While the Rest of Black America Laughs at Mississippi
Our young people have been taught that all things ignorant, poor, “country,” stupid, backwards, behind, and bad about Black people begin and end in Mississippi. Then, they are sent to various colleges and universities in Mississippi with absolutely no grounding in real African American history or the significance of certain historical events. Meanwhile, we had an ex-president who patterned himself after two of Mississippi’s most vociferous, anti-Black demagogues, Brett Favre unethically (maybe illegally?) took a million dollars out of the state’s welfare system, and a Black man was killed by the cops in Grenada, Mississippi.
If I didn’t think that my President would have me fired and escorted out of the building by the police, I would march to the admissions office and DEMAND that we no longer admit out of state students to our university. I am serious. Before you click off this article, Reader, read me out on this one. At the end of the semester, I received an email that made my blood boil. Seriously, I could feel my blood pressure rising as I read it. While I am well-read and relatively level-headed, students tend to forget that professors are human, and push every button on the temper-tantrum elevator until you explode through that metaphorical glass like the elevator on the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Here’s what caused me to almost toss my computer through the window: All through the semester, I announce explicitly that I CANNOT STAND PLAGIARISM. I just can’t. It is a hallmark of laziness and I do not tolerate it. For the sake of transparency, I announce to the students that I use plagiarism detection software for every major assignment.
In addition to announcing verbally several times to the class that plagiarism is my pet peeve, it is included in my syllabus. I even lecture my students on academic integrity, take them to the library for a plagiarism lecture, ask the educational librarians to teach them about the electronic databases, and layer this with an additional in-class lecture about the plagiarism detection software. In spite of all of this, a student decided to plagiarize. Now, for this offense, I could have turned him in to Student Affairs. However, I did not. My policy, as stated in my syllabus, is to give the students an “F” with no chance of a redo. Since the student plagiarized on his final, the student failed my course. A few days later, this student, who had plagiarized his entire paper, had the unmitigated gall to send an email asking me why he’d failed the class. I responded with the site where he’d lifted the paper. Do you all, Dear Readers, want to know what he responded to me with? Do you all really want to know what this knuckle head said to me, a Ph.D.-level professor? He, with his bare face hanging open before the Lord Almighty said, “I honestly didn’t think ya’ll had this kind of technology in Mississippi.”
I do declare, Reader. I do declare. Lord, have mercy. In the words of my Jamaica brothers and sisters. Lord-a-mercy. If that don’t beat all.
As intellectually insulting as this may sound, this incident is hardly unique to me (ask some of my colleagues around the state and they have similar horror stories)and it is hardly the beginning of my story. I grew up in a little border town, Centreville, Mississippi. It borders East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. It was and is quite common for teachers to retire from Louisiana, cross the border, and work 10 or 15 additional years in order to receive Mississippi’s retirement benefits. In spite of having a reputation as America’s poorest state, we have surprisingly good retirement benefits and insurance packages. Teaching us was not the primary item on their agenda. It was not surprising to walk in on school days and hear how “slow” or “behind” we were, because we were in Mississippi. These teachers obviously ignored the fact that we received two Baton Rouge news stations — WAFB (9) and WBRZ (2) — and we witnessed the disintegration of Scotlandville to the crack epidemic, the influx of AIDS to Baton Rouge, the high crime rate of Baton Rouge, and how many children were killed in house fires because somebody could not find the keys to burglar bars in the middle of the night. They must have forgotten that we witnessed nightly the inequitable funding of the higher educational system, since Louisiana State University was always on the news for any little thing positive while Southern University, the Historically Black College & University which sat right around the corner from the state’s flagship system, looked like it was on the verge of falling apart every day. I guess they also forgot that Baton Rouge was only a short drive away from us, too, and that our parents did most of our school shopping at Cortana Mall and when they wanted to do some heavy grocery shopping, we went to The Real Super Store. We saw the poverty, crime, and street walkers on Plank Road first-hand. We saw how much nothing most Black folk had in Louisiana, too. I guess they also forgot that many of us had relatives in New Orleans. And while they called us “poor” and behind, the only time that we saw homelessness was on the streets of New Orleans. I guess they forgot.
I attended an undergraduate institution where they employed Northern, near-Ivy League English professors who REFUSED to give any Southern students A’s in their classes — no matter how hard we worked. I got a B in this particular professor’s class, and all of the rest of the students thought I was a genius. This was the English department, where I have been reading British literature since the third grade. I knew this guy was a pompous jerk. These people come to the South like they are Jane Goodall and we’re the primates. In the History Department, it was more the same. I knew I deserved an A in one of the classes, but this Italian, who swore his Jersey accent alone made him more intelligent than the average Southerner gave none of us an A. Sadly, not all of them were from the South. We had one who was a Cuban American from Florida. What jackasses! Why work in Mississippi if we’re all too stupid to understand the words coming out of your mouth? And by the way, if one of those jackasses ever reads this blog, Shakespeare was a man of his time. I still contend that The Tempest alludes to the budding colonialism and slavery that would undergird England’s transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy. Jackass. And if Christopher Marlowe hadn’t gotten himself killed at a young age, he would be the bard, not Shakespeare. And I don’t give one damn what any of you all say in that pretentious department, Alexander Pope was the better artist. It’s not his fault that the British hated Catholic folk at the time.
