Southern Culture, Part I

In the Southeastern United States, there is a cottage industry focused on Southern Culture Studies. This is partly an academic enterprise, with much attention to southern culture in history and humanities departments of southern colleges and universities, and with academic conferences and programs focused on southern culture generally, or southern foodways or folkways. There is also a popular component, with much regional interest in southern culture expressed in various festivals celebrating aspects of it or with tourist sites like Stone Mountain near Atlanta.

What is Southern Culture?

What’s usually meant by “Southern Culture” is a set of cultural elements seen as typical of or typifying (not quite the same thing) the South or part of it, rather than the total set of important elements characterizing life in the South in the fullest anthropological sense of “culture.” The sorts of elements most often emphasized are food, language, and a variety of dispositions or character traits.

Food

As I’ve written before, food is particularly meaningful to people (see “Sushi and Globalization”). Like music, the meaning of food is generally without linguistic content, but it nonetheless can carry significant emotional weight and is invested with identity. Food is vital to life, and the foods we grow up with can be associated with home, family, region, and one’s culture in a variety of ways. Interest in Southern food can be general, emphasizing foods common and thought to be quintessentially southern throughout the region (cornbread, collards, black eye peas, sweet tea, fried chicken, or just about anything else fried), or it can emphasize southern regional diversity in foodways (fried mullet in the Pensacola area of the Central Gulf Coast, tamale pie in central Mississippi, vinegar barbecue sauces in central and northern Georgia and other regional barbecue traditions, Cajun and creole cooking in Louisiana, etc.).

Language

Much academic analysis of southern culture focuses on language, especially the study of southern regional dialects and accents. Distinct dialects, and even more so accents, are also one of the most clear markers of southern culture to the lay public. (When I was a child, whenever we would visit relatives in upstate New York, northern relatives would always want my sister and I to "say something southern" or to say "y'all." I'd ask them in turn to say "yous guys.")

Disposition

To many, southern culture means “Southern hospitality,” friendly attitudes, and a laid-back approach to life. Some would also include notions of noble and chivalrous masculinity, gentility, or other dispositions and character traits.

All of these things are, to varying extents, part of southern culture. Much of this is worthy of celebration. (Personally, I’m wary of any sort of glorification of masculinity, and the glorification of an old-style white upper class of southern gentility turns my stomach. Southern food is wonderful – as occasional food – but I worry about the many southerners who eat large amounts of the salty, fatty fare.)

Symbols

“Southern culture” also evokes or brings to mind various symbols of the South. The most controversial of these is the Confederate flag, a.k.a. the Confederate Battle Flag or the Stars and Bars, but a variety of monuments, especially Civil War monuments, throughout the South are also often associated with “Southern Culture” and capable of generating controversy (see two earlier posts: "Race and Public Monuments in Pensacola, Florida" and "Sometimes a Statue is just a Statue.") (Interestingly, the many monuments throughout the region to Martin Luther King, Jr., a man of the South if there ever was one, seem to be much less associated with southern culture, and for clearer reasons much less controversial.)

These things, food, language, socially patterned dispositions, and symbols, are important (if not always clearly good), and they do define the South in certain ways, but as I indicated above, they are only one subset of the patterning of social life in the region. An anthropological perspective on cultural ecology, economy, and social interaction indicates other important features (of at least cultural historical importance) of the South as well.

Cultural Ecology and Economy

In terms of cultural ecology and economy, plantation agriculture dominated and in part (if never wholly) defined the region both before and for a long time after the American Civil War. This was particularly the case through the “cotton belt” stretching across South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, part of Louisiana, and into East Texas, where after Indian removal and after Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made large scale cotton production feasible, this region of the South was largely colonized by new plantations that transformed the social and natural landscape. Long after the abolition of slavery, this sub-region of the south had both the largest black populations and more of the worst abuses of racism.

Race

The South has also been characterized by a contradictory system of racial classification and interaction, emphasizing both racial intermixture and absolute distinction and division.

Many anthropological and sociological analyses of race have emphasized that in North America, racial classification (at least with regard to black and whites) is characterized by hypodescent, sometimes called the “One Drop Rule,” whereby anyone with any known ancestry in one category (in this case “black” – the category historically constructed as inferior in racist logic) is classified as belonging to that category – even if they majority of their ancestry were from the other category. This is in contrast to racial classification systems in other parts of the Americas, e.g. the Caribbean, where race is not thought of in so starkly binary terms, where there is a gradation of categories in between black and white or African and European ends of a continuum.

What has been less noted is that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century, much of the South had a hybrid system which combined the recognition of racial intermixture as with Caribbean race classification and the recognition of absolute and stark division as with North American hypodescent generally. For example, in addition to the categories “black” and “white,” some were categorized as “quadroons” or “octoroons.” Such classifications indicated both racial (and sexual) intermixture, but also emphasized a clear divide. An octoroon was 7/8 white, but it was the 1/8 black ancestry that named the category and marked it as a subset of “black.”

In practice, southern racism has also often had a distinctive intimate quality to it. An older relative of mine who was dear to my heart as I grew up had a very close friend who was a black woman, but at the same time, this relative was in many ways quite racist, having no qualms with making racist generalizations and occasionally using flagrantly racist language. She was typical in this regard. As I grew up in the South, I heard many white racists defend their racism through a lens of intimacy – “We know they’re inferior, because we know them so well,” (usually phrased in contrast to those “damn Yankees” who didn’t know any better). The pattern of interracial friendship with specific individuals alongside a feeling of stark separation between general categories, or even explicit racism, has also been typical in the South.

