Why The Southeast?

“Us vs. Them” is the mentality held by those in the Southeast and Northeastern regions of the United States. As evident in the role that class stature and religion played in people’s relation to one another during the colonization of the US and the antebellum South. Because of this, it is worth exploring how a colonizer mindset and bloated sense of class have led to the Northern bias towards Southerners today. Time has moved disproportionately slow in the Southeastern region, maintaining a resentment post-civil war that trailed behind and has actively interfered with the nation's progress in human rights.

*a more recent study at Brookings Research says the south is comprised of 58% of the Black population in the US

People judge the south today

Have you ever watched a film or TV show where a character was poor but not living in the South or from the South, and somehow, they had a Southern accent? If not, you’ve most definitely heard a comedian use the accent when making jokes about someone they think is stupid or hardheaded, and if you’re not sure if you’ve seen these, pay attention in the future.

In What’s so funny about my Southern accent? Audrey Atkins details how many Southerners feel compelled to drop their Southern accents when pursuing educational or professional opportunities. She writes, “They don’t want to be thought of as “slow.” They don’t want to be denied opportunities. They don’t want to be singled out and embarrassed in front of their peers.” In Aubrey’s article, she interviewed Elizabeth H. Hutchins, an attorney at Dentons Sirote in Birmingham, who recalled that when she was in school at NYU, a professor asked her to translate for another student from south Alabama. He couldn’t understand the word ‘light’ pronounced in “Southern.”
Too often, the Southeast is used as a deflection by non-southern people to avoid looking inward or at the harsh realities of white supremacy of their ancestors. It’s almost as if to say they aren’t from the South, so therefore their people were “on the right side of history.”Many liberals throughout the U.S. today like to point the finger at low-income white people in the South for being the biggest proponents of all things unjust. This isn’t true. To be genuinely antiracist, Northerners would have to recognize that white people are all cut from the same cloth. While some white people may be anti-racist, that doesn’t change one’s whiteness. A white anti-racist is still a part of the uglier portions of whiteness.

White supremacy and bigotry go beyond low-income Southerners. It’s everywhere. Perhaps it is quieter and more pervasive in the North, but that does not make its racism or classism less violent or real.

More than White trash,

Rednecks & Hillbillies

It should be stated that few people in the South identify as white trash, rednecks, or hillbillies. Some may identify this way to reclaim the term which has oppressed them. Some may use this language, particularly those who identify as rednecks, to build a community around similar interests. On the other hand, 1 in every 3 LGBTQ people in the U.S. lives in the Southeast. 58% of the Black community resides in the South. Between 1990 and 2000, many Southern states registered the highest increase of those of Central and South American descent in the United States: North Carolina (394%), Arkansas (337%), Georgia (300%), Tennessee (278%), South Carolina (211%) and Alabama (208%) (Tafoya et al.). MLK wrote, “The South is not, today, one whole.” in a March 1963 essay for The Nation. Those words ring as accurate today as they did in the 1960s. Some numerous organizations and activists lend clarity, moral stamina, and cultural awareness that bring progress and help to a region where it is so often shunned.

Historically there have been a plethora of agents for change in the Southeast. They have pushed the region and the entire country towards racial justice, abolition, workers’ rights, LGBTQ rights, and environmental rights. When the nation listened to and supported these activists and organizations, history was fundamentally altered.

A small list of Southern change makers to be remembered and honored: William Faulkner, John Brown, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, Angela Davis, Nina Simone, the Carolina Gay Association, Bree Newsome Bass, Octavia Rainey, Ella Baker, The Mountain State Socialists, Louis Armstrong, Harriet Tubman, John Lewis, Hank Aaron, Lucy E. Parsons, Medgar Evers, Beyoncé Knowles, Bob Burns, the Southeastern Gay Conferences, Janis Joplin, Monica Helms, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Dolly Parton, Richard Loving + Mildred Jeter, Dr. Cornel West, and of course Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

During extreme polarization, many people are delegated to a left or right mindset that can come with assumptions about regional identities. It has also become increasingly clear that people don’t realize how many Southerners have shaped democracy, music, art, pop culture, sports, and politics since the beginning of our country's birth. The fight for human rights in the South today only becomes more challenging when the rest of the nation refuses to celebrate their work in favor of divisively protesting the barriers Southerners face. Instead, they choose to blame the entire region for their woes created by legislators in a self-righteous tweet.

