Part III Song for Alabama

Anti-Southern Prejudice Helps the Right’s Legislative Agenda

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

Hey there everyone –

Let me ask you something: when you saw the word “Alabama” in front of the headline “Alabama Supreme Court IVF Case,” what came to mind?

I felt an immediate desire to dismiss it. “It’s Alabama,” I told myself with an internal shrug. “What do you expect?” I think I waited a couple of days to even open the articles. 

There’s a lot of folks reading this who aren’t from the American South, or who aren’t even in the US. So I’ll tell you a few of my associations with Alabama; a few of the reasons I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this first test case for IVF happened in Alabama, the way I don’t think it’s a coincidence the first anti trans bathroom bill was introduced in Texas.

When I say “Alabama,” in my mind I hear “Sweet Home Alabama”; I imagine the rise and swell of cicadas, keeping me company in the darkness; I hear the sound of gravel being pushed by the tires of a low rider as it peels out, a white man’s hand ashing a cigarette out the rolled-down window. Porches. Sweet tea. Cotton. 

Then I think of Governor Wallace, promising in his campaign “Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!” I see him in 1963 blocking the entrance to the enrollment office of the University of Alabama. I see the black and white photograph of Vivian Malone and James A. Hood as the National Guard enforces their right to enroll.

I push the associations to the present: 16.2% of Alabama’s people live below the poverty line; the state ranks 44th in the nation in its literacy rates, and only 16.6% of the population has a bachelor’s degree. Rural areas labeled the “Black Belt” are emptying out, a second Great Migration; finding a healthcare provider in a rural area was already difficult, before the abortion/IVF restrictions heated up—and now it’s even worse. 

The popular stereotype of Alabama: white, rural, unapologetically racist, proudly Christian, conservative. The perfect place to test how far right the court will let you go. Part of a region that’s happy to deny their people federal funding for services because of “states rights”—harking back to the Lost Cause even if it kills them, back then and today. Is that the symbolic, secondary message sent by this IVF decision? Beware the power of the South. And at the same time, dismiss it. Only the ignorant can fall for this kind of zealotry. Only the truly racist can allow this much suffering on their watch. Only these kinds of places think like this. No need to pay it too much attention. Just be glad you don’t live there. 

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I always felt guilty, loving Sweet Home Alabama. Like how I felt about loving Led Zeppelin. How it felt to drive in the Southern dark on an empty highway listening to those songs turned all the way up, with one foot on the gas and the other barefoot, the heat on to keep my feet warm and the windows down, to let the cool air in. Way back when I’d smoke a clove and taste the sweetness and press the gas pedal down and blow the smoke out the window and wonder if this was how it feels to be a white man who can drive in the dark and go anywhere he wants, feel the power in his arms and thighs, his boots and his baseball cap, how he might have hard things on his mind but at least he doesn’t have to fear getting out of the car, what might happen to his body if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or even if anyone saw him, driving alone out there. 

It wasn’t that I wanted to be a man: I just wanted the freedom to move. I wanted the sense of “rightness”—that the world was made for me, a little bit; that I could move around in it, shape it, somewhat; that I had more latitude to express who I was, and then change it; that I could speak and I wouldn’t automatically be second-guessed. I thought that’s what Sweet Home Alabama was about.

There’s a similarity in the popular understanding of what Sweet Home Alabama and Bruce Springstein’s Born in the USA stand for. Both songs are seen as hymns to a full-throated pride: in the South and its history; in America and its exceptionalism. Except in both cases, that’s wrong. 

I felt guilty singing to Sweet Home Alabama because I thought when I sang it, hard, out the window, I was identifying with Southern racism, or that I was giving it a pass, every time I turned up the song. But that’s because I never knew all the words. That’s why I gave you a link to the band’s “lyric video.” 