Race and Class

Historically, race has been intertwined with class in complex ways in the South (as is true most anywhere in the Americas). In the South, there was historically an underclass of poor whites (mostly poor white farmers until well into the 20th century) who saw themselves as having at least a limited stake in the racial system. (This hadn’t always been the case – a number of excellent analyses have spoken of solidarity across race lines by subaltern whites and blacks in the early colonial south, but by the 19th century at least, white racial solidarity could often trump the class antagonism between poor and wealthy whites.) This stake in the racial system was partly about identity, about being part of a superior racial group even if poor, but it was also partly about economics. Slavery and later Jim Crow laws, by prohibiting free action, including economic action, of blacks, shored up the economic positions, even if they were still weak, of poor and working class southern whites.

Many southern whites would understandably like to forget about things like the long history of plantations as ecological and social systems in the South, and the dynamics of race, racism, class, and Jim Crow, and to simply move on. For many southern blacks (for whom such things are not ancient history, but things they experienced, or at least things experienced by their parents and/or grandparents), these are also part of southern culture (not in place of southern food, dialects, or laid-back attitudes, but alongside those things), and for many, who also want to “move on,” moving on entails remembering this less positive side of southern culture and history and dealing with the lasting material legacy of it.

Income Inequality Isn't The Problem - Stagnating Affluence At The Bottom and Middle Is

In his June 10 column, “Democrats’ Prosperity Problem” (this link may require you to sign in, though it should be free to do so if you’re willing to give your email address to the Washington Post), George Will takes the various Democratic presidential candidates to task for their concerns over income inequality in the U.S.

Will points out that there has been continued, sustained economic growth over the past several years. This is true – the economy is in grand health, or it would be if the economy were the sort of thing that could be healthy. Will brushes aside concern with growing economic inequality in two ways. First, he questions the concern with fairness, asking when wealth has ever been distributed evenly or fairly (which is to say that since things have never been fair, we shouldn’t now be concerned with fairness). Second, here and elsewhere, he and other fiscal conservatives have argued that so long as everyone benefits from an expanding economy, it shouldn’t matter that some benefit more than others, especially since it is through the investment of capital by the wealthy that great wealth is produced for everyone.

In theory, that’s all well and good. At certain times in the past and for certain places (mainly the industrialized world in the post-WWII decades) this has actually happened to some extent. The middle classes, and to some extent the working classes, of the industrialized world did see a significant expansion in affluence over several decades. (I addressed some of the effects of this in popular culture in an earlier post, "Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence," and in relation to sushi in "Sushi and Globalization.")

The extent of both the growth of economic inequality and the stagnation of the expansion of affluence are made clear in an article in The New York Times from June 10 by Roger Lowenstein, “The Way we live now: the inequality conundrum.” The article includes these striking figures. First, the top 1 percent of the U.S. population collected 9 percent of national income in 1979 and 16 percent in 2004. While striking, this alone doesn’t bother me. If everyone were doing significantly better, it wouldn’t bother me that the richest are sucking up an increasing proportion of total wealth, but that’s not the case. The real problem is with stagnation of affluence for the rest. Lowenstein also points out, for example, that the incomes of the bottom 20 percent of Americans, adjusted for inflation, have increased only 2 percent, which is to say not significantly at all. Many in the middle class feel increasingly insecure as well.

I find myself stirred by the concluding paragraphs of Will’s column, though I read them differently than he intends:


“Democrats need not confine themselves to their ritual tropes about how "the middle class is under assault" (Clinton again). They control Congress; they can act. The unemployed John Edwards, who has the luxury of irresponsibility, challenges Democrats to repeal the Bush tax cuts they disapprove of rather than wait for them to expire.

“Democrats cannot end the war (actually, they can but won't), but they can send their tax agenda to the president and dare him to veto it. They can, but they won't. Do you wonder why?”

Given everything else he’s said, Will clearly thinks the Democrats will remain inactive on this front because of a disjuncture between their theory and reality. To me, the inaction of congressional Democrats seems to be the result of other factors. First, though slightly less spineless than during most of the Bush Administration, the Democrats in general are still mostly spineless in standing up to Bush, even though they control Congress. Second, while I don’t at all think that Democrats and Republicans are all the same (the Republican party is much more beholden to the interests of large corporations and the wealthy, and this does make a difference), they are more alike than I’d like (See my earlier post "The 'Sameness' of Republicans and Democrats"). Talking about economic inequality is the Democratic equivalent of Republicans talking about the perils of gay marriage or abortion – it’s a way of drumming up support from the party’s voting base. Actually doing something about economic inequality would require bucking the interests of the wealthy and the corporations who provide most of the campaign funding for the Democrats as well as Republicans (even while the Democrats do get more money in small sums from large numbers of middle and working class people, and Democrats receive less corporate money than Republicans).

(I was led to both Lowenstein’s and Will’s pieces via a summary in the June 22 print issue of The Week magazine.)

"Sometimes a Statue is Just a Statue": On the Interpretation of (Phallic) Symbols

The following was originally written as a paper presented at an annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society. It is in part a follow up to the material presented in my previous blog post.

This is a paper about a paper and the reaction it provoked. It is also a paper about a perennial anthropological topic: the interpretation of symbols and other signs, focusing especially on phallic symbols and icons.