Prison, the Poor, and The Civil War

It took a century for the Black community to achieve legal human rights, and for even parts of the entire South to emerge from poverty and isolation. There have been no government reparations made to the Black community or Native American communities who experienced genocide and displacement from their own land. The colonization of our country and the civil war reaches into every aspect of American political, social, and economic being today.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg allows us to understand the shifts from poor white oppression for some to white power. She explains that the anxiety created by class frictions in the South drove Southern elites to present the division of the country due to slavery into a class conflict through a well thought out campaign. Northern slavery abolitionists put forth a vision of free labor, meaning equal paid opportunities for previously enslaved people and men of European descent, in which free labor kept white men out of competition with enslaved Black labor. To flip the free labor argument around, proslavery advocates emphasized that while the social hierarchy in the South was established on race, in the North it was dictated by class. Thus, elite Southerners contended, the slave labor system made poor white men powerful and equals because they would never be part of the lowest class of society like they could be in the North (Isenberg). The South planted this concept in the heads of poor white people that were being exploited for labor and made them believe they had power. It’s ultimately what led to the bootstrap concept that low-income whites believe in and live by today. What started as a way for the rich to separate the Black community and impoverished whites has persisted.

The prison and policing system are a fundamental piece of the colonial settlement lifespan in the framework of the United States. It controls the relationships between national, religious, class, and racial identities and their access to financial and physical opportunities. The specific construction of power and its hierarchy is a direct product of European colonial power and thus inherently white supremacist.

When tracing the history of privileges and oppressions held by poor white Americans, one can see in part how similar Eugenics arguments made about and practiced on Native Americans and enslaved Black folks were also practiced on poor people of European descent in the Southeast, too: predominantly in Appalachia. Nancy Isenberg explained that in 1860, a year before the civil war began, a deep Southern writer named Daniel Hundley refuted slavery’s part in poverty in the region and said, “it was bloodline that made poor whites a “notorious race.” (Isenberg, 266)

The significance that low-income whites had during this time is frequently ignored. Some non-slave owning settlers often found connection with and had relationships with Black Southerners before the Civil War. Impoverished Caucasian folks-built an interracial alcohol trade that created lots of anxiety among those who enslaved people. (Craven) During the first part of the nineteenth century, hurdles inhibiting poor white people from participating in politics spanned across the United States. Only men over the age of 21 and who owned property could vote. The reality after the colonization of the US and genocide of its native peoples is that the slave economy dominated the land while making it, so white men without enslaved labor had no opportunities to earn a living. Many low-income Europeans who came here after the initial colonization of the United States believed it to be an opportunity for a free-market economy that did not exist. The existence of slavery destroyed entire communities’ abilities to cope, which invited decline and generational trauma into the lives of poor whites. By the time the Civil War started becoming a likely option, all but one of the original thirteen states that entered the union had removed property requirements when being able to cast a ballot. 

In Masterless Men, Kerri Leigh Merritt tells the story of poor white Southerners without assuaging the brutality Black Southerners face. “Complete with large percentages of slaves and a sizable, disaffected poor white underclass, a constant state of anxiety engulfed much of the Deep South in the years preceding secession,” Merritt writes (Merritt, 67). Cooperation among slaves and poor whites would have endangered “the fortunes, the power, and even the lives of the region’s masters.” (Merritt, 67) Slaveholders were threatened by the idea of an interracial coalition, and Merritt argues that the handling of poor Southern whites rather came from the white elite’s determination to conserve slavery.

The Civil War, after appraisal, took the lives of 620,000 men and boys in the four-year-long conflict. Many people believe abolition was birthed from the battle, therefore believing it was a necessary evil. Anti-racist or not, many poor whites who fought for the confederacy did so reluctantly as they fought a rich man’s war. “Inhabiting a police state, with no economic standing and virtually no civil rights, they simply had no recourse for their many grievances,” Merritt writes. “Short of an all-out rebellion, they had to either fight for the Confederacy or hide out from the military authorities for the duration of the war.” (Merritt, 283)

What most present-day Americans tend to skim over when thinking about the Civil War is how white supremacy was so entrenched in the North and South that war and Reconstruction could never offer true equality or even safety. White supremacy had President Lincoln assassinated at the end of the war. A supporter of slavery, John Wilkes Booth believed that Lincoln abused the constitution and destroyed the South. Nobody in the union or the confederacy was anti-racist. The war was merely a way to expose the South to the North's need for industrialization and the rise of capitalism. Slavery was the center of the war but Black lives were abandoned and tormented immediately after.

