South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“A South, at least imagined, without Blackness.”

Many Americans see Appalachia as a rugged, white utopia while also treating it with disdain because of its poverty. Appalachians face disparagement when they are called “white trash,” as if they were disposable. The region is romanticized through a racist lens yet simultaneously scorned.

“History orients us and magnifies our present circumstances.”

To understand the modern US, one must know its history, because it explains how the nation’s current political, social, cultural, and economic landscapes were shaped. Perry consistently links the historical circumstances that she explores to present-day issues, such as the tie between enslavement and today’s prisons in which incarcerated people, many of whom are Black, labor under similar conditions.

“If you want to understand a nation, or have aspirations for it that are decent, myth ought to be resisted.”

Perry argues that if one has altruistic and good intentions for the US, then one must confront and reject the mythology that informs much of American history. This mythology, for instance, includes the sanctification of the founding fathers, many of whom enslaved people.

“[…] but I must also express outrage that as an American I am expected to digest the founding fathers’ venom casually, as though it is merely a part of the nation’s genealogy but not its soul.”

Perry rejects the racism in the writing and actions of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. She refuses to excuse this racism under the pretense that these men were simply shaped by the thinking of their day. Rather, these racist attitudes are embedded in the very foundation of the country.

“Janus-faced history: two monuments, two visions of heroism, one tradition.”

Janus is the ancient Roman god of transitions and is depicted with two faces. Perry uses this analogy to explain competing histories in the US, which she sees manifested in Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain’s Confederate monument. Though one monument celebrates US presidents like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the other remembers rebels who seceded from the US, they are built in the same tradition because enslavement was not only valued in the Confederacy but also formed the US.

“The American fantasy of fantastic wealth and power lies on one side, and the passionate defense of the ideals of democracy and liberty on the other.”

The capitalist lust that drives American dreams of wealth and success is unreachable for most. This greed also fuels white supremacist colonialism and democratic values, which stand in opposition to one another in US history and contemporary politics. The “God of masters” represents the first; the “God of slaves,” the latter.

“Don’t we always need to look round the back to see what made all this happen?”

Perry encourages readers to examine the dark underbelly of American history rather than focus on the shiny surface. The Kentucky distilling industry and the enjoyable tourist tours of those distilleries today stand as an example. What is less known is that enslaved people are responsible for this industry’s success and built its foundations.

“And yet I have learned in the course of my travels that there are ‘Souths,’ plural as much as singular, despite my Deep South bias.”

Having been born in Alabama, Perry traces her origins to the Deep South. However, her research and experiences have taught her that the idea of the South exists in multiple forms, as the US South shaped the formation of the nation, and the region’s relationship to the Caribbean ties the US South to the Global South.

“After all, when American exceptionalism is extolled, it requires us to set aside genocide, slavery, colonialism, and all manner of shameful deeds to trumpet national honor.”

Perry repeatedly encourages readers to interrogate US history. Popular culture feeds Americans a heroic mythology that celebrates the US as an exceptional nation. Yet colonialism, genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Africans supply the foundation upon which the nation rests.

“At Howard there is perhaps a parallel to Ellis Island of sorts, a place through which a person might travel to become something—not an American per se, but rather to become a person who understood her relationship to empire, including the American one, that power reached all over the world from the dawn of the twentieth century forward and which was born out of European empires. Even in the periods in which they had conservative administrations, HBCUs, simply by their composition, facilitated a critical look at the global order […].”

Howard University in Washington, DC, is an HBCU. This institution and others like it encourage Black students to see their world as one that extends beyond the boundaries of the US and to interrogate the European and American colonialism that shapes their lives. HBCUs transform Black students into global citizens.

“The distinction between country and Southern is a fine one. Southern is regional and cultural; country is a disposition.”

Perry questions a young, Black Lyft driver from Washington, DC, about the city’s Southern identity. He denies being from the South but calls himself “country.” Perry notes that the identities “country” and “rural” are frequently treated as synonyms. While they can be used interchangeably, one need not be rural or even Southern to be “country,” because it is a way of being or an attitude, a “disposition,” rather than a purely geographical designation. This disposition links the Upper and Deep South.

“If you think, mistakenly, that American racism can be surmounted by integration, by people knowing each other, even by loving each other, the history of the American South must teach otherwise. There is no resolution to unjust relations without a structural and ethical change.”