In October, 2003, I delivered a paper to the Gulf South History and Humanities Conference, a conference dominated by Southern historians, with the title of “Race and Public Monuments in Pensacola, Florida,” though the paper itself addressed many components of memorialization beyond just race. In the paper, I focused particularly on two monuments in downtown Pensacola which unlike any other in the city are dedicated primarily to individuals who never actually set foot in the city: Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The monument to Lee sits within a traffic circle on Palafox Street (a main street in downtown Pensacola) at the peak of North Hill. The monument itself is a frankly phallic affair, with a four sided marble pedestal, atop which is placed a column and atop the column a sculpture of a Confederate individual who local historians insist is not Lee, though the monument overall is dedicated to him and the individual does at least resemble the Confederate General. The monument is surrounded by trees which largely obscure it from view when passing by, as well as a circle of outward facing cannons. The site is relatively inaccessible to pedestrians, not being located at a light for safe access. The overall impression when passing by is of circulating around something important – yet something secluded, protected – sacred even.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza is located just a few blocks from Lee Square at the base of North Hill. It is hard not to look at this tableau – the monument to Robert E. Lee atop North Hill looking down toward or perhaps looking down upon the much smaller monument to MLK – as an icon of race relations in the city – and indeed I see no reason not to interpret the juxtaposition in precisely that way, even while there is much more going on. MLK Plaza is located within the median of Palafox St., with a bust of King upon a small pedestal of a different material, with low brick walls funneling the pedestrian/viewer towards the bust – an icon of accessibility and penetrability precisely the opposite that of Lee Square. From the perspective of the passing motorist (and in Pensacola one is almost always a motorist, almost never a pedestrian), the monument and plaza are a small affair, easy to miss while driving by, in contrast to Lee Square where it is impossible not to notice that one is passing by something of importance – even while that something is largely secluded from the gaze. Once noticed, though, - if noticed – MLK plaza is much more visible, more open to the penetrating gaze.

In the 2003 paper, I discussed the nature of public memorials and monumental architecture as repositories of public signs, presenting signs of a particular narrative of history or of what is significant. I also discussed the ways in which these two monuments are “about” a variety of things, including race, class, and masculinity, both through what is said and what left unsaid.

The thing which most clearly ties the two together is race. One odd thing about both monuments is their commemoration of specific individuals who never actually set foot in the city, but each is clearly associated with events and processes that transformed race relations in the city and region. An ambivalence towards race is noteworthy. In Pensacola, as throughout most of the South and country in general, race is a structuring element in virtually every interaction between black and white – though this is a basic social fact that largely goes unremarked in the sense that to remark upon it is virtually taboo. Perhaps to be expected, the monument to Lee and the Confederacy leaves race issues unmentioned. Its main dedication reads, “The uncrowned heroes of the Southern Confederacy, whose joy was to suffer and die for a cause they believed to be just. Their unchallenged duration and matchless heroism shall continue to be the wonder and inspiration of the ages.” There are additional commemorations to Jefferson Davis and Confederate secretary of the navy Stephen R. Mallory (after whom the local Sons of the Confederacy chapter is named), along with a quote from Mallory, “’Tis not mortals to command success; But we’ll do more sempronius, we’ll deserve it.’” Not surprisingly (at least to me as someone who grew up white in the South), there is no mention of exactly what the just cause of the Confederacy might have been – or that it might have had anything to do with slavery – nor for that matter just what in the heck to “do more sempronius” might mean. More surprising is the utter lack of mention of race equality or the civil rights movement at MLK plaza. The sole inscription there (aside from a plaque listing primary donors) quotes from King’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech from December 11, 1964, “Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” Certainly a sentiment worthy of commemoration, further standing as a reminder that King was a leader and hero for all, and not just a hero and leader for Black Americans – though he certainly was that. At the same time, though, if you didn’t already know much about King and his struggles, you leave the monument with no additional knowledge about King and his struggles, and the signification of King’s universal humanism, and only that, serves to present racism and civil rights as insignificant, not worth commemorating, or at the very least something best left unsaid.

Alongside this ambivalent presentation of race, I also talked in the 2003 paper about the ways in which the monuments present a discourse on class, though also largely through occlusion. For example, wistful nostalgia for the lost cause of the Confederacy, whether in the 1890s when the Lee monument was dedicated or more recently, depends in part upon erasure of the class dynamics among whites of the Antebellum South, and certainly today is based in part in contemporary class dynamics, based especially in the anxieties of working class white southerners in a time when working class Americans generally often fell rightfully anxious. With the King monument, King’s thoughts, words, and actions with regard to class and class inequality are potentially occluded to an even greater degree than his racial civil rights activism, in the sense that even though civil rights is not mentioned at the monument, it can be largely assumed that passersby will be familiar already with this aspect of his legacy in a way that cannot be assumed regarding his actions on class inequality late in his life.

I had expected when I presented the paper that if there were any controversy that it would be from these comments on race and class. I was after all talking about two of the most provocative topics in American culture – and talking about what was not being said, a controversial sort of discursive analysis since Foucault’s emphasis on presence and production in discourse. Instead this went unremarked, though I’m inclined to think that this was probably due to the great ambivalence and discomfort with dealing with and speaking about race and class in the South and the U.S. generally. Instead, it was a part of the paper – the phallic nature of monuments representing great men – that I had regarded as fairly non-controversial (I mean, really, who doesn’t think that war heroes atop giant columns are a tad phallic) that generated a mini-firestorm of reaction.

This was a part of my analysis I had assumed not only to be straightforward but also to be “objective” in the sense of being based in the interpretation of symbolic and iconic aspects of the empirical components of the monuments, in contrast to the other analysis which I myself regarded as more tenuous because based largely in what might be "said" in the unsaid. I drew attention to a general pattern of memorialization of great men in phallic symbolic and iconic form in western culture, while at the same time monuments of less obvious masculine and heroic figures or events tend to take other forms, e.g. the Wall commemorating Vietnam veterans in the absence of heroic triumph or the Holocaust memorial in Boston, which are decidedly non-phallic. In the case of Lee Square commemorating Great Man in the form of War Hero par excellence, the statuary itself takes what I saw as indubitably phallic form, to which is added the contextual components of forced circulation about the monument and its near impenetrability to the gaze and physical access (remember the trees shrouding it – not to mention those cannons). Even more interesting, I thought, was the case of King’s monument. King is often remembered as a clearly masculine figure and absolutely a Great Man, though in a quite different mold than the war hero more typically commemorated, being instead a vulnerable hero – as are all non-violent resisters, dependent ultimately as they are on the eventual acquiescence of their oppressors – and also a more open figure by virtue of his own universalism. I hypothesized then that for such a man would be found a monument phallic in nature (with the pedestal topped by bust fitting the bill nicely if on a smaller scale than with Lee Square) – but of a less typical nature – and here I addressed in the 2003 paper how the (severed) head bust atop pedestal of different material marked a vulnerability (if not arguably castration), as well as the accessibility and penetrability to the gaze and to physical access.