In Discipline and Punish, Michelle Foucault describes how the rise of capitalism changed the meaning of criminality itself. Foucault further illustrates how the inequality between capitalists and workers increased a disenfranchised and displaced population of houseless families. Driven by a growing type of capitalist production, escalation in wealth for the class reaping the benefits of that production and a greater value was placed on ‘property relations’ (rather than religious morals). The rising groups, or the middle class, required that criminal justice center protect their property. Police surveillance grew and was driven by requests to protect property. This new form of policing had the ‘bourgeois appearances of a class justice’ (Foucault, 76). According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, today in the U.S., 5% of inmates are locked up for burglary, larceny, and property offenses, 45.3% of those incarcerated are imprisoned for drug offenses, and 4.8% are locked up due to immigration issues. Poverty, trauma, immigration, and other things that could lead to drug use are criminalized, and the Southeast is the most impoverished region in the United States.

Reconstruction is the foundation of the Black and poor white racial tensions we see today. However, these tensions do not just exist in the South. We often portray racism in the U.S. “as a regional problem, not a national problem,” says Jeanne Theoharis, author of a book on the civil rights movement called A More Beautiful and Terrible History. “The tendency when talking about segregation in the North is to say that it’s more episodic and more personal, and not state-sponsored—except that we know that’s not the case.” (UpFront Magazine)

In an op-ed, Dr. Andrew W. Kahrl, who studies the history of segregation, wrote about Jim Crow in the Northeast. Dr. Kahn speaks to how laws like loitering or disorderly conduct removed Black people from areas white people dominated. White proprietors, concerned about their national image, realized that rules restricting public spaces to residents and enforcing laws could be used to execute racial segregation seemingly quietly.

He also speaks about public spaces like beaches, “In the South, white officials literally drew color lines in the sands and the waters offshore. In the “racially liberal” Northeast, towns devised elaborate and ostensibly colorblind procedures for determining who could access public shores, and what they could bring and do once inside, and then proceeded to enforce them for black and brown people only.

In the 1930s, Long Branch, N.J., passed an ordinance requiring all residents to apply for a pass to allow access to only one of the town’s four public beaches. Town officials claimed the rule was meant to prevent overcrowding. Without exception, though, black applicants were assigned to the same beach and were denied entry to the others.” (Kahrl)

Poor whites inherited all the traditions of slave competition and class competition which were strengthened by the elevation of the enslaved to citizenship. All white people in both regions set out to make Black folks realize that, despite their freedom, they were still “less than” because they were previously enslaved. Poor whites were the unfortunate victims of class oppression while later benefitting from white privilege, and many upheld a white supremacist structure. This could be seen in minstrel shows—everything once said about poor whites used to demonize the freed Black community. Historian Dale Cockrell told the National Museum of African American History and Culture that poor and working-class whites felt “squeezed politically, economically, and socially from the top, but also from the bottom, invented minstrelsy” as a way of expressing the oppression that marked being members of the majority, but outside of the white norm. (Nasheed, 2019) This is still happening today. White Rage is real. When anger, entitlement, and white privilege come together, it creates a recklessness and sad display of reasserting white supremacy. Carol Anderson, an Emory University professor and the author of “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide,” highlights how white violence is carried out subtly through legislation and oppressive policies. However, events such as when white people riot over a sports team's loss or the Capitol Riots are intense portraits of visible white violence in the face of white people not getting something they feel entitled to.

Church and Police state

How a Punitive Religious beliefs Influences Policies and Oppression

A shared faith arose within a society of remarkable class and racial divisions. Tensions were only deepened, and less controllable post-Civil War when the South’s financial system collapsed and enslaved Black folks were freed. Much like the lepers and the Panopticon, which Foucault analyzes in Discipline and Punishment, the south cut itself off from the rest of the country to maintain a white supremacist status while using religion to justify it.

Elected the first Bishop of Georgia, Stephen Elliott was a proponent of slavery. He also served as Provisional Bishop of Florida and the only Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America. (Mounger, Dwyn M., 286) He spoke to those who criticized slavery saying, “they should consider whether, by their interference with this institution, they may not be checking and impeding a work which is manifestly Providential. For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery! At this very moment there are from three to four million of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.” (Rae, Noel., 382)

Reviewing the work of the white churches, Frederick Douglass had this to say: “Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home.” (Speech: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” July 5, 1852, Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 2:383)

Much of Christianity, particularly extremist sects, centers around the fear of Hell.

