. 

In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.

Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.  An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.” 

In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”

Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’” 

In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”

In the 1850s, white southern leaders made sure that voters did not have access to news that came from outside the American South, and instead steeped them in white supremacist information. They stopped the mail from carrying abolitionist pamphlets, destroyed presses of antislavery newspapers, and drove antislavery southerners out of their region.

Elite enslavers had reason to be concerned about the survival of their system of human enslavement. The land boom of the 1840s, when removal of Indigenous peoples had opened up rich new lands for settlement, had priced many white men out of the market. They had become economically unstable, roving around the country working for wages or stealing to survive. And they deeply resented the fabulously wealthy enslavers who they knew looked down on them. 

In 1857, North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper wrote a book attacking enslavement. No friend to his Black neighbors, Helper was a virulent white supremacist. But in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, he used modern statistics to prove that slavery destroyed economic opportunity for white men, and assailed “the illbreeding and ruffianism of the slaveholding officials.” He noted that voters in the South who did not own slaves outnumbered by far those who did. "Give us fair play, secure to us the right of discussion, the freedom of speech, and we will settle the difficulty at the ballot-box,” he wrote.

In the North the book sold like hotcakes—142,000 copies by fall 1860. But southern leaders banned the book, and burned it, too. They arrested men for selling it and accused northerners of making war on the South. Politicians, newspaper editors, and ministers reinforced white supremacy, warned that the end of slavery would mean race war, and preached that enslavement was God’s law.

When northern voters elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 on a platform of containing enslavement in the South, where the sapped soil would soon cut into production, southern leaders decided—usually without the input of voters—to secede from the Union. As leaders promised either that there wouldn’t be a fight, or that if a fight happened it would be quick and painless, poor southern whites rallied to the cause of creating a nation based on white supremacy, reassured by South Carolina senator James Chesnut’s vow that he would personally drink all the blood shed in any threatened civil war. 

When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, poor white men set out for what they had come to believe was an imperative cause to protect their families and their way of life. By 1862 their enthusiasm had waned, and leaders passed a conscription law. That law permitted wealthy men to hire a substitute and exempted one man to oversee every 20 enslaved men, providing another way for rich men to keep their sons out of danger. Soldiers complained it was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” 

By 1865 the Civil War had killed or wounded 483,026 men out of a southern white population of about five and a half million people. U.S. armies had pushed families off their lands, and wartime inflation drove ordinary people to starvation. By 1865, wives wrote to their soldier husbands to come home or there would be no one left to come home to. 

Even those poor white men who survived the war could not rebuild into prosperity. The war took from the South its monopoly of global cotton production, locking poor southerners into profound poverty from which they would not begin to recover until the 1930s, when the New Deal began to pour federal money into the region.

Today, when I received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs, I could not help but think of that earlier era when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[heartshapedcaskett]

Dillon, South Carolina

[galechives]

The South has remained the region where the majority of African Americans live. And even with the declining population in the Blackest South, the Blackest Southerners remain. So the question I always ask is not why did Black folks leave, but why did they stay?

The answer is home. If everyone had departed, no one would have been left to tend the ancestors’ graves. When you walk past a plantation, even if not outfitted soberly or joyously in the history of slavery, you are forced to remember something. And it is a vile, bloody remembrance, but it is also one that should strike awe at the human mastery of existence that is evidenced in the blues, in the experience of the divine in the spirit-body, that keloid-covered, scarred Black body, that violated, hungry, sparely clothed body, the labor-flattened, thick-soled feet. Had these graves not been seen, daily, over generations, had we not been witnesses to them, I do not know how it would have been possible to sustain hope, or at least to pretend to.

American exceptionalism, that sense that we are somehow special and ordained as such, is a myth sedimented on Southern prosperity: oil, coal, and cotton. Every piece of evidence of our national distinction has relied upon this wealth of the nation. As you certainly have already gleaned, I do not think genocide, slavery, and exploitation were worth it. Nor do I believe they should be tidily set aside in moments of patriotic fervor or national piety like the Fourth of July or the following days: President’s, King’s, Labor, or Memorial. But even if you are a lover of the national romance, integrity requires that the stories be at least halfway honest. It is not enough to set aside a little time or attention here or there to grieve our national sins, then, soft as butter, turn back to proclamations of greatness. Because history is an instruction. And what you neglect to attend to from the past, you will surely ignore in the present. 

from Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2021)

[disteal]

i love having adult horse girl friends. I’ll send them a 100x100px crunchy ass jpeg of a random brown horse and be like “thought of u🐴” and I can literally feel their sims relationship bar fill up in real time

[karateriver]

I’ve mentioned in the past that I live in Georgia, and we’ve apparently become the center of the universe now. I’m not sure how much more I can take. I flinch every time I hear us mentioned on the national news, which is now multiple times every goddamn day. Trump has been haunting the place like the ghoul he is. People all over the country are familiar with our doofus governor, who has become beloved somehow. We went blue last election, and I’m proud of that and proud to have been part of it. I have already done all I can to help us repeat the performance this year. I just miss the days when I thought that this was the most boring place on earth.