The reaction to my arguments by the audience of mostly Southern historians (an interpretation on my part based on mode of dress, self-presentation, discursive style, etc.) was interesting. Nobody talked about the things I had thought most controversial, which in hindsight is not so surprising since basically it meant that nobody talked about the topics of race and class that generally nobody talks about. Instead, there was an incredulous response to the idea of public monuments as phallic symbols or icons – and a frankly anti-intellectual response which consisted not of counterargument but of flippant attempts at dismissal. This was perhaps summed up by one comment of the panel’s discussant, “Sometimes a statue is just a statue.” A ridiculous assertion in general – a statue is rarely if ever just a statue, given that such monumental architecture always involves presentation of public values and what is deemed important for memorialization, and is generally expensive to boot. And a statue, erected in the 1890s just a few short years after the end of Reconstruction, and dedicated primarily to Lee and secondarily to Jeff Davis and Stephen Mallory, is just a statue? That aside, I found it amusing that a gloss of the famous quip that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar from Freud was being used in an attempt to dismiss the possibility of phallic signification.

I was reminded of another experience, this time on an archaeology field trip to a Native American site in the Everglades accompanied by several professional archaeologists. It was a village site on a raised mound with several projecting raised fields. One archaeologist who had worked on the site tentatively put forth an idea that seemed to make sense to me. In plan view, these projecting fields were distinctly phallic in shape; they even had irrigation channels running down their centers – iconic of urethras perhaps. Further, opposite the main “phallic” field, at the “rear” of the village was a garbage dump, an iconic anus accompanying phallic symbolization. Another archaeologist was initially dismissive, but when the first persisted, pointing out how the interpretation fit, this second shifted from dismissiveness to something more serious, “But you can’t prove this.”

While the crowd of historians had been mostly just incredulous (and scandalized by talk of Lee or King in terms of phalli), there was also I think a similar more serious undertone. Given its inherent polysemy, symbolic phenomena is irreduceable to definitive proof, and this can create a rift between different practitioners of the humanities and social sciences who work using different modalities of the production of knowledge. Historians and archaeologists, though of course not a homogenous lot, operating in a modality of proof, are typically wary, and as I have encountered occasionally dismissive, of symbolic interpretation.

There is much to be said for both historical and scientific methods leading to proof, and when dealing with social phenomena amenable to such approaches, as for example with many cultural ecological analyses, it would be silly to dismiss the value of proof (though that doesn’t stop some). At the same time, semiotic phenomena do not become less significant because less amenable to rigorous testing and definitive proof, and though also not a homogenous lot, cultural anthropologists, like scholars in some other humanities disciplines, tend to be more open to a variety of hermeneutic and interpretive analyses, taking as a matter of course things like the interpretation of men’s sacred flutes in the New Guinea Eastern Highlands or the Central Amazon as phallic symbols. Or, take the example of Robert Shanafelt’s excellent paper presented at the 2004 Southern Anthropological Society meeting – presented only a few months after my paper to the Gulf South meeting and also dealing, among other things, with public monuments to Confederate figures in the South. At one point he showed a slide of a monument quite similar to that I described for Lee Square in Pensacola, though this time to a room of mostly cultural anthropologists. At some point, he mentioned the clearly phallic nature of the monument, and in this case no one batted an eye.

But this is not meant as a self-congratulatory exercise. Instead, we must ask in the absence of absolute meaning and in fact the impossibility of proof of symbolic meaning, how do we know when our interpretations are convincing? Clifford Geertz argued that a convincing interpretation of cultural phenomena is one that sorts winks from twitches. I’d agree, but then have to ask how we know when we’ve done so without lapsing into a circular argument that amounts to something like, “The convincing interpretation is the one that convinces.”

To get back to pesky statues, I really don’t think a statue is ever just a statue, but it is certainly possible to see more than is really there. This I think is a key part of the response: A convincing interpretation is one that is consistent and fits the set of objects being interpreted. That is, just because we are dealing with semiotic phenomena does not mean we are engaging in a non-empirical enterprise. Just as with art and literary criticism, there is no definitive interpretation to the work, but some interpretations are “wrong” in the sense that they do not consistently address the qualities of the work or fit those qualities consistently. That is, a convincing interpretation has a systematic and iconic relationship with that which is interpreted. Barring this, we have a confabulation, that might be interesting in its own right, but which is unconvincing as an interpretation. The more consistently the interpretation meshes with and explains the full set of facts, the more convincing it becomes. Referring to any old thing with vaguely columnar shape as a phallic symbol is not particular convincing, but when the interpretation takes into account the form of a particular monument in relation to other monuments to other war heroes, in relation to other monuments to groups such as Holocaust victims or veterans of a non-triumphal (and even non-heroic) war, and in relation to surroundings like an encircling fringe of trees and cannons within a traffic circle, then we have something to me more convincing.

