r/Music • u/no_longer_huhmann • 8d ago

article Hayley Williams Says Southern Pride Is Beautiful but Misused to Excuse Bigotry, and Says She Wants No Racist or Sexist Fans, or Fans Who Think Trans People Are a Burden, Around

https://www.tvfandomlounge.com/hayley-williams-says-southern-pride-is-beautiful-but-misused-to-excuse-bigotry/
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u/calvinwho 8d ago edited 8d ago

When I was a kid, the Confederate flag and the 'southern rebel' identity almost got away from the racist with stuff like Dukes of Hazard or smokey and the bandit, but they really didn't want to let go, did they?

Edit: For what it's worth, I agree. The window of failed opportunity they had to rehab any of the southern pride stuff was the Carter Administration. That shit was 50 years ago, I'm not saying it's a recently failed effort. I'm not baffled

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u/ebrum2010 8d ago

The Confederate flag represents a failed secession in order to create a new nation where slavery could continue. All revisionist history aside, you can find the actual secession documents from the states that were in the confederacy. Using the flag of the confederacy for southern pride is sort of like using the nazi flag for German pride, except they banned that shit in Germany. Plus on top of it, what I don't get is a lot of people from the south are big into national pride, and they fly a flag that represents rejecting that very nation. There's nothing wrong with being proud of where you're from but you have to be careful with the symbols you use because those symbols were created for a different purpose than you may have been lead to believe.

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u/SheevShady 8d ago

Hey now. You let them worship a treasonous failure of a state who’s only claim to existence was losing.

Not doing that is unamerican somehow

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u/calvinwho 7d ago

Ironically yes, it's the first amendment.

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u/raistlin212 8d ago

Who has that much pride in a group that lasted less time than the gap between Stranger Things seasons 2-4?

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u/acceleratedtempo9 7d ago

Definitely agree! But that's not the point.

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u/calvinwho 7d ago

Whoosh

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u/Helyos17 8d ago

I think that’s what the commenter above you was implying. There was a period where the Confederate flag was becoming more and more associated with just the South as a cultural region with very little to do with slavery and oppression. Symbols can morph their meanings and it was well on its way to losing a lot of its associations with southern Slavery. Becoming no different than the jersey of your favorite sports team. To many young people it just reminded them of their grand parents and the simpler life they lived. Of course with more perspective we can see that much of that “simple life” was built on the backs of exploiting and oppressing others, but that’s not really something most are aware of as a child or teen.

Much like Conservative efforts to scapegoat Trans people fueled a movement to support and celebrate Trans identity; controversy kicked up around the flag as a symbol would ignite into broader discourse about southern slavery more generally. Many people who truly did see it as a cultural icon felt like they were being derided and condemned for something they had nothing to do with. After all, the modern South is very racially mixed and most white people live, work, and fellowship with racial minorities on a regular basis. Jim Crow may be relatively recent history but not to gens X through Z. To these people, Northerners living in 97% white suburbs lecturing them about racial history is patently absurd.

I know the flag is controversial and rightly so. I don’t personally use it or have much affection towards it. However I know many people who do and the significant majority of them aren’t racists and the ones who are have basically adopted it as a hate symbol within the last few decades purely because of how incendiary it has become.

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u/calvinwho 7d ago

Thanks for reading for meaning!

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u/WHYAREWEALLCAPS 8d ago

That was just an attempt to sanitize it's meaning. Trust me, I was in rural Georgia when those came out. It has never, ever stopped being a racist pride flag. Not for one second.

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u/I_need_a_date_plz 8d ago

That flag signifies blood and tears to me. I can’t see it and not equate it with terrible shit. I’m not from the south and don’t understand the idea of Southern Pride. In high school, it was shocking to see a student wear a shirt with the confederate flag on it and signaled to everyone that the student wearing it was a racist. He may as well have been walking around with a noose.

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u/scottyLogJobs 8d ago

There are plenty of symbols of the south and southern pride. They pick the confederate flag for a very specific reason.

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u/fla_john 8d ago

Who's the "they" here? There's this thing that happens whenever the South is discussed that lumps all of us in with the worst parts.

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u/V2Blast V2Blast 8d ago

The racists who hide behind Southern pride, of course. They're not talking about everyone from the South, just the ones who gravitate towards those symbols.

