The civil war is always painted as a war for the "fiscal" south. In other words, the south's economy could not survive without slavery. But, within that understanding is the reality that Caucasians were not slaves. Hence, the USA Civil War was a war of White Supremacy and why the attachment of the confederate flag to modern-day White Supremacists.
The degree of which southern culture permeates the culture of the USA is rather incredible and isn't going to disappear overnight. It will take at least a generation to dismantle the entrenched memorializing. The civil war ended in 1865. It has been 155 years and this culture is not only wrong but, a problem for modern-day America. It is time to end the intrusion of the Civil War South and return tackle the problems facing southern families in the way of health care and economic viability rather than the reality today of the working poor.
Fall 2011
Reaping What You Sow: Southern Cultures, Black Traditions, and Black Women
By Cynthia Mikell
This is an inquiry into Southern cultures, (click here) Black traditions, and Black women with a focus on the life of one Black woman educator. Drawing upon the works of Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning African American woman, novelist, and master storyteller, Toni Morrison (1970, 1973, 1976, 1987, 1988, 1993, 2003, & 2008); activist and Black feminist protest thinker and writer, bell hooks (1981, 1984, 1995, & 2000); the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, activist, and womanist, Alice Walker (1983); the Black feminist thinker and writer, Patricia Hills Collins (1998, 2000), and the critical race theorist and the first tenured African-American professor of Law at Harvard University, Derrick Bell (1992, 1995); I create a composite (He, 2003) main character, Marie Sincerely Lucky, an ordinary farm girl from a rural Southern community. I utilize Marie as a persona to tell key life events and experiences using fiction (which is not widely accepted in academia as a methodology) and the seasonal metaphor (literal and Biblical) which becomes the titles of chapters and sections throughout my dissertation....