Even here, though, we must be cautious. As Emerson posited, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and there is nothing quite so consistent as a conspiracy theory. But, we should also note that it is foolish consistencies that we want to avoid, and key here is that it is not just consistency that makes for convincing interpretation, but consistency plus fit. Conspiracy theories are usually internally consistent, but often fail to fit or have much of an iconic relation with the world of facts. But even once we have an interpretation which is consistent and systematically fits the facts at hand, what we have is not proof but a good basis to believe that we have a convincing argument – at least in the absence of counterargument more convincing.

Race and Public Monuments in Pensacola, Florida

The following was originally presented as a paper to an annual meeting of the Gulf South History and Humanities conference:

As with most cities, public monuments litter the landscape of downtown Pensacola. This is nothing new. Monuments and monumental architecture more broadly have always been a feature of urban landscapes. As signs representing the past, monuments can serve the interests of elites, and on occasion others, in shaping public memory, discourse about the past, and indirectly identities and discourse about the present.

The public monuments of Pensacola are mainly of two types: those which commemorate the achievements and the memory of particular individuals, such as Andrew Jackson, who had something to do directly with Pensacola history, and a more recent type, those commemorating the memory of generic groups of individuals, such as Vietnam veterans at the Wall South, a replica to Washington, D. C.’s Wall, or the Missing Children’s Memorial. Two particular monuments stand out as different, representing individuals who, while related to broad regional processes and events which clearly affected Pensacola, were not associated with Pensacola specifically, and never actually set foot in Pensacola: Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza and its bust to MLK, and Lee Square (actually a circle) and its monument to Robert E. Lee and other “national” figures of the Confederacy.

The obvious commonality between the two monuments is that the two are tied (albeit in quite different ways) to the often troubled history of race and racism in the southeastern United States generally and in Pensacola specifically, even if there is more going on as well. In fact, if we look at the monuments in relation to one another, they say more about race than was perhaps intended.

The monument to Lee sits within a traffic circle on Palafox Street (a main street in downtown Pensacola) at the peak of North Hill. The monument itself consists of a four-sided marble pedestal, atop which is placed a column with a sculpture of a Confederate figure atop the column, which makes for a typically phallic monument. The monument is surrounded by trees, largely obscuring it from view when passing by. At the same time, the site is relatively inaccessible to pedestrians, not being located at a light for safe access. The overall impression when passing by is of circulating around something important – yet something secluded, protected – sacred even. In certain ways, Lee Square is similar to Lee Circle in New Orleans. That monument, similar in basic appearance though much larger in scale, is also located within a traffic circle along a major street offering one of the main entryways to downtown. It is not so inaccessible to pedestrians, nor is it secluded from view by trees. It is, still, separated in another way, by its base being situated atop a still larger pedestal which must be surmounted by a flight of steps, so that the inclination of the pedestrian simply walking past on St. Charles is to simply circulate around the monument without directly approaching it.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza in Pensacola is located just a few blocks from Lee Square at the base of North Hill. It is hard not to look at this tableau - Robert E. Lee atop a tall pedestal atop North Hill looking down towards, i.e. looking down upon, the much smaller monument to MLK - as an icon of race relations in the city – and indeed I see no reason not to interpret the juxtaposition in exactly that way, even if there is more going on as well. MLK Plaza is located within the median of Palafox St.., with a bust of King upon a small pedestal, and low brick walls funneling the pedestrian/viewer towards the bust. From the perspective of the passing motorist (and in Pensacola one is almost always a motorist, almost never a pedestrian), the monument and plaza are a small affair, easy to miss while driving by, in contrast to Lee Square where it is impossible not to notice that one is passing by something of importance – even while that something is largely secluded from the gaze. Once noticed, though, - if noticed - MLK Plaza is much more visible, that is, more open/vulnerable to the penetrating gaze.

These monuments are about race in a variety of ways, and not just as iconic metaphors of race relations and racism in Pensacola. Ironically, they say something significant about race relations through their utter avoidance of overt mentions of race. At MLK plaza, the only inscription (aside from a plaque listing primary donors) quotes from King’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech from December 11, 1964, “Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” This is certainly a sentiment worthy of commemoration, and it further stands as a reminder that King was not only a leader and hero for black Americans – though he was that – but also a leader and hero for all. At the same time, though, if you didn’t already know much about King and his struggles, you leave the monument with no additional knowledge about King and his struggles.

The monument at Lee Square, being by far the larger of the two, bears more inscriptions, one on each face of the pedestal. On the front face of the monument (that is, the side visible when one is facing Lee atop the monument) is the main dedication: “The uncrowned heroes of the Southern Confederacy, whose joy was to suffer and die for a cause they believed to be just. Their unchallenged duration and matchless heroism shall continue to be the wonder and inspiration of the ages.” Continuing around the monument, one encounters on the next face the following dedication: “Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. Soldier, Statesman, Patriot, Christian. The only man in our nation without a country, yet 20 million people mourn his death.” On the third face: “Stephen R. Mallory, Secretary of the Navy of the Confederate States of America. ‘Tis not mortals to command success; But we’ll do more sempronius, we’ll deserve it.’” Finally, on the fourth face, the one inscription relating to a Pensacolian: “Edward Aylesworth Perry, Captain of the Pensacola ‘Rifles,’ Colonel of the 2nd Florida Regiment, General of the Florida Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. Among the 1st to volunteer in the defense of his adopted state. Faithful in every position to which his merit advanced him. His life and deeds constitute his best monument.”

