Ellie judges more songs on New Orleans, and also enjoys referring to herself in third person

So I wrote a post a while back about Reckless Kelly’s new album and my disappointment with their take on Katrina (ok, my outright anger and self-righteous indignation.) And this week, I have discovered yet another Katrina-related misstep by one of my favorite Texas (ish) Country bands, Jason Boland and the Stragglers. Sigh.

“Sons and Daughters of Dixie”

God bless you Mississippi
God bless you New Orleans
For holding through the hard times
Like few have ever seen
Otherwise left high and dry
With nothing there to use
Into the arms of Houston, Mobile and Baton Rouge

Those who turned a blind eye
Will answer for their sins
And be denied redemption
When your cities rise again
The backs shall not be broken
Of the soul that won’t be killed
One thing a southern man knows how to do is to rebuild

Look away, glory’s just a few miles down the road
A better day is at the end of this long road you must hoe
If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise,
We’ll make it through another year
Keep the sons and daughters of Dixie dry
And wipe away the tears

Resurrection morning
The stone will roll away
Back into the levees
With a little luck they’ll stay
One thing I can’t stomach
Is how the hill watched it bleed
Bet they’d sing a different tune if the flood had hit D.C.

They looked away hell was just a few miles down the road
A better day never came for the ones who were not chose
The good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
We’ll make it through another year
Keep the sons and daughters of Dixie dry and wipe away the tears

If I were really going to take this blogging thing seriously, I would go break out my copy of “Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity” by James Cobb (link to his blog here: http://cobbloviate.com/), in which he takes his readers through a history of the South and how people have thought about the region from the antebellum era through the somewhat current post-Civil Rights moment. As he does this, he focuses one chapter on white Southerners, and then one chapter on black Southerners. Back and forth, back and forth, through the whole book. I could pick out any of the historians, literary critics, scholars, and so on that I have read over the past four years who all agree that there is a huge divide between white and black experience in the South. Even the term, “the South,” has, historically, been used to indicate the world inhabited by white southerners, excluding our black population from consideration. The difference in that experience is largely lost on white Americans, due to what I like to call the privilege of ignorance.

I have totally forgotten where I first ran into the term, “the privilege of ignorance,” but the example given was this: during his presidency, Ronald Reagan met with Francois Mitterand, then President of France. Mitterand knew some English, though he was not completely fluent. Reagan, however, knew no French, so their conversation took place in English, obviously favoring Reagan, who could move much more easily in his native tongue. I have no idea if this story is true; either way, it works as an example. (It might have been Jacques Chirac that Reagan met with, as he was Prime Minister at the time.)

White people, not just in the South but also in the rest of America, have the privilege of ignorance. They have the privilege of living in the majority, of not having to face, on a daily basis, what it means to be part of a visible minority. They don’t have to understand that experience, and sometimes, they can act like it doesn’t exist. They generalize their experience as if it can stand in for the experience of people not like them. It is a problem that all minorities have when faced with the gaze of the majority group, whether you are considering race, gender, class, sexuality, region, religion, etc. Generalizing from the majority experience leaves out some of the most important problems, and the process of the creation of those problems, for minorities. Without that understanding, how can we do anything to remedy injustice and inequality?

Which is why this song makes me very uncomfortable. I don’t want to call it racist; rather, I think of it as being unaware of race. Which seems pretty remarkable to me when you consider that it is about New Orleans and Katrina. Before Katrina hit, the population of New Orleans was nearly 70% African-American. From Kanye West’s infamous statement to Spike Lee’s incredible (and incredibly depressing) documentary on the hurricane and its aftermath, much of the discussion of the impact of Katrina and of the subsequent bungling of the relief and recovery efforts has centered around the topic of race. And certainly the continued effects of endemic, institutional American racism are part of the reason so many of New Orleans’ black residents were at risk in the first place.

But the song makes no mention of race, and actually includes a couple of references that, in their unexamined form, actually exclude African-Americans from the narrative. First, the phrase “look away,” from the first line of the chorus, is a quote from the song “Dixie,” which is now widely acknowledged to be pretty racist. It has been a point of contention on college and high school campuses across the South since the Civil Rights Movement, as African-American members of those communities fought to have it removed from marching band playlists. I think Ole Miss still plays it, but I haven’t been to a football game in some time so I’m not sure. Even the word “Dixie” is really only used to reference the world of white southerners. Its use in the title and chorus of the song don’t really do anything to dispute that fact.

Second, the line about “one thing a southern man knows how to do is to rebuild” really bothers me. (Though it sings a lot better than it reads.) My reading of this line is that it is a reference to Reconstruction. If I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure African-Americans weren’t really doing any rebuilding at that point so much as they were doing…building. It’s just another example of generalized rhetoric that covers up the crucial differences among racial experience.

Why? Why, Jason Boland? Why, Willy Braun? Why do you ignore these things that seem to be such an entrenched part of the rhetoric of New Orleans? My favorite bands from the Deep South don’t make the same mistakes in regards to race that you do. The Drive-By Truckers do not forget about race or accidentally preclude black southerners from their narratives because they are unaware of the connotations of their terminology. Neither do the Dexateens. The North Mississippi Allstars would never do that either.

I have a very vague and completely un-provable theory as to why this is true. I have been thinking a lot lately about the difference among states’ big symbols. No, I don’t have a more technical term than “big symbols.” I was thinking about using “metanarratives” but that doesn’t quite work. Alabama and Mississippi’s big symbols are things like slavery, plantations, cotton, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, segregation, George Wallace/Ross Barnett. Our big symbols are all about race. And though Texas had plantations and slavery and cotton, fought on the side of the South in the Civil War, had its share of big events in the Civil Rights Movement, and plenty of racist, segregationist politicians, those are not its big symbols. Texas’ big symbols are things like cowboys and longhorns, the Alamo, and Texas independence. (Also George W. Bush.) No one is telling Texas that it needs to change its state flag so that it doesn’t include the Confederate flag, or any kind of reference to the Confederate flag. The history of Texas has this interplay, but it also has Mexico to deal with. The major thrust of Texas history bypasses the concept of race as it is understood in the Deep South.

This might also be the place to point out that neither of these bands (or their respective songwriters) are actually from Texas, but both are from states whose big symbols also have little or nothing to do with the Deep South’s black/white divide. JBS are from Oklahoma. Oklahoma’s African-American population is about 8%. Texas’ is about 10%. Willy Braun is from Idaho, whose population is an overwhelming 97% white, which is also less than 1% Af-Am. Oklahoma does have a substantial minority population, but it is more Native American than anything else. Living in Oklahoma or Idaho or Texas doesn’t require the same attention to black/white relations that exists in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana. They don’t have quite the same kind of history or demographics.

Now, writing about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina without writing about race is inexcusable. But maybe this helps me understand how someone could look at that disaster and manage not to see what is so clear and unavoidable to me.