[caffeineheroes]

Absolutely impressive. But what's also interesting is how kudzu is not actually as ubiquitous or invasive as you may have been led to believe by American mythologists and famous descriptions of the American South. The cows quick work of this kudzu is a good example of its tenuous hold on the landscape.

The True Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Never Truly Ate the South

Bill Finch, Smithsonian Magazine, September 2015

this plant is kudzu. aka 'the vine that ate the south'. a damaging invasive plant that’s a nuisance to the local area in this video. Now look at those moos go

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

An American hero, banned from the history books in the American South. 

Mary Elaine LeBey: 60th Anniversary - April 23rd, 1963 - William Moore, a Baltimore postal worker, on a one-man Civil Rights demonstration where he set out to walk from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss., to hand deliver a letter to the governor of Mississippi asking him to reverse his stance on segregation, was murdered with two shots to the head by KKK members... This photo showing his homemade sandwich-style sign, was taken just prior to his murder…

And, given this murder happened in Attalla, Alabama, it went “unsolved"... Just another martyr not taught about in American history classes…

[Scott Horton]

[spatteringstars]

can the bugs fucking not. Please

[dearhearted111]

A post-medieval scale tang knife handle with inscription 'make you bleed' from the 17th - 18th century

[spiritshaydra]

I’m from the south and I have NO intentions on moving from my HOME just because my state’s government sucks ass. I may not be a social person, but I will NEVER trade the warm southern hospitality that I’ve experienced my whole life for how cold it feels socially up north. Yeah sure, Texas is a red state, that’s no secret, but we DO have pretty public lgbt+ scenes and very diverse communities ESPECIALLY in our cities. The small city I’m currently attending college in has one of the most supportive queer communities I’ve ever encountered, with people of all walks of life.

I LOVE Texas and I don’t want to be ashamed of loving my home state. I have an accent. My family has been here for well over a century, and I love them. My 84 year old granny is one of the most loving and accepting people I’ve ever had the pleasure of having in my life.

And you wanna know something else? Texas is a BEAUTIFUL state and I will stand by it.

Just look at it

THIS should be protected

I tried to add a variety of pictures I’ve taken from southern, western, coastal, central, and northern Texas (even places underground because not a lot of people know that the natural beauty is also below the surface) but I’m on mobile so I’m unable to :( I tried to capture the landscapes, the weather, and the flora. Texas is beautiful and we should protect it.

yall have got to be more normal about Southern people and I'm not kidding. enough of the Sweet Home Alabama incest jokes, enough of the idea that all Southerners are bigots and rednecks, and enough of the idea that the South has bad food. shut up about "trailer trash" and our accents and our hobbies!

do yall know how fucking nauseating it is to hear people only bring up my state to make jokes about people in poverty and incestuous relationships? how much shame I feel that I wasn't born up north like the Good Queers and Good Leftists with all the Civilised Folk with actual houses instead of small cramped trailers that have paper thin walls that I know won't protect me in a bad enough storm?

do yall know how frustrating it is to be trans in a place that wants to kill you and whenever you bring it up to people they say "well just move out" instead of sympathizing with you or offering help?

do yall understand how alienating it is to see huge masterposts of queer and mental health resources but none of them are in your state because theyre all up north? and nobody seems to want to fix this glaring issue because "they're all hicks anyways"

Southern people deserve better. we deserve to be taken seriously and given a voice in the queer community and the mental health space and leftist talks in general.

[sassymccoy]

a lot of us in the south/southeast usa have been hit with some pretty severe winter weather recently that regionally we just aren't capable of taking on (i saw a report this morning about tennessee being third in number of burst pipes) but for us in the nashville area, the temperature just officially got above freezing and the sun is out so i know i'm not the only person with my face pressed to the glass of my windows like

[galechives]

The fact that some tenderness crept into my chest despite myself made me uncomfortable. I know he has struggled. Just like I know that he thinks I am supposed to struggle more than he does because I’m a Black gal. And that, of course, is the conundrum—I am American. That means something to me, some common ground with others of this soil, even as the country feels irredeemably racist and maybe not worth saving. It is what Du Bois called a twoness—two warring souls—Black yet American. You face it in its most raw truth below the Mason-Dixon Line. To be an American is to be infused with the plantation South, with its Black vernacular, its insurgency, and also its brutal masculinity, its worship of Whiteness, its expulsion and its massacres, its self-defeating stinginess and unapologetic pride.

from Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2021)

[reasonsforhope]

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

[littleredwritingcat]

I'm currently living in the south and this is so true it hurts. Voter suppression and all kinds of abuses of power lead to some very good people being held hostage by very bad forces backed by lots of blood money. It's not that different from lots of other states - but this area gets derided by people in other locations while we fight like hell.

Sure, that doesn't erase personal responsibility - but it lends perspective.

[mother-lee]

[hussyknee]