Now, let me go on a brief aside here. I am NOT on Mississippi’s tourism board. I am not here to defend my state. Mississippi is a damn disaster from one Republican governor to the next and our white neighbors just keep voting against their economic interests by voting them in. Let me give you a brief tour of Mississippi as a historical disaster. First of all, Mississippi has had the most colorful, venomous, race-baiting demagogues to take the national stage in the history of the United States. Are you tired of Donald Trump? Do you have Trump fatigue? Try being a Black citizen of Mississippi between the years of 1904–1908. That meant that James K. Vardaman (pictured below), The Great White Chief, as he was called, was the governor.
This man, originally born in Texas, was one of the most vociferous race-baiters that the world has ever seen. When he spoke about the 1890 Mississippi constitutional convention, James K. Vardaman said, and I’m quoting him word-for-word here, “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter…. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger.” He made no class distinctions. Every person of African descent was just “a nigger” only fit to shine his shoes. When speaking of Booker T. Washington’s trip to the Whitehouse, Vardaman said that the place stank of “nigger” so bad that the rats ran out to the horse stable. Vardaman did not believe in education for Black people in any shape, form, or fashion. Who would be available to shine his shoes? Alarmingly, this monstrosity of inhumanity went on to become a United States Senator.
Then there was Theodore Bilbo, who served as Mississippi’s governor twice (1916–1920, 1928–1932)and was every bit the colorful race-baiter as his predecessor, though he did enact some progressive measures. Here’s the rub, Bilbo was a card-carrying Ku Klux Klan member who dismissed most of the Ph.D.-level professors at the state’s major universities. Once he axed the professors at the state’s major universities (he didn’t think enough of the Black ones to damage them), Mississippi’s universities developed a reputation for being second-rate that it has never recovered from.
Now, for the sake of transparency, I have to write this about Bilbo, Reader. On his deathbed, Bilbo called a Black newspaper reporter to him. He admitted that though he did not believe in “social mingling” of the races, he respected Black people. In fact, he believed that Black people had a noble heritage and history and should be as proud of their heritage as he was of whiteness. He used race-baiting to cover up class politics. The people he really hated were the rich and wealthy. He used race to cover up the fact that he was siphoning power and money away from the wealthy planter class of the Mississippi Delta to the poorer, white people of the Mississippi Hills. It worked like a charm. To this day, the Delta is seen as “poor” while counties like DeSoto in Mississippi continue to build and enrich themselves.
In addition to the colorful demagogues, Mississippi once led the nation in lynching and it is worthy of noting that only Black newspapers reporting this grim statistic. Right now, the current Great White Hope, Brett Favre is embroiled in a welfare scandal that is well over a quarter million dollars, and the white man hype network, ESPN, has remained relatively mum about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/10/28/brett-favre-welfare-fraud/
Right now, the very Republican Governor, Tate Reeves, is making efforts to block all mentions of critical race theory in Mississippi schools. Read about it here: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mississippi-gov-tate-reeves-calls-for-elimination-of-critical-race-theory-in-budget-proposal
Reader, if you knew how badly I want to walk up to one of these Republican operatives, any of them who are using CRT as a boogey man, and say, “Define it.” What are the nuances of CRT? Who came up with it? Why? If only you knew! I am getting bitter. I am getting bitter, because none of these people were sitting in class with me when I was reading Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights. I was a Master’s Degree student and I didn’t see any of these people in the library when I slogged through this book. I was alone. Where were these people? Did they take any of those JD/MA classes on campus? My school had a law school, but I didn’t see any student Republicans in classes with me or even any reading groups and I KNOW that no k-12 teacher has the time to read and break down this text during the semester. No k-12 student has the capacity to understand an Ivy League contract lawyer. I was a Master’s degree student and had to read the chapters multiple times in order to understand it and Patricia Williams is a great writer. I just do not understand legal jargon.
But, I digress, and this has been a LOOOOONNNNNNNG digression.
As a Black Mississippian, I feel and have felt that other Black Americans malign us for the inanity of white Mississippians. It is very American for people to want to feel different and better than somebody else, and African Americans are not immune to this. Even if we are not materially better than others, we want the feeling of being better off than others. This is why African Americans have traditionally ostracized Africans. But for African Americans, this behavior has dangerous consequences and I will prove it. What do the killings of George Floyd, Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and other Black men have in common? They did not occur in Mississippi. Yet, Black people continue to preach Mississippi as the worst. And the Black man who was brutally beaten to death by the police in Grenada, Mississippi in 2018 has gained absolutely no attention in Black America or anywhere else, because it does not fit the narrative of “white racist cop killing innocent Black man.” Look at the video and you see Black and white cops involved here: https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2021/04/23/robert-loggins-ms-black-caucus-calls-federal-investigation/7320428002/
Robert Loggins was killed in the same manner as George Floyd, but we in Mississippi cannot get any support for an investigation into his murder. We have a policing problem here and not a clearly racial problem here. In Mississippi. And nobody cares. On the other hand, what if New York’s stop and frisk policy were a Jackson, Mississippi policy? Would it have gone on as long as it did? I think not.
Black America, WE, not the dominant culture, need to do a better job of how we talk about ourselves. The need to elevate and separate one from another is detrimental to our progress as a nation within a nation. Robert Loggins deserves the same justice as George Floyd. He is not receiving it, because he does not fit a certain narrative. Our young people do not know who we are at all. They do not even respect Ph.D.-level professors because of what they have been taught at home and are utterly shocked when they learn that Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till are linked. In spite of how far we’ve come, we really haven’t come that far at all. All I can say that it’s America, it’s 2021 but in many ways, it’s still 1963 and everywhere is Mississippi. And while that may sound grim, it’s what is real. And if we do not prepare our young people for that reality, haven’t we done them a disservice? For the sake of our collective mental clarity, identity formation, common sense, and my sanity at the end of the semester, we need to be honest with our young people.