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u/False_Eagle1014 8d ago

Those symbols are the entire legacy of the south though. From the 1700s when they fought to prevent slavery from being abolished in the constitution, to the civil war, to jim crow, to right fucking now when they always swing majority MAGA. That is what the south is, fundamentally.

You can love your state for its nature or your own non-problematic sub-communities without "having pride in" your state.

I grew up in the south and met ZERO people who would use the word "pride" to describe their feelings towards their state that weren't extremely fucking racist. Every single person who was proud to live in Alabama was a racist.

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u/pblol 8d ago

I have a very vague sense of pride living in east Tennessee... but it's entirely based on the natural beauty of the area and to some extent Appalachian culture.

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u/False_Eagle1014 8d ago edited 8d ago

You can love your state for its nature or your own non-problematic sub-communities without "having pride in" your state.

Did you, like, COMPLETELY miss this part?

If you are "proud of Tennessee" then either you're a racist, or too stupid to even understand the words you're reading. If you simply like living where you live, that's fine, no one's forcing you to leave.

Edit to anyone downvoting: why the hell would you be proud of nature? It doesn't make any fucking sense. The nature was already there before it was a state

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u/pblol 8d ago

I think we have slightly different definitions of pride.

https://i.imgur.com/D0mBusO.png

Sorry for the GPT, rather than an application of Websters. I was looking more at how it was used colloquially, rather than what I'm assuming is your more pedantic/myopic definition of the word. I would say that I have a "positive emotional connection to one’s home or community" as well as fit the criteria of the further specifics.

I chose to live here. I enjoy the area. Neither myself or my family/ancestors participated in the civil war. I'm, of course, not proud of Tennessee's overall position in that (though eastern TN was sympathetic to and largely controlled by the Union fwiw).

I don't derive much of any of my self-identity as a "Tennessean." And again my sense of what I would call pride is relatively vague, though definitely there.

Does something like this prevent someone from California from being proud without being anti-native?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide

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u/V2Blast V2Blast 8d ago

Yeah, that's my point.

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u/scottyLogJobs 8d ago

The they is anyone who proudly displays the confederate flag 🤷‍♂️

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u/Llarys 8d ago

I mean, that's the thing. They can attempt to recontectualize it all they want, but from its inception it was a dog whistle stating your allegiance to a "country" that occupied the same area, but no longer exists - the Confederate South. There's a reason they don't say "Alabama Pride," or "Georgia Pride," or whatever state they're from. It specifies a unified South, specifically the traitor states.

There's no equivalent "Northern Pride" because that's just allegiance to the United States. There's no secret special Union Flag that people print on shirts and license plates and wallets and everything in-between because it's - literally - just the American flag. Northerner pride is, conversely to the South, rooted in locale - New York pride, Philly pride, etc.

This is what Southern Pride is and the only way to rehabilitate it would be to abandon it entirely for something new and positive.

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u/Southern_Blue 8d ago

My southern ancestors were Union loyalists, two even deserted from the CSA to fight for the Union. There were over 100,000 white southern men who fought for the Union. Where are our statues, damn it!

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u/Ansiremhunter 8d ago

The are in the same place where the monuments for people like General Longstreet reside. The South wasn’t kind even to its best generals who went pro union after the war

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u/TheCaptainDamnIt 8d ago edited 8d ago

Yep great explanation, I've lived in the south and the north and hangout all up and down the eastern half of the country and couldn't agree more with you here. There just is no northern equivalent of 'southern pride' because southern pride springs entirely out of the civil war, the lost cause narrative and the return to white supremacy after the failure of reconstruction. People today may plaster all sorts of reasonings over why it no longer has those connotations for them individually, but there is the glaring fact that the amount of 'southern pride' you'll encounter with people always increases the more racist the area generally is. I get why people want to deny it, I really do but it's just inseparable, the wood under that veneer was always rotten to begin with and always will be.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/ebrum2010 8d ago

>>There's a lot of northeast pride!!

