Porn for Southerners

When I was younger, my mother watched Gone with the Wind incessantly. For some reason, a film centered on Vivian Leigh acting like a conniving bitch for three hours was not enough the first one hundred viewings. Gone with the Wind essentially became mom’s version of porn.  It may have been the same god damn thing over and over again, but mom still drooled over her battered VHS copy of the film much like a prepubescent twelve year old boy drools over his father’s secret stash. This all seemed harmless until I realized that millions of other Americans—northerners and southerners—viewed Gone with the Wind in the fashion. (I suppose the burning of Atlanta is the film’s “money shot”). Millions of Americans continue to lose brain cells as they watch Margret Mitchell’s plodding, three hour justification for slavery and the society it built.

After nearly eighty years in circulation, a large segment of the American population has absorbed Mitchell’s narrative. In most cases, the film reinforces their preconceived stereotypes of African Americans, which becomes challenging for public historians attempting to incorporate slavery into their interpretations. This usually engenders bitter outrage from Americans steeped in Mitchell’s, and other southern apologists’, bullshit. For instance, R. Wayne Byrd, the president of the Virginia’s Heritage Preservation Association, opposed Virginia’s official acknowledgement of the deleterious effects of slavery, claiming the State of Virginia was caving in to political pressure from racist hate groups like the NAACP (Think of Mr. Byrd as the Larry Flynt to Margaret Mitchell’s Hugh Hefner). Unfortunately, it is still controversial in some parts of this country to acknowledge that slavery was a terrible institution; only in America.

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that, for many other Americans, slavery is simply too painful because of the personal history involved. I cannot even begin to imagine the gamut of emotions an African American must feel when they see interpretations of slavery at museums. For some African Americans, the topic is something they would rather put behind them. However, James Oliver Horton notes that it is virtually impossible to make sense of today’s racial conflicts without a serious discussion about slavery, the institution that created the modern racial hierarchy in the United States. We could either do that or re-watch Margaret Mitchell’s epic porno. Let’s hope we all chose Horton’s alternative.