Southern Pride

Miss. county schools ordered to comply with desegregation order

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.
The order, issued by Senior Judge Tom S. Lee of the U.S. District Court of Southern Mississippi, came after Justice Department civil rights division lawyers moved to enforce a 1970 desegregation case against the state and Walthall County.

I'm so glad that Haley Barbour said that slavery "didn't mean diddly" to Confederate History Month.  Mississippi is clearly leading the charge in bringing our nation to the ideal of racial equality.


It's just enormously saddening to see this kind of idiocy still going on.  This fight was decided more than 50 years ago, and the hate-mongers lost.  That this stuff is being passed on to yet another generation is perhaps not surprising, but it sure is depressing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates had a fantastic post today at the Atlantic:
The Ghost of Bobby Lee

 What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present.

            ...

This is about a lancing shame, about that gaping wound in the soul that comes when confronted with the appalling deeds of our forebears. Lost Causers worship their ancestors, in the manner of the abandoned child who brags that his dead-beat father is actually an astronaut, away on a mission of cosmic importance.

The Confederacy was about treason to force militarily the continuation of slavery.  There is no pride in that, only shame.  Southerners have a lot to be proud of, but the Confederacy is not one of them - it is something they have to live down.  It's pretty tough to admit that one's forebears were scumbags, but the South will never grow up as a society until they finally confront that ugly past.

And I dearly hope this is a topic I never have to deal with again - but I suspect I will.