Another absurdity in the vein of taking Robert Lee off the UVA game. http://www.knoxnews.com/story/enter...s-name-change-now-called-stampede/1017388001/
Shaming peoples of their history worked really well during Reconstruction. The blowback from these decisions should be glorious.
I am completely ok with not celebrating the Confederacy (statues etc). If I were a black person, I wouldn't want to walk by my courthouse and have Bobby Lee staring down at me from atop Traveller. CSA stuff needs to come down from public places. Caving into our crazy culture and removing the name "Dixie" is a far cry from that imo. Bunch of hysteria.
The story of Reconstruction has been a lie for 150 years and perpetuated for a long time in the North and South. The issue is that racism was so completely embedded, accepted and prevalent that the clean up has been lengthy and exhausting. The culture of celebrating the Confederacy was simply massive. Plus, those lamenting the loss of history are off, too. Much of the stuff was just shitty and baloney history, anyway.
That is the origin, but the original line drawn by Mason and Dixon was pre-Revolutionary War between Maryland and Pennsylvania and did not have anything to do with slaves according to Wikipedia.
my 11th grade history teacher taught us all about the evil industrialist radical republicans and how they abused the south during Reconstruction. She never missed a chance to tell us how Lincoln was a moderate and would have thwarted the radicals had he lived. Tangentially, US Grant is my Anerican hero. New book on him is first rate. His Presidency has been smeared a good deal by Lost Cause types. My dislike of the Dixie Stampede name change has nothing to do with glorifying the Confederacy.
Ok. But the celebration of “Dixie” is celebrating being below the line—the line that legally allowed people to own other people. Everyone can decide what that means for themselves, but it’s a tad bit arrogant to say “that’s not what it means to me, so that isn’t what it means.” A compromise is we just all start saying “SEC! SEC! SEC!,” and move on. Until that becomes about the exploitation of youth for profit. But I’m sure by then we’ll have something “uniquely cultural” to us, again. Or at least Alabama and Georgia will.
Now, I don't mind chopping wood. And I don't care if the money's no good. You take what you need. And you leave the rest. But they should never. Have taken the very best.
To me this just sounds like people that want to get mad about something. I get the Confederacy and Rebel flag. Fighting to preserve slavery should be regretted and not celebrated. But the idea that the south can't be proud of anything at all unique to itself because there were slaves here for longer than other places (they were in north and south at the time the line was drawn) just strikes me as PC-ness out of control.