As with the King memorial, the issue of race per se is occluded from the Civil War context being memorialized (that is, being promoted as a particular form of public memory). There is the slightest tinge of defensiveness in noting that the uncrowned heroes of the confederacy joyously suffered and died for a cause they “believed” to be just, but overall, the memorial sets out to glorify the inspiring nobility of the lost cause of the Confederacy. Through a variety of significations, memorials can attempt to promote or critique dominant (or other) discursive constructions in the public memory (and the same could be said of museums, the other main repository of public signs of the past). Here, the construction is one of nostalgia for the nobility and honor of the lost cause of the Confederacy, with any mention of the relevance of slavery carefully censured. Given the prominence of place (though site selection was also clearly driven by the presence of a Confederate Redoubt on the site during the Civil War) and the obvious investment of resources necessary to construct the large marble monument, Lee Square was an embodiment of dominant discursive constructions at the time of its dedication in 1891. It clearly still has a great deal of power for some local residents today, as seen with annual salutes to Lee and Stonewall Jackson held at the site by the local Stephen Mallory chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, as well as a small trophy that had been left at the site with the letters “CSA” hand-etched upon it which I encountered left behind at the site on a recent visit. Similarly, when encountering numerous white southerners, both in Pensacola and throughout the Southeast, with T-shirts or bumper stickers displaying a currently controversial symbol, the Confederate Battle Flag, along with slogans, such as “Heritage, Not Hate,” I take them to be sincere, in the sense that theirs is a nostalgia for a better time (which never existed) characterized by noble values and honor, that is nostalgia for a discursive construction like that represented at Lee Square and not for an actual social and economic system based largely in slavery and human misery. (But then there was the bumper sticker reading, “If I had known, I would have picked my own cotton,” or the restaurant somewhere in northern Georgia named the Kountry Kooking Kitchen [with the K, K, and K boxed off in diamonds lest you miss the point].)

MLK Plaza, dedicated in 1993, represents a more recent and widely accepted construction – one which is not the polar opposite of that at Lee Square, but instead one which attempts to censure the Confederate legacy every bit as much as the nostalgic constructions of the Confederacy attempt to censure the associations of the Confederacy with slavery. Instead, a benevolent universal humanism is embraced – a laudable thing in itself, while at the same time, the very real social fissures of race which continue to be produced are occluded. The two monuments together index (by omission rather than intent) an important quality of race relations and racism in Pensacola. In virtually every interaction between blacks and whites, race is a factor shaping the interaction and racial inequality continues to be reproduced, but as with these signs of public memory, almost never is it mentioned. In fact, though the monuments assiduously avoid any mention of slavery or of the racism which MLK and the civil rights movement addressed, the fact that they are icons of regional/national figures rather than local individuals belies the pain of racism and of addressing/speaking about racism in the monuments’ displacement from the particulars of Pensacola even when commemorating the Confederacy or the civil rights movement.

As important as these monuments are in illuminating aspects of race relations and racism in Pensacola and beyond, it is not solely race which is signified. They are also about class, and as with race, they largely function by occluding important aspects of class relations. For starters, nostalgia for the lost cause of the Confederacy depends upon an erasure of the class dynamics amongst whites of the antebellum South. Many, if not most, of the southern whites nostalgic for the Confederacy had ancestors with little stake in the economic system of slavery or the political and economic interests of the Confederacy. Further, nostalgia for the better days of the noble Old South is based in part in the class dynamics of today, based in the anxieties of working class white southerners in a time when working class Americans generally often feel rightfully anxious.

With King, the issue of racism and the civil rights movement is occluded, though much to the credit of the monument designers, the plaza does stress important positive aspects of King’s legacy and it probably can be assumed that very few passersby will be unaware of King’s crucial involvement in the civil rights movement and the struggle for racial equality. King’s writings and actions with regard to class and class inequality are similarly occluded – and perhaps to a greater degree because it cannot be so easily assumed that passersby will be previously aware of King’s writings and actions addressing class as much as racial inequality towards the end of his life. As Michael Eric Dyson has pointed out, in most versions of the lives of both King and Malcolm X, the trend of both men’s actions and words towards the ends of their tragically short lives was towards working across racial lines to address not just racial inequality but also class inequality and exploitation generally. If it is painful and threatening to deal with race and the continued social production of racial inequality, it seems to be that much more painful and threatening to move across race lines and address class inequality simultaneously, and it is not surprising that class is largely absent from public memory and commemoration.

These monuments are also about gender. The men being commemorated are just that – men. Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee are tokens of the Great Man, embodying qualities such as honor, nobility, strength, and dignity (albeit in different ways) which are also often gendered qualities, symbolically associated with masculinity. Their masculinity is represented iconically in different ways, however, bespeaking the different ways and different contexts within which they embody characteristics of ideal masculinity.

Lee’s monument is a (stereo)typically phallic one, whose importance is reinforced through the forced circulation around him. The monument in its relation to circulating traffic provides a barrier to approach, and as discussed above, is largely hidden from view by a ring of trees grown tall over a century. This provides a spatial and visual ambiguity to interpretation, appropriate for the ambiguity of the Confederate legacy in public memory. On the one hand, the relative difficulty of approach alongside the seclusion from view reinforces the monument as sacred site and Lee as the Great Man, and as a typical Great Man difficult to approach and largely masked from the penetrating gaze. On the other, at the same time that when passing by one cannot help but notice that one is skirting around something of importance, this same difficulty of approach and seclusion from view of the monument itself meshes with attempts to erase the Confederate legacy from public memory.

