Martin Luther King

Today we recognize the life and achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My college is not holding classes, but alas, my husband's college is. It becomes an issue every year. This year, I really wish he did not have to leave the house because the roads are awful. It's too cold for the salt to work, so the snowplows are plowing and sanding, but traffic reports are full of slide-offs, accidents, one including a school bus and car, and general misery.

Some Southern states are taking this time to recognize Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who distinguished himself in the Civil War. He is perhaps better known for having signed the surrender at Appamatox.

People here in Michigan really do not understand what it means to be Southern. It's always interpreted as Racist. You have to have been brought up knowing that sense of defeat and humiliation that studying the Civil War always brings to Southerners, especially the part where the winners, the Yankees, penalized the South so heavily--the imposed governments, the property confiscations, the Carpetbaggers, the destruction of beautiful plantations just for the sake of destroying them--and if you don't know how that feels, and if you think it's just about race, then you are so wrong. Just about every Southern person I know (and obviously, that's quite a few folks) tries really hard not to be racist in any way. But that doesn't mean that they don't have a Confederate flag flying somewhere, even if it's only on the walls of the den. Southern Pride--the South shall rise again!--does not mean slavery or racism or any of those negative things to most of us. It means that we love the place where we were born and raised, and we don't like having to constantly feel defensive and "wrong." The more people from the North try to shame us and lay guilt-trips on us, the more we wish the South had successfully seceded from the Union.

After all, the North can hardly hold its head up high. The first U.S. military draft involved the Army of the North drafting these poor immigrants fresh off the boats from Ireland, Germany, etc., into the war with the South. In many ways, this draft was a form of involuntary servitude in which the servant-soldiers had fewer rights and comforts than black slaves in the South had. That is not to defend slavery--the very idea of it fills me with revulsion--and Dr. King was right and should be admired for his work to end the last formal vestiges of the slave system that caused some people to be denied work, to be allowed fewer rights and privileges, to have to suffer in innumerable unjust ways. As a teacher who loves all her students, black, white, and other, I know that there is no difference in people. All of us feel pride, pain, happiness, grief, all emotions, equally. All of us should be treated equally under the law and in common practice.

That said, I can sit here and cringe, thinking of the many times that non-Southern people have made anti-Southern remarks to me or in my presence and never thought twice about it. After all, the South is this big horrible nasty place that lynches people of color. All Southerners are racists. All Southerners are evil. All Southerners are stupid. Poor. Missing teeth. Married to their cousins. Whatever.

I honor the memory of Dr. King and all he stood for, perhaps more so because I do know what it used to be like in many places in the South. And as a transplant to the North, I know also what it is still like in many places NOT in the South, where people still have to prove their worth if they don't belong to the majority culture. Happy MLK Day, y'all. Dr. S.