Oh, Hell, No

Wednesday, on Facebook, we posted the same graphic we posted on election day. Two hands shaking, with the words, “We voted. Now, let’s work together.”

Our folks seemed to like that graphic just fine the day before — you know, when we believed we’d be happy to work together with the people we just beat in the election. But many people screamed back at us.

An old friend, a musician in Nashville and one of our most steadfast supporters since the beginning, wrote this: “You want me to work with the ‘lock her up’ guy? The ‘no Muslims’ guy? The pussy grabber? What part of ‘Bitter’ does The Bitter Southerner not understand?”

More poignantly, a young woman wrote, “You can't work with those who want you dead. I'm utterly afraid today, a bisexual living in Alabama. They will burn me at the stake soon.”

If you think those people are overreacting, you're wrong. Just look at this.

So let’s get something straight here: We will not shy away from shining the harshest of lights on anybody who would commit violence, terror or harassment against anyone because of who they are. And no, my old friend Jon, we will never ask any of our readers to “work with” someone who does not respect the rule of law, who would ban people from this nation based on religion, who brags about sexual assault.

Oh, hell, no. Those are the people we have to fight to our dying breath, but we must fight with dignity and with class and with the long view in mind. The fight for human rights across the South and around the world has raged for a long time, and it rages still. In my most pessimistic moments, I wonder if it will still rage long after I’m gone. But I absolutely refuse to forget the words of one of my heroes, the Civil Rights Leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis.

“If you're not hopeful and optimistic, then you just give up. You have to take the long hard look and just believe that if you're consistent, you will succeed.”

We’d be nuts to look at what happened this week and say, “Oh, don’t worry. It’ll be OK in the end.” But we must find reasons to be hopeful and optimistic, because fighting the battles ahead of us now will be hard. We have to find the same faith that drove Congressman Lewis and his fellow citizens across that bridge in Selma.

Southerners now have to stretch farther and reach higher to build our understanding of the South and each other. In no other way can we make the place better. For our part at The Bitter Southerner, we’re going to do two things.

1. We’re going to start difficult conversations.

2. We’re going to do more stories about issues that keep the South from reaching the potential that all of us — you, the reader, us, the staff, everybody — see in our region.

Here’s how we’re getting started. First, we are making a serious commitment to bring more voices of people of color into The Bitter Southerner. You’ll see that start over the next few weeks as we introduce a new series of columns. One of those columns will be about Southern music, and I’ll be taking turns writing it with Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, one of the nation’s leading scholars on hip-hop culture. Joyce and I met at South by Southwest in the spring, and we struck up a friendship. We both believe in the power of Southern music: It’s just that she was raised on beats and rhymes and I was raised on twangs and whines. We believe that by having conversations with each other, we’re going to stake out even more of the common ground that black and white Southern music have always shared. We also believe we’ll become even better friends.

On the subject of food, one of our columnists will be L. Kasimu Harris of New Orleans, who writes interesting takes on the foods of our home region.

If you are a Southern writer, photographer, creator, whatever, we want your voice. We want The Bitter Southerner to become the first Southern publication ever to pull off the trick of gathering a diversity of voices that reflects the true nature of the South. Like we said, if you say you’re a Southerner, we need to hear from you. My email is chuck@bittersoutherner.com. If you’ve got something to say, we want to hear it.

On that second point, we’re going to dig in and do stories about those who have great difficulty finding a home in the South. We have a story that’s been in the works for several months now — and you’ll see it soon — that looks at four organizations around the South that have sprung up over the last 30 years to meet a serious need: how to create a sense of family and home for young LGBTQ Southerners, too many of whom are disowned by their families and left to fend for themselves. (And it’s coming from our own Amelia Hess, a Tulane University student who interned with us this summer, a courageous and thoughtful member of the LGBTQ community.)

Of equal importance is the need for us to venture more frequently into the rural South for our stories. On election night, I could not help but think about my late, great old man, Clarence, and his 11 brothers and sisters in our little hometown of Ellijay, in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. All 12 of them grew up knowing that although life could be hard, they would always have a way to make a living and make lives and families there in Gilmer County. Maybe none of them would get rich, but they could live dignified lives there. And they did, every one of them.

The members of my family who chose to stay in Ellijay and build their lives there don’t have the same confidence my father’s generation had. I see too many of them and others in their community working low-paying jobs that barely keep them out of poverty.

We have to head into the rural South and learn what needs learning. We never have forgiven — and will never forgive — racism and needless phobias. Neither to some dude on the street, nor among our own families. We believe too strongly in the basic equality of every individual.

Everybody who reads the BS understands what it feels like to be the “other,” the misfit, even in their own families. We doubt you’d give a damn about our stories if that wasn’t true. But that means we have the responsibility to acknowledge that neither political party has done much to address the economic and cultural fallout that rural America has suffered with the rise of industrial agriculture, urbanization, globalization and technology. As a result, it’s clear that rural people started to feel like the “other,” too. They were mad enough about it to hand us our asses in Tuesday’s election. We can’t get better, as a region, without attempts to understand them — and to encourage them to understand us.

Maybe we’re pollyannas, but we never forget the words of old warriors like John Lewis — a man beaten down for the color of his skin on that bridge in Selma so long ago, but who still reminds us of the power of optimism and hopefulness.

We might not break it down quite as simply as David Wong, a child of rural, deep-red Illinois, did in Cracked, but it does provoke thought when he writes, “Already some of you have gotten angry, feeling this gut-level revulsion at any attempt to excuse or even understand these people. After all, they're hardly people, right? Aren't they just a mass of ignorant, rageful, crude, cursing, spitting subhumans? Gee, I hope not. I have to hug a bunch of them at Thanksgiving.”