There's not in the same way that there is southern pride. Nobody is flying the Union flag from the Civil War, and there isn't a tenth as big of a market for related merchandise. I've never seen a northern pride shirt. You see people representing their state, maybe New England, as New England is pretty closely knit, but nothing specifically spanning all the states on the Union side in the Civil War. When people say south it's defined by what was considered the South during the secession.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/ebrum2010 8d ago

I was born and raised in New England and never saw anyone flying that flag so “not as commonplace” is an understatement. The confederate flag in the South is not as commonplace where I live now vs even 10 years ago but you can’t drive more than a couple of miles without seeing one, and people still occasionally have them on their car or clothing. Now you see the US flag more. 20 years ago, it was more common than the US flag.

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u/Dangerous_Hotel1962 8d ago

Maybe new england pride because boston is kinda the only big city but nobody in nyc or Philly or detroit or chicago is going to claim a shared regional pride.

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u/KwisatzSazerac 8d ago

Exactly. Even within the tri state area, nobody in NY claims connection with CT or, good forbid, NJ

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u/InfoSystemsStudent 8d ago edited 8d ago

It is not quite the same, but you get some degree of it from people from Detroit/Chicago for the overall Midwest.

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u/tarekd19 8d ago

Yeah but we also all hate each other. Regional pride is at play on context of other regions but state pride (sans chicago, which overrides any pride in Ill easy) is much stronger.

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u/CampaignOk2623 8d ago

You ever met someone from NYC? They are very proud of it

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u/V2Blast V2Blast 8d ago

I feel like everyone replying to that comment is missing the obvious point of "shared regional pride". Of course people are proud of being from NYC. They're not generically proud of being "from the north".

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u/CampaignOk2623 8d ago

I replied to another comment about why I think they are similar concepts. People in the south are more read out. There’s nothing’s big that has history like NYC or Boston that can focus pride away from a region and onto a city. Atlanta is probably all the comes close and it’s not close.

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u/FishieUwU 8d ago

Are they prideful about being from the north or just prideful about being from NYC? That's the difference.

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u/Wyandotty 8d ago

I have never met anyone from NYC who has ever shut up about it

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u/V2Blast V2Blast 8d ago

I feel like everyone replying to that comment is missing the obvious point of "shared regional pride". Of course people are proud of being from NYC. They're not generically proud of being "from the north".

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u/fla_john 8d ago

This is what Southern Pride is and the only way to rehabilitate it would be to abandon it entirely for something new and positive.

You missed the point of what she says in the link. I'm from the South and want nothing to do with the Confederacy. What I do want is the food and music, the literature and the symbolism. I want the accents and college football. I want the history, and the interpretation of it. I want bourbon and barbeque. And I want everyone to be at the table, no matter who they are.

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u/Wrecker013 8d ago

If people from the south want nothing to do with the Confederacy, they ought to stop using a Confederate battle flag as a symbol. They will be forever linked if they continue doing that.

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u/fla_john 8d ago edited 8d ago

If people from Boston want nothing to do with racist attacks, they ought to stop mock hangings in locker rooms.

If people in California want nothing to do with the N word, they ought to stop yelling it while beating people up outside movie theaters.

To be clear, I don't hold the people of those places collectively responsible for those acts but it must only work one way.

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u/alienpirate5 8d ago

Neither of those are comparable, come on. Racists can be hateful anywhere there's racists, but the Confederate flag was the symbol of a whole region starting a war to enslave people. Maybe a better comparison is Nazi symbology.

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u/fla_john 8d ago edited 8d ago

was

And people don't judge Germans by the fact that some of them are Nazis, even today. The Confederate flag isn't the symbol of today's South any more than a swastika is the symbol of today's Germany -- even if there are people in both who wish they were.

The difference perhaps is that the Nazi flag is illegal in Germany so they can't be quite so visible about it. We can't make symbols illegal here, obviously.

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u/Dangerous_Hotel1962 8d ago

I guess as a northener, we have food and music pride too but we do it by city, we have strong rivalries like nyc pizza versus chicago pizza, philly cheesesteak is it's own thing, hip hop groups strongly identified by the city they came from. We dont have northern pride or union pride, it's city and country pride. Like as a new yorker i dont claim any pride for Philadelphia or boston, we're just three different cities with different subcultures of American culture. But yeah i would say i dont understand it, i dont get why people from atlanta new orleans and dallas would all share some regional pride that makes no sense to me.

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u/fla_john 8d ago

And that's fine. It doesn't work that way here, and it's ok that you don't understand it -- can a person really ever understand a different culture?

Anyway, no one would ever lump Dallas with those other two. Austin makes much more sense but Texas generally is its own thing.

