What's with "Southern Pride"?

Where are you seeing this? I live in NC, and I haven’t noticed anything.

It dates back to the Civil War loss.

If it was on the side of an eighteen wheeler, it is a group of truckers that are a business consortium. They are top of the line long haul truckers.

What @marinelife said. I can’t speak to North Carolina specifically, but some folks I’ve met from the South (of the US that is) still make reference to it.

“You yankees sure think you’re smart.”
“Down in the South, we know what family’s all about.”

Just a couple of things said to me like this.

I certainly wouldn’t assume it’s everyone from the South though.

I agree with @marinelife that it goes back to the Civil War. It’s probably the reason you still see people with Confederate flags down there and it doesn’t seem to be as big of a deal as if someone in the North had one. I get the sense that the Confederate flag in the South represents unity and old values, whereas up North it represents slavery, bigotry and racism.

I think the things that people have said to @cprevite are bullshit, personally. I’ve been to small towns in Vermont that feel just the same as the South.

It definitely stems from the Civil War and Reconstruction. I’ve heard many Southerners joke that the South would rise again. And during my stay in North Carolina, I was told time and again that there were two kinds of Yankees, the Yankees who come to visit and the damn Yankees who come to stay. I’m from the Southwest U.S., and my state sits as far south as N.C., so as far as I could tell, a Yankee is anyone who’s ‘not from around here’ .. or there as it were. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone there said to me, “you ain’t from around here are ya?”

The confederate flag, in many ways, represents the triumph of personal and state interests (individual liberty) over the “tyranny” of the federal government. I think there are less offensive ways of displaying “southern pride” – but that’s what a lot of it is. It’s pride in the land, the individual – it’s an objectively good thing, twisted in some ways to be something kind of backwards.

I’m proud of my southern roots, and heritage, as much as I’m proud of my northern education and complex value system that comes from the interaction of the two.

I’ve never understood why anyone would have pride in a tradition defined by its desire to own slaves in defiance of the will of a democratically elected government.

Maybe this is why so many southerners engage in revisionist history where the point of the Civil War wasn’t about the right to own slaves, but rather about brave individuals fighting against the tyranny of the (democratically elected) federal government (because they were worried it would take their slaves away).

@Qingu – I’ve never understood why someone should be ashamed of who they are or interested in where they came from.

In that case, I’ve never understood why any American would be proud of a country that was built on the backs of slaves. Patriotism is racism.

I was recently in the company of a Southerner for a week who brought up the South and its customs constantly. One night on the trip we had a discussion about it, and why the South doesn’t seem to be able to get past the Civil War. It was quite a heated discussion, but I do think they’re being on the losing side has a lot to do with the “pride.”

@janbb – For me (and I’m a native northerner, but my family is significantly southern and I have lived in the south for a lot of my life) I think a lot of it has to deal with the fact that the civil war is almost universally qualified as a “war about slavery” by a lot of northerners. It ignores a lot of the other elements of the war, and the reasons for it.

@iamthemob Very likely true, but the fact that the issue is still so alive in the South is somewhat perplexing. This guy also said it is called “The War of Northern Aggression” by many older Southerners which does put another slant on it. There is the old adage that history is written by the winners.

@janbb – That adage sort of speaks to the reason why there’s a “revisionist” aspect to the southern-pride “War of Northern Aggression” take on things. When you have people saying it’s one way, it makes the “losers” want to scream about the “real reasons.”

Most taking a fully-fleshed look at the civil war note that it’s somewhere in-between (although arguably slavery had much to do with it, it’s also a pretty nuanced part of the reason).

Agreed!

It’s exactly the same thing as “Yankee Pride” only a little further south.

@iamthemob

So the alternative to having “Southern pride” is having shame?

@DominicX – Nope. Although that’s an alternative, of course. ;-)

What’s wrong with Southern pride? I’m from the south and proud of that fact.

Southern Pride is a clothing line, a popular brand of chewing tobacco, a brand of foods—especially eggs and butter, a trucking company, a company that makes barbecues and smokers, and a big ol’ car dealership in Ashboro, North Carolina. You may be seeing advertising. I really don’t think it’s anything sinister.

Hold on.

@iamthemob, the Civil War was about slavery. To say there were “other reasons” is misleading. These other reasons were in parallel to the primary reason, slavery. For example, the war was about states’ rights… because the Southern states wanted the right to own slaves, and believed (as they explicitly noted in their articles of confederation) that the right to own slaves was worth seceding from a democratically-elected government and starting a war that resulted in the deaths of 600,000 human beings.

I don’t think anyone alive today should feel shame for the actions of their ancestors. (I certainly don’t feel shame for the actions of my ancestors, some random 1850’s Eastern Europeans who were probably jerks in one way or another, as most people were back then).

But nobody should feel pride for a culture that was built around, defined itself by, and ultimately fought a war over its desire to own human beings as chattel. And nobody should try to erase their ancestors moral culpability for one of the greatest atrocities in history by claiming that the war wasn’t really about slavery.

@Qingu

Consider this from Georgia:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests.

These are reasons independent of slavery. Now, in honesty, slavery was the fulcrom on which the entire war turned. You’re right about that. But to say it was “about slavery” is to deny the complexity of the issue of slavery itself as well as that it was the only reason. That’s naive as well as misleading itself.

Further, you’ve linked to information from only four states, and the documents you’ve quoted are excerpts from the DECLARATIONS OF SECESSION not the Articles of the Confederation. That’s not only misleading, but could be considered an outright lie, but is more likely a profound act of carelessness.

Ah, you are right. I can assure you, it was carelessness, not a lie. (The articles of confederation would have been from, what, 1784?)

However, the paragraph about different economic structures you cited is also related to slavery. The reason the South’s prosperity was based on an agricultural economy was largely because that agricultural economy was built on slavery. Maybe this is more of a chicken and egg than I’m giving credit for (did the South shirk industrialism because it was agrarian, or was it agrarian because it shirked industrialism?) But I still think slavery ties into it rather strongly.

Absolutely it does – as I said, it was the fulcrum – and stated earlier that slavery was a huge part of the issue. But people ignore what are non-racist elements to the war that were based on states rights, economy, etc. – these were tied to slavery in many if not most cases, but are rational arguments that can be separated from slavery if we’re talking about “Southern Pride.” ;-)

Well, racism… I would certainly hesitate to say that racism was unique to the South or a cause of the war, since the North was probably just as racist. (Abraham Lincoln was a raving racist by any standard today, thought that blacks could not live with whites, and wanted to send them all back to Africa.)

You can have slavery without racism; slavery existed in most places and times in history and it wasn’t always race-based. That said, obviously slavery in America was race-based, was sustained and justified by appealing to racism, and ended up creating an entirely separate culture and poverty cycle hovering on one race that continues to this day.