There is a push among some southern whites in the U.S. for a separate category on the census. The Southern Legal Resource Center is calling on self-proclaimed “Confederates” to declare their heritage when they are counted in the 2010 Census. According to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the organization is urging white Southerners to declare their “heritage and culture” by classifying themselves as “Confederate Southern Americans” on the line on the form, question No. 9, that asks for race. Check “other” and write “Confed Southern Am” on the line beside it.
In a move that appropriates the language of multiculturalism, the director this organization says:
“In this age of honoring diversity, Southern/Confederate people are the last group in America that can be maligned, ridiculed and defamed with impunity. Using the Census to unite the Southern/Confederate community can be a significant first step to our obtaining rights and recognition that all American ethnic groups are entitled to.”
Scholar Tara McPherson, USC, has written about neo-confederate groups such as this in a chapter called “I’ll take my stand in Dixie-Net: White guys, the South, and cyberspace,” in Kolko, B. E., L. Nakamura, and G. B. Rodman’s edited volume, Race in Cyberspace, New York:Routledge (2000), and in her book, Reconstructing Dixie, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, (2003). McPherson’s take on these groups is complex, nuanced and theoretically informed by cultural studies.
A key point from her work are important to note here about this move to racialize the census in a new way by “Confed Southern Am’s.” Although it would be easy to place these neo-Confederates in a group with other white supremacist groups, McPherson cautions that this is too simplistic and facile. In contrast to other white southern groups may affiliate themselves with a “Lost Cause” ideology that characterize blacks as racial Others who are either loyal ex-slaves who benefited from plantation life or a dangerous ‘cancer,’ the neo-confederates focus almost exclusively on whiteness, albeit a whiteness that is naturalized and taken-for-granted (McPherson, 2003, p.110).
Thus, rather than engaging in overt expressions of racism, the neo-Confederates that McPherson studies adopt the language of multiculturalism in an attempt to place regional, Southern, whiteness as equivalent to African American or any of the other identities now represented in Questions 8 and 9 on the 2010 census. Why do this? It’s a rhetorical and political strategy that seeks to undermine moves toward racial equality by de-emphasizing the power and social resources associated with ‘whiteness.’ Once again, the census proves to be useful a lens through which we can view the current landscape of racial politics in the U.S.
Thanks, Jessie. It is amazing how the Census and debates around it foreground so many US racial issues, indeed. As someone raised southern and white, I have watched now for seven decades how before the 1960s almost no one white aggressively or routinely described themselves as white/confederate to more of that over the years. I think one dimension of this is that as Jim Crow and much overt racism declined by the early 1970s, many southern whites had no new and more egalitarian worldview/framing taught to them about how to view and operate in a (somewhat desegregated) non-jim-crow world. So they started using the confederate battle flag (new really in the 1960s) to reassert as part of the effort to be sure they maintained white power and white control in South, actually and symbolically — which of course whites (esp. powerful whites) never ever lost.
And, again, white decisionmakers need to be featured in our analyses of key Census decisions stuff. “The people” do not make these decisions.
This is sad, just plain sad.
Amazing that these low mentality in-bred subhumans would show themselves, but then again, stupid is what stupid does.