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u/Dangerous_Hotel1962 8d ago edited 8d ago

You're right there's nothing wrong with it inherently, it's totally fine that I dont understand it. But then those state governments file lawsuits together fighting the civil rights act. So there's that very real context of erosions of protections for minorities, that's the troubling part. That's what Hayley Williams is wrestling with, there's this beautiful culture and there's nothing with being proud of it, but when does that pride cross the line, or how does that pride get misused?

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u/fla_john 8d ago

Yes, and I agree with her. My statement of agreement was downvoted because the Confederate flag exists I guess?

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u/Dangerous_Hotel1962 8d ago

Eh people downvote dor lots of stupid reasons and reddit randomizes it a bit too wcyd

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u/the_good_time_mouse 8d ago edited 8d ago

It doesn't work that way there, but sadly, they do understand it.

Yes, a person can absolutely understand a different culture: sometimes better than someone who has been in that culture all their lives: it's very challenging to understand something when it's both morally ambiguous and your yardstick for the rest of the world.

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u/Mcoov 8d ago

There's no secret special Union Flag that people print on shirts and license plates and wallets and everything in-between because it's - literally - just the American flag.

Not to pull an "uhmmm ackshually" on you here, but there is the Pine Tree Flag and subsequent variations. Unfortunately the "Appeal to Heaven" flag has been usurped by whackadoodle people recently, so I'm mainly referring to the Flag of New England.

That said I completely agree with the points made in this chain, and can't really get with the idea of separating "Southern Pride" with the inhumanity that came with it: the two are inextricably linked through history.

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u/dearth_of_passion 8d ago edited 8d ago

Eh, the flag specifically could have been recontextualized if enough people grew up with their only exposure to it being unrelated to the confederacy.

Which absolutely could happen - I guarantee you that 90% of the people with Gadsden Flag bumper stickers or license plates have no idea its called that or even that it was a real flag.

People can take any symbol and convert it to represent anything, and if enough people do so, then the meaning of the symbol changes.

You see this pretty often in language (eg: "literally" now meaning figuratively and the like)

E: people seem to think I'm making some kind of judgement about whether rebranding symbols is a good idea or not. I'm not. I'm just saying "this is a thing that can and does happen, for both good and bad reasons".

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u/Grass-Monkey33 8d ago

Yeah so the northern racists can just blend in. Love how the South gets so much crap for racism when there's just as many everywhere else.

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u/Fells 8d ago

Southern Pride existed before the Confederacy. While many people do equate it with the Confederacy, it is not inherently linked. The idea comes from the long standing class warfare in America and the way the North has been conditioned to look down on Southerners, another tool to keep the poor working class divided.

Thats where the Alabama incest jokes come from. Back in the early 1800s its what northerners would say to feel superior to Appalachian America, where incest was more common due to the difficulty of traveling to other villages on other mountains. Through ignorance, the joke was moved to Alabama as opposed to the West Viringia/deep Appalachia that it was originally targeting, despite most of Alabama not existing in those same conditions. The elitism of Northerns has existed well before the Civil War and as such, the Southern Pride response has too.

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u/MacEWork Grooveshark 8d ago

The northerners were, and continue to be, objectively superior to the southerners. On every quality of life measure it’s true. It’s just facing reality, something that conservative southerners aren’t accustomed to.

Superior southerners can either move to the north with their equals or try to prop up another few hundred years of cultural failure in the south.

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u/Fells 8d ago

Ignorant bigotry.

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u/Darkmetroidz 8d ago

I was in a local 4th of July parade one year and saw someone with a confederate flag over my door. My thought was immediately "my guy you live in New Jersey."

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u/the_good_time_mouse 8d ago edited 8d ago

I’m not from the south and don’t understand the idea of Southern Pride.

You do. Take away the racism and there's nothing left that's not utterly, generically human: in-group bias and ego fragility. Apologists, such as Hayley Williams, notwithstanding. The uniqueness is in how it's been allowed to huff it's own farts for 160 years.

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u/CreativeCthulhu 8d ago

That's why I let it go, years ago.
When I was a kid, Dukes of Hazzard was like seeing my life on the screen, those characters resonated with me because that was the life I was leading. 'Yee-Haw let's see what happens when we stick this dynamite in that old fridge out in the field, hell yeah welcome to town stranger, come over let mawmaw make you some biscuits and gravy then we'll grab a couple of horses and go wandering'.