The phallic icon is a typical component of monuments to Great Men and heroes, while with other sorts of historical figures or instances, monuments often take on other forms, such as the Wall in Washington, D.C. commemorating veterans of the Vietnam War and its replica, the Wall South in Pensacola, or the Holocaust Memorial in Boston – cases where there is a felt need to remember the tragic deaths of individuals en masse, but where there is no heroic triumph or even lost cause perceived as great. With King, we clearly have a Great Man, generally characterized as noble, strong, courageous, and dignified, but also a non-typical Great Man, associated also as he is with nonviolence – making him in my book an admirable token of the Great Man type, if we must have Great Men. One would expect, then, a non-typically phallic monument, and MLK plaza provides just that, and as with Lee Square, it is one whose meaning is ultimately ambiguous. King’s monument is still basically phallic in shape, even if on a less grand scale than Lee’s monument. In contrast to Lee Square, MLK Plaza offers a setting with easy access, overall visual openness, and a disembodied bust. On the one hand, the monument is penetrated by the gaze and as phallic icon, the bust as disembodied head is a castrated or emasculated one. On the other, the monument, by resisting the more obvious and clear phallic image of the Lee memorial, resists also the incarnation of King as Great Man with strength in the form of dominance. At the same time that use of space may evoke a sense of vulnerability, it also emphasizes the specific qualities of dignity and nonviolent resistance in the face of injustice – a theme which is occluded from the monument in other ways, but which is indexed here in the use of space and the disembodied representation of King himself. Either interpretation is possible, as are combinations of the two, and that is ultimately where I wish to end, with meaning open, for my intent has not been to criticize (I think that there is much that is overwhelmingly positive with MLK Plaza), but to provoke and open up to contestation the construction of public memory.

Taxes and an Upward Redistribution of Wealth

The Florida House of Representatives is debating a measure that would eliminate property taxes on homesteaded property, with the budgetary shortfalls that would result to be made up for by a 2.5% increase in the state’s sales tax. This is being presented as a move to relieve the economic burden of the state’s permanent resident homeowners. (It should be noted that such a radical move faces an uphill battle to adoption. It would first have to pass through the legislature, and then, since it involves a state constitutional matter of taxation, it would have to be approved by a 2/3 vote, which wouldn’t occur for at least a year and a half, according to current news reports.)

To judge from the comment boards to articles on the issue in the past two days’ (February 21 and 22) online editions of The Pensacola News Journal, this would be a move highly popular among many homeowners. This is understandable in the current context. For starters, the elimination of property taxes probably sounds on the surface like a good deal to any property owner. Further, many if not most Florida homeowners are currently economically burdened by increases (sometimes drastic) in home insurance costs as a result of the hurricane damages in the state during the past few years. Right now, any reduction of total house payments for any reason sounds like a good thing to many Floridians. On the News Journal’s comment boards, the vast majority of posters are clearly in favor of the proposed changes.

One rare dissenter, who posted that this move would place the tax burden on the poor, those who rent, and those with currently low property taxes, was promptly rebutted with the claim that he or she (comments are generally anonymous, without clear indication of gender) was using faulty logic, that clearly the burden for the shift to higher sales tax would be on those who spent the most – not the poor. In one sense, that thinking is correct – as with sales tax in general, those who spend the most pay the most sales tax, so the increase in sales tax revenue will come more from those who spend the most. But I think the problem with the dissenter’s post was not in its logic so much as in its rhetoric. If instead of asking who will bear the burden, we ask who will be burdened, or who will benefit and who will be disadvantaged relative to their current situation, we see a different perspective.

Regardless of whether one feels the proposed tax changes are fair or unfair, moral or immoral, on objective economic terms, the proposed changes in how taxation works will cause some people to pay more in total taxes than they do now and others to pay less than now.

Simply put, the poor, those who rent (whether poor or not), and/or those with currently low property taxes will generally end up paying more total taxes. If you don’t currently pay property tax, you can’t benefit from its elimination (unless one assumes that landlords would pass on their savings on property tax to renters, something I find hard to imagine happening en masse, and certainly not something to count on). If you don’t currently pay much property tax, you won’t benefit much by its elimination. And at the same time, the poor along with everyone else will end up paying more sales tax, with therefore the result being more total taxes for the poor, and in many cases, as a proportion of income, considerably more tax.

For most of us in the middle class economically, the proposed changes won’t amount to much one way or another. Some will gain a bit when the elimination of property tax is weighed against the increase in sales tax (by my own quick and dirty calculations, I figure to fall into this situation myself); some might lose a bit; most middle class homeowners probably don’t stand to gain or lose much by these changes (I again place myself here), though the subjective weight of the eliminated property tax bill might be heftier than the increased sales tax spread over many small purchases, i.e. it’s likely to feel like a better economic deal than it is for many.

Those who are wealthy will pay lower total taxes than now. They’ll pay more total sales tax on an individual basis than anyone else, just as now, but in proportion to income this will affect them less and will be outweighed in most cases by the elimination of large property tax bills.

In short, and again whether one finds it right or wrong, fair or unfair, what the Florida House’s proposed changes amount to is an upward redistribution of wealth where the poor will pay more taxes than they do now and the wealthy will pay fewer taxes than now.

The Wealth Explosion and a "Classless" America

One of the pleasures of reading The Wilson Quarterly is that its editorial positions and articles do not fall out neatly along contemporary vernacular notions of “liberal” and “conservative” (it’s more of an “Old School” liberal magazine whose political and economic positions tend to be congruent with 19th Century / early 20th century liberalism and progressivism). Which is to say that I enjoy the pleasures of both agreeing and disagreeing within the same magazine.

The Quarterly’s Winter 2007 issue features a special section on “The Wealth Explosion,” three articles which focus on the recent expansion of wealth in America and elsewhere in the world economy, as well as on some of the effects of this expansion.

The most interesting, and problematic, of the essays is “Lux Populi” by James B. Twitchell. Twitchell discusses luxury goods’ loss of standing as positional goods. One of the things that makes luxury goods markers of class status is and has always been not just their expense but their inaccessibility to the masses. Not only could most not afford luxury goods, but most did not opportunity to acquire them even when being potentially able to afford them. In today’s world, luxury goods are widely available to whoever may afford them (one of Twitchell’s examples is Gucci handbags being sold on the Home Shopping Network), and the middle class, at least, can afford more of them than ever before. Twitchell sees this as a problem for the wealthy. “Ironically, what this poaching of deluxe by the middle class has done is make things impossible for the truly rich.” Alas for the poor rich – what are they to do when the luxury goods, which “have little intrinsic but high positional value,” lose there positional value in marking their status of wealthiness?