The top 12 most religious states, which are also of Christian faith, in the US are:

1.    Alabama- 77%

 2.  Mississippi: 77%

3.   Tennessee - 73%

4.    Louisiana - 71%

5.    Arkansas- 70%

6.    South Carolina - 70%

7.    West Virginia- 69%

8.    Georgia – 66%

9.    Oklahoma – 66%

10.   North Carolina - 65%

11. Texas: 64%

12. Utah: 64%

(Lipka and Wormald)

All these states are in the top 15 states in the U.S. with the highest incarceration rates (Us Bureau of Statistics 2019)

Vinson Cunningham wrote about a collection called “Hell of Our Own Making,” which includes Vasily Grossman’s account of the concentration camp at Treblinka and an essay by an incarcerated man named William Blake. Grossman writes, “The last hope, the last wild hope that it was all just a terrible dream, has gone.” Blake writes about his time in solitary confinement. (The essay first appeared in an anthology of such pieces called “Hell Is a Very Small Place.”) (Cunningham) Prison is hell on earth, and Christians should technically oppose it and the death penalty.

Lee Griffith wrote The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition. In Chapter 3, he speaks about “the first crime” when Cain killed Abel. In that story, readers and Christians are to learn that every killing is an act of taking life from our sibling. So, in terms of the death penalty, he writes, “It is God who brings the surprise to the story. Cain is guilty as sin, and yet in violation of all humane “justice,” God protects him. Even before we are told of God’s establishment of the law (in the bible), we are told of God’s mercy in the face of lawlessness. In this sense, Karl Barth is right: the gospel does not come after the law; it precedes the law.” (Griffith,87)

CHANGE CAN and does happen

Evangelical Christianity and civil war history are two powerhouses shifting in the South. As the South changes and many areas don’t want to be defined by the confederacy and violent history, how will it be described? Will these realizations look to extensions of slavery, racism, and homophobia, such as prison and lack of access to financial stability and healthcare? Suppose one is raised in a culture centered around a punitive god. Can the culture ever treat those who make mistakes or live outside of a specific set of morals as if they were human and deserve humanity and second chances? Can people look inward and see that they were taught punitive concepts in a religious society?

Lee Griffith says that repentance is a confession of sin and accepting our powerlessness. He writes, “When we make a confession of our powerlessness, we will be enabled to respond in a much different way to questions about the alternatives to the reliance on police and courts and prisons. We will be reoriented away from seeking to concoct institutional and technical answers.” This work isn't to push for a call to end all Southern institutions, like churches, but to re-evaluate them and ask how to move beyond retribution. We can’t control the actions of others, and demonizing people out of a fear of lack of control only leads to more violence. No state agent stops a crime; they merely show up after it happens. This work will also highlight the many people and organizations in the South already doing the heavy lifting around prison abolition. This project wants to lay the groundwork for abolishing prisons in the Southeast by utilizing history and various optics. It is also for non-Southerners, especially nonsouthern white middle- and upper-class liberals, who have spread misinformation about the region to be challenged in their thinking.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer further explores themes presented in the abolitionist catalog. Robin Wall Kimmerer discerns that nature is a rich, kind, and living entity. Using the traditional knowledge of the Potawatomi people and the instruments of botany, she writes about how all people can heal both the land and humankind by operating in a symbiotic bond with nature. The Potawatomi Nation suffered the same fate as all the original people on Turtle Island. (Kimmerer) White people living in the U.S. today didn’t personally colonize this land, but their responsibility to free themselves from their victim narrative of the past and colonizer mindsets. The fact that poor whites were also once seen as mutant and abused doesn’t mean they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to success. It means they were used to oppress others and brainwashed to love capitalism. Many are still paid laughably low wages; hence they are still being exploited today. The first step in repair and abolition is not letting this understanding dismiss other people’s troubles and histories but instead should radicalize low-income people of European descent. 

Americans must begin introducing these concepts of a New South into the activist spaces and institutions they occupy. The South is indeed an area that withstood a lot of violence and continues to see harmful legislation, but that only means that people outside the South must do everything to lift those who are reshaping it. All movements, but especially the national call for prison abolition, must include people who either live in or are from the South; our collective history must emphasize those who brought change to the region; the conversations and the mainstream media must showcase those on the ground doing the hard work right now. Prison abolition is a network, and each area has its history entangled in the system. Every region must be free of prisons. In many ways, the south is where what we know as prisons today all started in the US. It only makes sense to support activists and changes in the area enthusiastically, physically, and financially.