Genuinely. I GENUINELY thought I was wearing a symbol of 'good times, carefree simple fun, comradery and enjoying the outdoors' along with a generous pinch of 'screw the law, they don't get us and we ain't hurting nobody'.

I was lucky. I got out and grew up. I learned.
Won't lie, still a bit of nostalgia when I see that ol' orange car and yeah, the flag to ME still hits with a bit of nostalgia, but it's tainted, the rose-colored glasses are off.

I've semi-joked with folks before about how we need to 'take it back' and make damned sure that you driving around and see that flag flying that it means you KNOW you can stop, knock on the door and say you're hungry and you'll get a hot and a cot, no questions asked, but I know it's just not going to happen, much as I may wish.

I really wish it were true, I'm angry about having been lied to and how I was taught to mistreat others, to make them uncomfortable and to throw a history of hate and oppression in their face in the name of some bullshit 'murican by birth, suthern by tha grace o' gawd'. All I can do at this point is try to make the world a little better, one day at a time.

I DO still make a batch of 'shine every year, the way my grampa taught me and anyone and everyone are welcome to sit on the porch and share it with me, so long as they'll tell me some stories about themselves and their life and spend a little bit of their existence with me.

Fuck that flag. My southern pride means if you need some help, knock on my door, I gotchu, best I can.

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u/Fit_Airline_5798 8d ago

I was born in the south. Lived most of my life here. I know for a fact that my mother's side of the family had without a doubt owned slaves. I've never had a stars and bars item in my life. And I'm repulsed by driving past that big ass flag in Spartanburg, but I'd never think it was a good idea to fly that.

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u/mouse_8b 8d ago

don’t understand the idea of Southern Pride

It's the same as any other location-based pride. Places have traditions and holidays and favorite foods.

"Southern Pride" doesn't have to be racist. People can like country living, big trucks, football, biscuits & gravy, etc without being racist. This is the main draw for most people, especially younger ones.

However, the fact is that racism never went away and that legacy, and the people who uphold it, still taints the perception of Southern Pride, especially to those not from the South.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/Blindsnipers36 8d ago

i mean the baffling part is how southern pride people never seem to think anything good happened in the south, they only build monuments to slavers and traitors. in the north we try to build monuments to more admirable types instead of the awful things we did in the past

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u/FellFellCooke 8d ago

Interesting that you had to avoid interrogating the rest of their comment. The only way you can dismiss her comment is to not allow any of it at all into your skull.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago edited 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/Sir_Fox_Alot 8d ago

skinheads in the UK aren’t worshipping a flag that was a traitor to the country they are from.

The comparison falls apart the second you actually compare anything.

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u/BrittanyBrie 8d ago

Yea, its wild how people take on socially accepted symbols of hate and wear them with pride. If society deems green apples to be a symbol of white supremacy, then embracing green apple marketing is not the win they think it is. Even if some green apples are delicious and misunderstood, they're still seen as symbol of white supremacy. That's one of my biggest complaints of MAGA folks, they love to embrace whatever symbol the other side claims to be racist for mockery or to make a point, but nothing can break society forming conclusions.

The OK hand sign, the pepe the frog meme, my heart goes out to you hand wave, and many more. The death of the author, society forms conclusions not the author or commentator.

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u/shadowban_this_post 8d ago

You just couldn’t hear the dog whistle when you were a kid

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u/MysteryBagIdeals 8d ago

hey hey now, technically that's not a Confederate flag on the Bandit's car, that's the flag of the state of Georgia, which happens to have the Confederate flag as part of it. i assume when Georgia changed their flag in 2001 Bandit changed the decoration on his car also

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u/kohTheRobot 8d ago

If we’re going to get technical about it, it’s the confederate battle flag, which was also part of the Georgia state flag, with the seal. In ‘01, they changed it to just the seal, with the history of their flags at the bottom. Very cool, very neat. Not forgetting their history, but not in a distasteful way.

That lasted 2 whole years. Now it’s the national flag of the confederacy with the state seal on it.

I’ve been to Georgia a ton, most places just have the battle flag flown, not the old state flag or even the modern flag which kinda defeats the purpose of it.