Lessons Learned From the “Accidental Racist”

In But Not Of

A column posted by Judy Mottl and written by the Rev. J. Gary Brinn.

The night before we got walloped with snow, I was at the Nassau Coliseum. I was there for a concert of country music, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but truthfully, I still was.

There in the parking lot before the show, a bunch of young adults in the bed of a jacked-up truck drinking and waving a huge Confederate flag. I thought they couldn't possible get what it means, or at least I prayed they didn't. You see, I'm a son of the South.

Not just a son of the South, but descended from what we call FFV, that is “First Families of Virginia,” slave-owning farmers and businessmen who we celebrate as patriots and “founding fathers.”

I'm old enough to have seen the last of the Jim Crow era, young enough to have escaped the most obvious racist indoctrination. I have seen southern inner-cities and the shanties of sharecroppers.

This all came flooding back a couple of weeks ago, just days before I was due to fly home for a week of visiting grandma and mom, a week of grits and barbeque and biscuits and gravy. Brad Paisley released a new album that includes a duet with LL Cool J called “Accidental Racist.”

And the alternate realities of mass media, social media and the blogosphere went nuts. Paisley was accused of being not an accidental racist, but a full-out racist.

The last thing I would ever do is excuse racism. But I think that just as the critics accuse Paisley of not getting it, so the critics don't get it. I do. From earliest childhood I was raised with what Paisley's song describes as “Southern Pride.”

We visited Civil War battlefields, we celebrated Lee-Jackson Day, and it was all done in a sanitized way that was meant to put brackets around slavery and racism.

I was told again and again that the “war of northern aggression,” as it was referred to, was about state's rights, not about slavery.
 
Cousins Robert and George, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, these were the heroes of my childhood, a little less than Jesus, but far above we mere mortals.

Racism? Yes, but of the most pernicious kind. And it takes a lot of work and education to climb out of it. It took me years to see that the “genteel” culture of the South could only exist because slaves were doing all of the dirty work behind the scenes.

It is a difficult path that leads to the realization that there is little to admire in your cultural heritage. Unlearning is the hardest learning of all. I was fortunate enough to have many patient teachers, to attend a great college and a great divinity school.

My version of privilege is educational and cultural privilege, which helped me eventually, frustratingly slowly, to recognize that romanticizing the antebellum South is an act of racism. But that's where I am. Many white Southern males haven't been as lucky as me, haven't been exposed to other cultures, to great teachers and classmates.  

For many teens and young adults in the South, Paisley's song will be the first time they've heard a certifiably Southern man with all the attendant white-privilege confront the complexity of the problem.

Most have no clue that 'Southern pride” is racist, much less their annual “Junior League Antebellum Ball.” Paisley's work is not perfect, certainly not from a liberal-elite post-colonialist post-modern perspective. But maybe it will start a conversation.

Maybe, rather then vilifying an artist who took on a difficult topic, we can celebrate his courage.

Maybe rather than looking for the splinter in his eye, we can work on the 2x4's in our own eyes, can admit that we critique from a position of privilege and continue the slow learning and teaching that leads to justice.

In a nation where people wear “Put the white back in the White House” shirts at Tea Party rallies, I can think of few tasks as important.