Restricted Who defines "Southern Heritage?"

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The following five or so posts are content from the book "The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory" by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. These post encompass no more than 6 full paragraphs, from the first chapter. I have split them into separate paragraphs for readability.

The topic is Who defines "Southern History?" This will be seen in the following paragraphs:

In February 2000, the city council of Richmond, Virginia, voted to change the names of two bridges that link the north and south banks of the James River. Since then the J.E.B. Stewart and Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson bridges had carried the names of Samuel Tucker and Curtis Holt, two local notables in the civil rights movement. The council's decision outraged Jerry Baxley of the Southern Party of Virginia. “The southern people are getting tired of being told they’re not important,” he fumed. He rebuked city officials for “taking away our heritage, our symbols."​
Three years later and a thousand miles away, Shelby Foote pondered the definition of southern art at the opening of a new museum in New Orleans. “I'm not aware that there is such a thing as southern art, at least not if you're defining it by technique,” he explained.” “If there's something distinct about it, it’s subject matter and also inner heritage. All Southerners who try to express themselves in art,” he announced, “are very much aware that they are party to a defeat, which is something most other Americans didn't feel until Vietnam.”​
Baxley, a polemical provocateur, and Foote, a noted man of letters and interpreter of all things southern, define “southern” heritage similarly. Both presume that the Confederacy was the crucible of southern identity and that white heritage and southern identity are synonymous. The adjective “southern” apparently does not apply to African-Americans who live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Moreover, by this definition, southerners have been unable interpret the collapse of the confederacy as anything other than a defeat.​
When southern identity is assumed to be interchangeable with white identity, much more than semantics are at stake. White claims to power, status, and collective identity are advanced at the same time that black claims are undercut. Baxley and Foote are hardly unusual in the cultural privilege they are assigned to whites. The logic of their comments rests on a presumption that the heritage of Southern African-Americans merits little recognition and had scant influence on the region’s culture.​
James K Vardaman, an uncommonly zealous **** and Mississippi’s governor, made this claim at the dawn of the 20th Century. “The Negro,” according to him, had never built any monuments “to perpetuate in the memory of posterity the virtues of his ancestors.” Vardaman’s strident claims are unlikely to be widely endorsed today. Yet the substance of his message still informs the commonplace use of “southern,” which implies that Southern heritage is the exclusive property of whites.​

- Alan
 
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