White and Black Southerners already knew one another and had close relationships despite segregation. Integration allowed Black and white students to attend the same schools or eat in the same restaurants, but it did not solve the problem of structural white supremacy, because it is embedded in American institutions.

“Some of us who watched Roots as little children had nightmares because it wasn’t just a story of the way back then; it was ‘let me explain to you so you can understand what is happening right now.’”

The past is not gone for Black Americans. Alex Haley’s novel Roots, which became a TV miniseries in 1977, recounts the saga of the enslaved Kunta Kinte and his descendants. The terror of that history echoed for Black viewers the trauma they experienced at the hands of white supremacy.

“The Black queer mecca, the heart of the Black music industry, the place where McMansions are maintained, pristinely, by the descendants of domestics who now pay somebody else to clean their house. Atlanta is an in-the-flesh Disney World, a spectacle of American consumption and ambition.”

Perry challenges the widely held conception that Atlanta is a center of Black prosperity and success. While this view is true in part, Perry argues that the city is a center of exploitative consumerism and corporatization. Many Black residents remain impoverished, yet their impoverishment is hidden behind a façade of glitz and wealth.

“It is what Du Bois called a twoness—two warring souls—Black yet American.”

Perry draws on the work of civil rights activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois to explain her dual identity, which often conflicts with itself. Despite the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity, American identity is often equated with whiteness. Perry takes pride in being American, which creates a shared identity with her fellow citizens, some of whom resent her because she is Black.

“Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy.”

Perry explains white privilege. It offers promises of a life better than that of non-white people. Poverty, however, creates a sense of white grievance when one witnesses non-white individuals’ success.

Just remember, the sounds of this nation that captures the whole world were born out of repression.”

Perry reminds readers of the true origins of rock and roll music. It was not created by white men like Elvis Presley but grew out of the hardships that Black Americans experienced in the South. Presley drew on sounds and styles that Black artists like Little Richard created.

“On the one hand, the White Northerner often seeks to find sympathy and common ground with the White Southerner by disappearing the Black Southerner. On the other, the White Northerner seeks to express solidarity with the Black Southerner by turning the White Southerner into a caricatured demon in comparison to his own virtue. Both are insidious.”

Perry calls attention to the hypocrisy of white Northerners who disparage the South as a backward, racist, and impoverished land. These white Northerners simultaneously pursue communion with Black Southerners in their disparagement of white people. However, this effort often erases Black Southerners, who are the South’s soul, by perpetuating an image of the South as white.

“How, I have wondered, having walked on these islands, could we maintain the myth that the ‘heartland’ is the place farthest away from the water? Is it because of the American habit of running away from the truth?”

The Midwestern US is commonly referenced as the nation’s “heartland.” Perry questions this accepted truth. The country’s “heartland” more accurately lies along the Southern coastline, where enslaved Africans disembarked. These enslaved peoples and their descendants created the nation’s soul in the Southern US.

“Every cruelty is also an acknowledgement that the thing or people reviled are there, and ain’t going nowhere.”

White right-wing people often demonize marginalized groups of people, such as LGBTQ+ individuals. Nevertheless, this demonization serves as witness to the existence of these marginalized communities that their opponents cannot eliminate.

“Slavery as an institution colonized New Orleans as much as any empire.”

The French established New Orleans as a colony in 1718. Remnants of French colonial culture are visible in New Orleans today not only in surviving architecture but also in local traditions like Mardi Gras. Yet enslaved Africans and their descendants also heavily influence the city, as seen in the Mardi Gras Indians, a Black traditional celebration that takes place during Mardi Gras.

“Of course there are lots of places to go. Because the Southern region of the United States has both shaped the world and been filled by it.”

Perry chose to include Cuba and the Bahamas in her travelogue because they are an extension of the Southern US. She reminds readers, however, that other parts of the Caribbean, and the globe, are also linked to the Southern US because of the mutual exchange of influences between the Southern states and the Global South.

“[…] it is that Cubans, no matter how white their skin, do not deny the fundamental Africanness of who they are the way Southern White people do assiduously.”

Perry notes that there is a racial hierarchy in Cuba, despite the Cuban Revolution’s efforts to destroy racial inequality. Nonetheless, there is a distinction between the way that white Cubans and white Southerners in the US view themselves. White Cubans acknowledge their African background or the influence of African cultures in Cuba. White Southerners deny it.