I have two main problems with Twitchell’s piece, despite finding it thought-provoking. First is the overall tone of the piece, which seems to imply that the loss of positional marking (to the extent that this has occurred – clearly he’s onto something, but it’s hardly the case that the wealthy [or the blue collar, for that matter] lack any means of marking their class status today) is a bad thing, a tragic loss. Twitchell says, “‘Luxury for all’ is an oxymoron, all right, the aspirational goal of modern culture, and the death knell of the real thing,” but if luxury goods have low intrinsic value but high positional value, what is lost with the greater availability of such markers is not the “realness” of the markers, but simply their restriction to a particular class – not in itself a bad thing (unless you really think that the wealthy deserve to pretend through the display of essentially valueless commodities that they are intrinsically better than everyone else). Twitchell’s reference to the middle class’s “poaching” of luxury goods is a further affirmation of his sense of the impropriety of the spread of luxury items. This is topped in the final paragraph with flippancy: “In a sense, the filthy rich have only two genuine luxury items left: time and philanthropy. As the old paradox goes, the rich share the luxury of too much time on their hands with the very people on whom they often bestow their philanthropy. Who knows, maybe poverty will become the new luxury…”

Second, and more problematic, Twitchell seems to misdiagnose why luxury goods have lost much of their standing as positional goods. His point is essentially that luxury goods are more available to more people because everyone is wealthier. To an extent, this is correct. There is little absolute poverty in the U.S. (or Canada or Western Europe) (though there is some – and more in the U.S. than in Canada or Western Europe). The middle and working classes are able to buy more stuff of all sorts than ever before, though a lot of this purchasing is financed on the continued extension of debt. Another thing that’s really changed, though, is that the purveyors of luxury have changed their selling strategies, marketing somewhat downmarket versions of their goods to much larger numbers of people via shopping malls, cable shopping networks, and the internet.

Further, the realities of the distribution of the current expansion of total wealth are far different from that implied by Twitchell’s article. The editors of The Wilson Quarterly preface the special section with (emphasis added), “Not since the late 19th century has America experienced such a flowering of new wealth. The surge of dot.com whiz kids, handsomely paid CEOs, and lavishly rewarded entertainers is transforming everything from the market for private jets to the nature of philanthropy. A few rungs lower on the ladder, the merely affluent vacation in the Caribbean and cart home big-screen TVs from Costco. But while the money is flowing freely, most of it is flowing uphill. As fortunes large and small pile up, there is cause for celebration, and some healthy skepticism too.” Less cautiously, in another article in the special section, Steven Lagerfeld argues, “…no embrace is unconditional, and there are already signs that the public’s ardor for the new era of riches is flagging. The economic progress of many people on the middle and bottom rungs of the economic ladder – even allowing for understatement by some statistical indicators – is slow or nonexistent. Getting ahead is getting harder, as the costs of health care and a college education to rise faster than the rate of inflation, and the ordinary insecurities of life on the job are magnified by the stresses of globalization, outsourcing, and technological change.”

The extent to which getting ahead is getting harder is made clear in an article in The Nation (February 5, 2007 issue) by Jeff Madrick. Madrick quotes Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan from the journal The Future of Children defining the ideal of America as a classless society as “one in which all children have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they were born,” before reporting on the extent to which America has lived up to such an ideal. Madrick reports that studies from a few decades ago indicated an America living up to such a classless ideal (at least in Sawhill and McLanahan’s terms), with “only 20 percent of one’s future income…determined by one’s father’s income.” Compare this with a recent study by Bhashkar Mazumder of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago that argues “that 60 percent of a son’s income is determined by the level of income of the father. For women, it is roughly the same.” In other words, far from a burgeoning of classlessness, we are seeing an ossification of America’s class system in terms of income – even while the buying habits and markers of class are becoming more homogenous.

The markers of socioeconomic class standing have certainly not disappeared. It is still possible to visit virtually any public space in America and make assumptions (and be reasonably certain about the accuracy of these assumptions) about the class background of a person based simply on such things as clothing or physical bearing. Such class markers have never been purely about economics but also about class subcultures. Just as previously possession of luxury goods marked not just economic wealth but social access to certain milieux, the group of men I observed eating at a barbecue restaurant, each wearing mesh ball caps and button up shirts with patches bearing their names over one breast pocket, were clearly blue collar workers, though some of them might well make as much money as I do as an assistant professor of anthropology at the local university. At the same time that class markers have not gone away, the appearances of class have grown more homogenous. More people, in the United States at least, do have access to more stuff, including luxury and other positional goods, than ever before. That in itself is not a bad thing. The American ideal of a classless society is a worthy one, even if it has never matched economic realities. While I do wish that our consumer goods were produced in more environmentally sustainable ways, the availability of more things to more people is a good thing. While material things and comforts don’t alone bring happiness, the absence of a certain amount of material comfort certainly inhibits happiness, and I for one would be highly hypocritical if I tried to pretend that I don’t enjoy the pleasures of the stuff that I own.

The problem is not the growing homogenization of class markers nor the extension of positional goods such that they mark a classless society. The problem certainly isn’t that the rich can’t distinguish themselves anymore. The problem is that the extension of luxury and other consumer goods to more people is accompanied by burgeoning debt, an increasing precariousness of middle class standing, and the ossification of economic status and loss of the American dream of upward mobility, with the result that we now live in an increasingly rigid class structure which manages to masquerade (and to a greater extent than before) as a classless society.