The South's final defeat

First they lost the Civil War, then they lost the battle against civil rights, and now comes this, the white South's last defeat: demographics.

[I]t is difficult, if not impossible, for many white Southerners to disentangle regional culture (Southern) from race (white) and ethnicity (British Protestant). The historical memory of white Southerners is not of ethnic coexistence and melting-pot pluralism but of ethnic homogeneity and racial privilege. Small wonder that going from the status of local Herrenvolk to local minority in only a generation or two is causing much of the white South to freak out.

The demographic demise of the white South is going to be traumatic for the nation as a whole. [...] 

[T]he old-stock Yankees in the Northeast and Midwest did not accept their diminished status in their own regions without decades of hysteria and aggression and political gerrymandering. The third and final defeat of the white South, its demographic defeat, is likely to be equally prolonged and turbulent. Fasten your seat belts.

If only for white Southerners intolerable whining, it will be traumatic for all of us.

The white South’s last defeat

By Michael Lind

February 5, 2013 | Salon

URL: http://www.salon.com/2013/02/05/the_white_souths_last_defeat/