Sweet Home Alabama expresses, in a catchier way that I can in this post, exactly what I’m trying to talk about. I won’t go through it line by line (but here’s an essay that does). What’s important is that the song calls out Neil Young for his easy flattening of all Southerners in his songs Southern Man and Alabama. It calls out people in the North, or people who aren’t Republicans or conservatives, who like to take refuge in their superiority to rednecks, who they assume are all racists, all ignorant, all rural, all “one” person. It mocks “Montgomery”—the location of the governor’s mansion and the seat of power—as having the “answer” to the South’s problems. And it reminds its listeners of Watergate: of the way federal corruption relies on the South as a distraction machine, a way to say look over there, it’s worse, or look, they’re doing it, too.

The American South has long been the space of displacement, the unconscious repository of everything the United States can’t face. The Abolitionists could tsk tsk at the South and ignore what was happening up North. The white people who want to say “not me” when white supremacy comes up can point to Alabama and say at least I’m not like that. 

The thing is, when you’re white and you live in the South, you have to talk about racism. You have to talk about slavery. You have to take it when people of color won’t look you in the eye, not out of politeness, but to ensure you feel invisible, that you don’t register, because of what white people did, and are doing, and they want you to keep remembering. You can’t pretend that when Atlanta calls itself the city too busy to hate that means progress.

Every time I looked at the red clay that is the dirt in so many parts of the South, I thought about the blood spilled, and how it seems right that the earth is still that color now. I’ve positioned myself on the gentle slope at Gettysburg where more than 50,000 soldiers were shot with small cannonballs at point blank range; lay of my belly imagining what it must have felt like to be 17 or 18 years old, looking down that tiny slope and firing at the face of someone who looked just like me. I learned how that small shift in terrain maybe made the difference in who won.

The brilliance of the Republican’s framing is that it’s kaleidoscopic: it uses the South as cover for its reliance on white supremacy, rooted in Kevin Phillps’ Southern Strategy. It uses the South as its proxy; a stand-in for the kind of America that is under threat and needs to be resurrected. It uses the South as its refuge; the place where people defend the Lost Cause, no matter how many times they lose. It relies on Southern outrage at being labeled deplorables to stoke hatred of latté-swilling liberals, so classist and ignorant they have no idea how complex the South really is. It stands with the rural and the working-class whites against the monied interests of legacy politicians, no matter how rich its candidates actually are.

It doesn’t matter that over 80% of registered Republicans support access to IVF, because this case is about standing up for the little guy, the persecuted Christian minority that just wants to protect life, even as what it’s also doing is showing the rest of us just how much power they’ve already amassed and what they plan to do with it, once they get more.

That these tropes and myths are centered on an image of the South as made up of white people, erasing everyone else, is not only a continuation of the logic of slavery and the denial of personhood, but a way of enacting, at the level of representation, the wish that the Confederacy stood for and that a segment of the population wishes for today. 

In my last piece I wrote about the ways the Alabama decision represents the Law as enacting the will of the people of Alabama to institute a (white) Christian theocratic state. I asked which people “count” under that logic, and which people should be denied the right to reproduce. I updated the piece a few days later, when House Republicans expressed opposition to a federal policy that would have increased IVF access to single veterans and veterans in same-sex relationships. That Alabama is a racially-diverse state, full of people of many faiths, identities, sexualities, and family structures is an inconvenient obstacle to the Christian nationalist project that Justice Parker has publicly stated he’s called to enact.

Part of the reason I was so upset about the ways the mainstream media talked about the Alabama IVF decision is because the complexity of Alabama, and of the American South, was being erased, creating an open space for the ideas and images I’ve outlined in this post to fill. When MLK day rolls around, we get tried and true images of King and Selma, of Montgomery and Ebenezer Baptist. But when it’s an ordinary Tuesday, the mainstream media still largely speaks of the South as a political entity as white; still refuses to acknowledge the political power of all the people who are organizing on the ground, who are working across difference, in multi-racial coalitions that include white people, to fight for racial justice; for reproductive justice; for economic justice. 

Yesterday in a special election in Alabama, Marilyn Lands, a white woman, flipped a House seat Democratic, winning by 25 points. Her campaign addressed the need to protect access to contraception, abortion, and IVF. 

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca