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Reclaiming the South thadious m. davis I n discussing the origins of his classic study From Slavery to Freedom (1947) John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke University and former chairman of President Bill Clinton’s advisory board on race, talked about the need for the text in the 1940s and his writing it while teaching five classes at Durham’s segregated North Carolina College. While pointing to the phenomenal success of the paperback edition in the 1960s, after the surge of Civil Rights activism created a larger demand for a comprehensive history of black people in the United States, Franklin remarked, “I haven’t taught [black history] in thirty years. . . . I teach history of the South.”1 That casual but pointed remark, to use a cliché, “leaped from the page” and into the notes for my own work on race and region. Like a found poem, it said without embellishment what I had been laboring to say. The process of redefining southern culture is, I believe, much like Franklin’s description of writing his book: “There was no original research. . . . It was a matter of organizing , reconstructing and conceptualizing.”2 This essay is, in a sense, descriptive ; it identifies vital contemporary activity, suggests some underlying causes, and explains the activity as a response to particular needs: the recognition of the exclusion of a major aspect of self from the conception of identity and the determination to achieve a redress by communal positionality within the landscape of the South. It also begins and contextualizes my larger project on race, region, and writing. Though the historical presence of blacks in the actual or imagined landscape of the South has put forward more than one idea of the region, that presence is 57 1. John Hope Franklin, quoted in David Newton, “Publisher’s Pushing Made Franklin Write Best-Selling History of Blacks,” Durham Morning Herald, 8 October 1987, p. 2B. 2. Newton, “Publisher’s Pushing Made Franklin Write,” 1. thadious m. davis 58 perhaps more problematic today, when there is an ongoing attempt to link the region to concepts more in keeping with the slick media image of the Sun Belt. Downplaying the presence of blacks and of racial and ethnic minorities generally may be a way of simultaneously asserting changed conditions in the region and denying one significant catalyst for those changes. Though there are sociologists of the South who choose to write only about white southerners in isolation from matters of race by referring to them as an “ethnic group,” or ethnic entity, that tendency implies a fresh attempt to define the region and its culture without one of the major components. The matter of race is undermined, dismissed as somehow applicable only to blacks and inapplicable to new considerations of the region. A white racial identity becomes normative—but, even more significant, whiteness elides all else, so that there is no need to refer to difference. In fact, the idea of race in defining the region has not merely meant the historical presence of blacks in the American South, or of Native Americans in the region, but the presence of whites, particularly Anglo-Saxons, in much of the region, who defined race in terms of difference from their majority group rather than as a self-defining factor. “Not white” or “nonwhite,” or even distinctions based on polar opposites such as “colored” or “black,” did not directly address the matter of “white.” More important, these “not” definitions achieved an acceptance of self-definition and selfindividuation based on exclusion. They also helped to perpetuate a binary mode of thinking and writing about the South as a region so that, despite advances in race relations in the South and the arrival in numbers of different groups of people from Mexico and Latin America, from Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the notion of two exclusive and oppositional groups permeates discourses on the southern region and southern writing, even when “the black other” is not mentioned directly. The normative stance was perhaps most transparent in the 1980s when there was a resurgence of interest in discourses on the South and new regionalisms in general. The tendency toward exclusion, then, did not remain applicable only to individuals but became one of the primary ways of defining the region and its culture , not only for cultural insiders but for outsiders as well. (“Slavery” and a “slave-based economy” historically provided one primary means for cultural outsiders...

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