Heritage Not Hate? Defining The True Meaning Of Southern Heritage & Confederate Identity

Defining The True Meaning Of Southern Heritage & Confederate Identity 

By C.W. Roden

"It’s about 'heritage, not hate,' I hear. This is sometimes naive, sometimes disingenuous, sometimes downright ignorant and sometimes a mingling of all three. I’m all for remembering history. I’m all for celebrating heritage. I’m all for celebrating the South. It has grits. It has Faulkner. It has barbecue. I’m just confused by the logic here. Why, if what you want to do is celebrate the South -- but not the racist, ugly parts of the South -- would you choose to do so by waving a symbol literally used by the Confederacy? This just seems like the least efficient possible route of achieving what you say you want to achieve."

That quote comes from some anonymous Social "Just Us" regressive and anti-Confederate heritage reactionary, and it sums up perfectly just how far behind many of them truly are when it relates to the idea of both Southern and Confederate heritage as a whole. 

It seems like these days those of us who honor Confederate heritage hear this argument -- or more likely some far less well spoken and more profanity-laden version of this talking point -- from those who remain largely ignorant of exactly what it is defenders of that heritage actually honor. 

Sadly many of the most ignorant and uninformed are themselves Southerners of Confederate descent that believe in their hearts based on some personal experience, or a great deal of misinformation, that there can be nothing behind the display of the Dixie Cross banner, or the many Confederate monuments throughout the Southland other than some vaguely defined attempt to promote fear and bigotry. 

Once upon a time back in my youth, this blogger once felt as these people did and understand where they come from. 

Now obviously if y'all have spent more than half an hour reading this blog then y'all know that I have long since grew past my ignorance on the subject of Southern heritage and Confederate identity long ago. This didn't happen overnight, not did it come from any one source.

It came from a couple of years of critical thinking and from taking the time and trouble to not only visit Confederate memorial services, but to talk with those who attended them and see them as free-thinking individuals rather than group-think caricatures and stereotypes. I did not allow myself to be indoctrinated in "Lost Cause" nostalgia, nor did I close my mind to new experiences as far too many of today's youth appear to be fond of doing. 

I watched these men, women and children dressed up in replica Confederate uniforms and 19th century clothes. I watched as "widows" in black gowns laid wreaths of flowers on graves and monuments for the dead. I watched children and adults alike kneel down to place flags on soldiers graves. I listened to they prayers, to the roll call of the dead, of stories of individual lives and who they were to the people telling them. I did not hear glorification of war, or hatred for anyone -- not even the Union soldier. All I saw were people who cared about the dead in the graves, the men honored on those monuments, and the connection through blood and family they have with the living today.

I learned from observation and keeping an open mind that these were not closed-minded people who saw everything in "Moonlight and Magnolias" terms. Nor were they folks who longed for the days of sitting on a porch while African-Americans and other minorities toiled in the fields and did their yard work. 

In fact I found that not all of them were in fact Anglo-Celtic at all! There were people from all walks of life, from all racial and ethnic identities there to honor the life of Johnny Reb and the men who led them -- many of them also direct descendants. 

What I found was simply a group of fellow Southerners who shared my love for history and personal identity. People whom, for the most part, simply do not look at the world entirely in terms of racial identity politics. White, black, Hispanics, Native, Jewish, Christians, and others -- a virtual tapestry of Southern cultural identity. All equal brothers and sisters who shared one important thing in common: they were all Southern and descendants of the Confederate dead.  

I saw the simple message in all of those memorial services and small acts of honor, especially to those laying in unmarked graves with Unknown Soldier as their own legacy: We remember you, soldier -- and we still care.

The more I learned and the more I came to understand that, these same people welcomed me into their small but interesting family. I was a son of Dixie that came home. A few years later I joined the Sons of Confederate Veterans and since then I have never failed to attend a year observance of Confederate Memorial Day, never failed to help clean the graves of the dead when called upon, or place the flags on their graves, or light luminaries at the monuments in the evenings.  

More so, I have never failed since that time to stand up and speak out whenever someone denigrates my fellow Confederate descendants, my brothers and sisters of Dixie, whenever someone says a cross word about them, or abuses the symbols of the heritage we share in one form or another.

Defining Southern Heritage

Now unfortunately there are still Southerners today who remain ignorant of the true meaning of their own heritage, or reject the idea of what they wrongly believe that heritage is in favor of presenting themselves favorably to modern-day political correct ideologies. For them, and many others who live outside of Dixie, terms like Southern heritage and Heritage Not Hatred mean very little, or are likely viewed as meaningless slogans. 

