The belief that the South is the only region of the United States with racist ties creates a false narrative of American history, according to Karen Cox.
“It is not simply that Americans … have laid the burden of our national center for racism at the door of the South, but then, in doing so, the result has been a misnarration of history in American identity,” said Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Boston College’s Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy hosted Cox on Thursday evening to unpack the historic romanticization of the South by Northern Americans and the impacts of Confederate monuments on Black communities.
According to Cox, the rise of novels, music, and films that idolized the South during the 19th and 20th centuries created a growing attachment to the region by white Americans while depicting Black individuals as second-class citizens.
“A key component of this attachment was a vision of Black people as inferior, as individuals who needed the steady hand of a white man, a vision that white Northerners shared with their Southern counterparts,” Cox said.
Cox said the popular culture that emerged in the North romanticized the South, highlighting how white Northerners agreed with the racism and Anglo-Saxon supremacy that engulfed the country.
“This attachment to the imagined South expressed how white Northerners felt about freed men and women and aligned with their own racism and the rise of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that raged across the country in the late 19th century alongside Social Darwinism,” Cox said.
Cox said Black journalists and scholars of the time criticized popular culture for stereotypically portraying Black individuals and hindering the budding Civil Rights Movement.
“[Black scholars] argue that such stereotypes are detrimental to Black morale across the nation,” Cox said. “How could the Civil Rights Movement make any kind of headway when the most influential form of popular media did not allow Black men and women to be seen as anything other than servants or slaves?”
Cox also described how the use of Confederate monuments allowed for the cementation of white dominance in the South and acted as a means of intimidation.
“As Southern states reduce the 15th amendment to words on paper, as they excise Black men from the political sphere and their right to vote, it’s that same time Confederate monuments appear during that period as they serve white supremacy,” Cox said.
Today, the Black Lives Matter movement has led to an increased shift toward removing Confederate statues across the country, particularly as communities begin to look at the monuments in their own regions and not just in the South, according to Cox.
“George Floyd’s murder pushes that needle further and more Confederate monuments have been removed in the aftermath,” Cox said. “And since this time—since 2017, probably more than any other—Americans have turned their gaze inward to their own communities and not just looking at the South as this place where it happens.”
Cox said that grappling with the history of Southern romanticism has lasting implications for Black Americans even today.
“The attachment to the South of our imagination … is an attachment with real world consequences for people of color,” Cox said. “It’s an attachment infused with white supremacy, even now, a desire to control Black lives.”
