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"HOW DUMB ARE Southerners?" Mr. H. roared.There were thirty boys before him, standing in double ranks on an expanse of burnished concrete in the basement gym of Forest Avenue Elementary in Verona, New Jersey. The room was too low-ceilinged for a proper basketball net, but we school kids did our gymnastics there by day and suffered through square-dancing classes, and on one recent morning we'd lined up in a long queue to receive our Salk vaccines. On this night in the early 1960s I stood on that burnished concrete in handbook-perfect parade rest posture, ankles apart, shoulders back, hands behind my back, eyes straight ahead, as the lecture proceeded and the lecturer paced. We were Verona Boy Scout Troop No. 1, and Mr. H. was our troop master, which gave him the apparent duty of concluding our Thursday meetings with a scholarly disquisition, which this week concerned Southern mental incapability.
The subject had come up (it came up periodically) because Confederate flags were in the news. The appending of the Southern Cross symbol to the Georgia state flag a few years earlier-as a declaration of "state's rights" resistance to desegregation-had ignited an awareness of the persistent nostalgia for Confederate iconography among white Southerners. "They think the Stars and Bars was the flag of the Confederacy?' Mr. H. said, "when that was actually a field of blue. They're so stupid they don't even know their own history?'
His critique did not have to rest on its merits: its merits rested on a widely accepted social consensus that extended beyond Southern stupidity to encompass Southern venality and Southern sexual depravity and Southern moral culpability, adding up to a Southern exceptionalism as a locus of American evil. It was a critique the white South had worked hard to invite, with its slaveholding and Jim Crow history and violent resistance to integration. And insofar as the South today devotes itself to voter suppression legislation and white supremacist politics in the era of Black Lives Matter, it invites the same condemnation.
The South's diabolical exceptionalism remains intact. And yet as I sit here, fifty years on, ankles apart, shoulders back, eyes forward, and hands on the keyboard, that benighted status in the national mind still rankles. Is this because the...