Perhaps the most amusing example of this comes from one of these regressive lost Southerners I witnessed only a year ago who showed up to protest the yearly reunion of the South Carolina Division Sons of Confederate Veterans, a somewhat middle-aged white woman standing around holding a sign that read: Y'all Means All. 

Ironically, in spire of her abysmal ignorance of the people she came to protest, or to virtue signal against in favor of gaining the approval of her assorted nuts -- oops, I mean peers -- this woman's slogan actually came far closer to the truth than I am certain she realizes -- Maybe not grammatically, but in the overall spirit of its meaning. 

True Southern heritage as a living heritage is about all of us.

To define Southern heritage as a whole the way a Confederate heritage supporter defines it, one would have to imagine that heritage as an large, old patchwork quilt with each square representing different cultural aspects from various origins that go back well before the modern-day Southern culture to pre-European colonial days: Cajuns, Creoles, Scots-Irish, English, Gullah-Geechee, African, Appalachian, Cherokee, ect. 
  
Now imagine that all of these differing cultural groups representing these squares are woven together on the same patchwork quilt by strings of history and shared cultural experiences that inter-connect them into the larger whole. In the end creating a beautiful old quilt. 

This old quilt called Southern heritage has its torn places certainly, its burn marks and old stains representing some of the less attractive parts of our shared identity as a Southern people; yet overall even with those old scars this big beautiful quilt is still held dear by everyone who defines themselves as a proudly Southern person. 

Everyone who has ever lived in what we call The South -- the New South or the Old South, really makes no difference -- and everyone who lives in it today is a part of that old patchwork quilt of Southern heritage.
 
Confederate heritage is only one of those patches in the quilt interwoven with the others. A frayed and worn one to be sure, but one that is as precious at the whole quilt itself, and also deeply connected to the other various multi-cultural patches mentioned. 

For those of us who honor Southern-Confederate historical heritage, we do not so much honor the War Between the States itself -- the destruction and the loss of human life, nor necessarily the Confederate government or its ideals -- although there are people who include the more positive of those in terms of representative government as opposed to the negatives which include, unfortunately slavery. That is not to say some people don't, although they represent only a fraction of the Confederate heritage movement. 

Rather when we honor this aspect of our living Southern heritage, we honor the courage of the Confederate soldier himself -- soldiers many recognize as American veterans (the old Union soldiers who fought against him accepted him as a fellow American soldier after the War ended) and his legacy in terms of the martial spirit he gave to his ancestors -- Southern men who served in the US military and fought with the descendants of his former Union opponents to defeat the enemies of America. That too is also a part of American heritage as a whole. 

For us the Confederate soldier wasn't just some nameless footnote in history, he was our ancestors. People who shared our last names, our family. Our blood. A piece of us. It is just about wanting to honor one's own sense of personal identity and the heritage given through blood and a sense of personal honor. 

Nothing more and never anything less than that.

Finally, because Confederate heritage is so interwoven into Southern identity as much as any other aspect of Southern cultural identity, it is a living heritage that represents not just one group of Southerners, but all Southerners everywhere of all colors and creeds worldwide. That heritage belongs to us all, even if one does not feel like honoring it while another does. It belongs more to the descendants of Confederate soldiers -- also men and boys of all races and religions -- who fought under the battle flag; yet that heritage is a gift to all Southern born people everywhere.

Now what happens when one tries to remove a square from a quilt folks? Obviously there is a large hole in the quilt, but more so the strings that hold the quilt together to other squares begin to come loose and unravel because those same strings bind that one square to others and in turn those other squares to others still. When you choose to reject one square, the entire quilt becomes useless or worse, falls apart.

To deny any of that, or to claim that you can pick and choose which aspects of that living heritage defines you is the worst sort of folly. Certainly one or more squares can personally represent your individual cultural identity directly, but overall the rest of those squares are also a part of you and other Southerners as a whole.

Our shared Southern heritage is all a part of us. Appalachian history is Southern history. Black history is Southern history. Scots-Irish history is Southern history. Cherokee history is Southern history. Hispanic history is Southern history. And yes Confederate history is Southern history. We are all bound together and a part of that same patchwork quilt that is Southern heritage.

   
So yeah, in that respect: Y'all does in fact mean All.