Why does Chuck Thompson hate black people?
Just when the percentage of African Americans living in Dixie
reaches its fifty-year high, Thompson writes
Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern
Secession. Coincidence?
Of course, the author never comes out and admits his prejudice.
He employs code words.
The good news is that I’ve deciphered his encrypted tome. The
Rosetta Stone to understanding Better Off Without ‘Em
involves recognizing Thompson’s use of “Southern” as a code word
for “black” — a practice akin to his younger white hipster
brethren using “Canadians” as a sub rosa slur for African
Americans. This is that subtle racism that university professors
have been warning us about.
The Oregon (2 percent black) by way of Alaska (4 percent black)
writer contends that “southerners were always less well educated,”
noting the region’s dismal standardized test scores and poor high
school retention rates. “Unless we’re willing to separate ourselves
from our lowest common academic denominator,” Thompson warns,
“we’ll forever be a nation sitting around waiting for the slowest
kid in the class to catch up.” The author condemns the South’s
“hungry hippo parade,” “unhealthy eating habits,” and “waddle-prone
masses.” He observes, “Louisiana leads the nation with 11.2 murders
per 100,000 people — nowhere near lowball New Hampshire, which
kills off just 1.0 per 100,000 citizens.”
Of course, Thompson can’t say he likes New Hampshire because
blacks constitute one percent of its population and dislikes
Louisiana because it contains more African Americans than every
state but Mississippi. He can’t bring himself to utter social
heresies, so he obsesses over the region, while ignoring the race,
that scores lowest on the SAT and drops out of high school at the
highest rate. He can’t say that four in five black women are
overweight or obese, making African Americans the fattest people in
Fatso Nation. So he uses that code word —
Southerners.
It’s hard not to connect the dots to see the ugly picture
Thompson seeks the reader to trace. “Of the seventy-seven U.S.
counties that are majority black or African American,” he tells us
after 100 pages, “all are in the South. On the Louisiana border,
Claiborne County, Mississippi, has the highest percentage of blacks
in the country, with 84 percent.” These are the counties he seeks
to erase from the U.S. map, right?
For Thompson, the Bible Belt is the noose strangling America.
Exasperated by what he calls “KKKristianity” and “Book of Dip$#!+s
creationism,” Thompson confesses: “It’s too bad we didn’t just let
the South secede when we had the chance.”
The closest the book comes to admitting the South’s
contributions comes in its bizarre plan for separation. Better
Off Without ‘Em concedes America wouldn’t be better off
without Northern Virginia: “Sorry, Virginians, it’s a lot of money
and educated people to lose, but most of y’all don’t consider that
part of the state ‘southern’ anyway, and neither do the rest of
us.” Presumably, Washington, D.C. stays in the Union, too. Thompson
forces Texas, with its booming economic and population growth, to
remain as well: “I have not treated it as part of ‘my South’ for
one reason: we can’t afford to lose it.” But Thompson exiles the
rest of Dixieland.
Even a Yankee unable to pronounce the letter “r” can articulate
the charms of the drawling South. America’s military heroes, from
George Washington to Alvin York to Dakota Meyer, have
disproportionately come from below the Mason-Dixon line. Whether
one drinks Coke or Pepsi, Jack Daniel’s or Jim Beam, one drinks to
the South. Has the CNN travel writer traveled to Savannah,
Charleston, or Nashville? The musicians who invented rock ‘n’ roll
— Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Fats
Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers — all hailed from the
South. It’s also a fact that the South has better fiction: Flannery
O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, etc.
Who but a hater wants to discard all that?
The old anti-Southern tic, meshing with the geographical
stations of those looking down and those looked down upon,
resembled traditional snobbery. When I ran into the First Lady of
Alabama, for instance, she playfully instructed that upon my return
to Massachusetts: “Tell them that we do wear shoes.” I could only
respond: “They won’t believe me.”
This isn’t what’s going on in this hateful — strangely mistaken
for “humorous” in certain circles — polemic. The snobbery here is
of the looking-down-at-you-from-below variety, of the kind “white
trash” once used to humiliate accomplished blacks. The South has
gained factories, jobs, people, and political clout at the expense
of regions more interested in taxing than producing. It’s thriving,
while places like Thompson’s Oregon or my Massachusetts are, if not
dying, then at least shadows of their former selves. Better Off
Without ‘Em is player-hating.
Perhaps the author regards it as unfair to deconstruct his
screed against the South as a thinly-veiled racist tract. Alas,
Thompson comes to resemble those he crusades against. He concludes
that Lincoln was wrong. He buys a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood for
$100. He strangely opines that Sarah Palin — a governor of
Alaska like the author’s dad — would “look pretty good in
a swastika.” He even calls one school teacher “the only black
person I’ve ever met.” My bad — he calls her “the only black
person I’ve ever met who hates Chris Rock.” After
painfully reading a book that habitually distorts a region
containing 100 million people, I couldn’t help but go native and
strip the context from one phrase of a 75,000-word tirade.
One wonders if Chuck Thompson, crusader against bigotry and
backwardness, went native, too.
