Speaker 1: Pushing it all right on this episode of Some of
Speaker 1: My Best Friends Are we are traveling to the South.
Speaker 2: Man, I'm already there with that music. But this is
Speaker 2: an adventure episode a journey, right, Yep, we're gonna talk
Speaker 2: about a trip that you and I took last summer
Speaker 2: to Tennessee. That's right, Sawanna University, which is also known
Speaker 2: as the University of the South.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's right. In fact, they liked Siwani a little
Speaker 1: bit more these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: We'll talk a little bit more about that. But this
Speaker 1: was part of a conference. You and I were there
Speaker 1: with a bunch of really incredible people, writers and artists
Speaker 1: and scholars, and you know, it was an opportunity to
Speaker 1: do something you and I have never done, certainly not
Speaker 1: done together, which is to think about Southerness, to think
Speaker 1: about what it means to be Southern in the twenty
Speaker 1: first century, and to even personally think about whether or
Speaker 1: not I could identify in this way as a non
Speaker 1: white person, like does that even include me?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Or hell, does it include me? You know, like a Northerner,
Speaker 2: a Jewish person, somebody married to a black woman with
Speaker 2: biracial kids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know, we haven't really had a chance
Speaker 1: to digest exactly all that we took in, you know,
Speaker 1: to be surrounded by Southern whites at a Southern white
Speaker 1: institution and kind of like meeting them on their own
Speaker 1: terms at the University of the South.
Speaker 2: I hear you, khalil, Well, come on, carpetbager, that's that's South, all.
Speaker 1: Right, all right. I don't have a banjo, but I
Speaker 1: got my blue shoes.
Speaker 2: How about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's.
Speaker 4: My age.
Speaker 2: So to get to Tennessee, I traveled from Chicago.
Speaker 1: That's right. I flew in from New Jersey.
Speaker 2: And the two of us we met up at the
Speaker 2: Nashville Airport. And you know, Sewanee is on a mountaintop
Speaker 2: about one hundred miles southeast of Nashville. So the university
Speaker 2: sent this driver to pick up a group of us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this driver really awesome person. His name's Benny Humes, uh,
Speaker 1: and he he kind of was like our ambassador for
Speaker 1: the moment. He was, you know, a black man deeply
Speaker 1: immersed in the country music scene, much to our surprise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a woman in our group in the passenger
Speaker 2: seat got him talking about all the people he's driven.
Speaker 5: Everybody in country music this, nobody, nobody, I haven't driven
Speaker 5: absolutely Wow, Reaper McIntyre, the juds, Oh, Chris Stapleton.
Speaker 6: I was with him last week, Vince Gil. Have you
Speaker 6: ever heard of Brooks and Done? Yeah, hang out with
Speaker 6: him quite a bit. Man.
Speaker 2: I loved Benny and I still don't know who brooks
Speaker 2: and Does. So, as you know Khalil, in the twenty
Speaker 2: and tens, I actually lived with my family in Nashville
Speaker 2: about five years and then we moved back to Chicago.
Speaker 2: So I have a lot of experience, uh, not only
Speaker 2: with the South, but specifically with music city, which is
Speaker 2: what people call Nashville. So it wasn't surprising to me
Speaker 2: at all when Benny said that he was also a songwriter.
Speaker 6: Well, it goes a little something this, I'm in the
Speaker 6: I'm in the I been at it. I mean, they
Speaker 6: can't stay.
Speaker 1: I love that. I'm in love with a woman I
Speaker 1: can't stand.
Speaker 7: Man.
Speaker 1: Ain't that the truth from back?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 1: No, that came out the right way. I know what
Speaker 1: that's like from back in the day, I mean, not currently, that's.
Speaker 2: Not cart before your twenty five year marriage, however.
Speaker 1: Long you've been exactly and in fact, you know if
Speaker 1: you haven't experienced that emotion, whether it's a woman singing
Speaker 1: about a man she can't stand, you have never really
Speaker 1: truly been in love, how about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, I wish Benny the best in both songwriting
Speaker 2: and love. What a great guy. So we get to campus.
Speaker 2: You know, it takes about two hours. We pull on
Speaker 2: to campus and like I said, it's on a mountain
Speaker 2: and it is beautiful. You pull through these gates. There
Speaker 2: are thousands of acres of woods and these vistas overlooking
Speaker 2: a valley. The buildings are this limestone and we get
Speaker 2: dropped off at our dorm to which around the intersection
Speaker 2: the corner of Mississippi Street and Georgia Street.
Speaker 1: I'd never been there, but you've been there before, right,
Speaker 1: You have a friend who had actually invited you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The reason that we were there is because my buddy
Speaker 2: Adam Ross. He's the editor of the Sewanee Review, which
Speaker 2: is this literary magazine that's published out of the University
Speaker 2: of the South out of Sawanee. And you know, he
Speaker 2: invited us because I'm his buddy, but he's also a
Speaker 2: fan of the podcast, and he realized that even though
Speaker 2: you and I are Northerners and we don't like necessary
Speaker 2: talk about the South in a lot of ways. The
Speaker 2: big question that they were asking there of like what
Speaker 2: is Southern identity? Who is Southern? Can it be more expansive?
Speaker 2: We ask variations about that in terms of like, you know,
Speaker 2: how to reckon with the pat with America's difficult path,
Speaker 2: you know, the sense of a deeply divided in an
Speaker 2: unequal country is a question that they were wrestling with there.
Speaker 1: That's right and it's not unreasonable, both in terms of
Speaker 1: how we think about our own conversations, these ongoing conversations
Speaker 1: we have. But like, how much is America is the South?
Speaker 2: I mean, so like that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: That is like overhanging this whole question. So I mean,
Speaker 1: first of all, just to echo your point, this is
Speaker 1: in a beautiful place. I mean, it's so beautiful. They
Speaker 1: call it the mountain because.
Speaker 2: They just call it the mountain.
Speaker 1: They just call it the mountain. But this school has
Speaker 1: a pretty unique story. So the first I learned about
Speaker 1: it was a marker on campus which you see as
Speaker 1: you enter the campus, And the first thing it tells
Speaker 1: you is that the school sort of was built in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty eight, right before the Civil War, and what
Speaker 1: you learn is that the school was dedicated to raising
Speaker 1: up a group of Southern elites who would basically defend
Speaker 1: the interest of slaveholders. This would be the Harvard, the Yale,
Speaker 1: the Princeton of Southern slaveholders elites. It is the only
Speaker 1: institution of higher education designed for this explicit purpose.
Speaker 2: The explicit purpose like to promote the South of the
Speaker 2: civilization of slavery, all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, absolutely, so that was.
Speaker 2: The original founding of the school. Then during the actual
Speaker 2: fighting of the Civil War, Union soldiers march up this
Speaker 2: mountain and they destroy the university central building.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: So then a couple of years after the war, the
Speaker 2: university rebuilds and reopens. Slavery has been abolished.
Speaker 1: That's right. By eighteen sixty eight, they rebuild the school
Speaker 1: and it's still fabulously wealthy even after the war. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're made up, the school is made up of the
Speaker 1: slaveholding elite. They're still committed to the memory of the
Speaker 1: South slaveholding past. And this place becomes like an engine
Speaker 1: for the creation of the Lost Cause narrative.
Speaker 2: Hey one, let's define. Let's define what that is the
Speaker 2: lost cause narrative.
Speaker 1: Go ahead, sure, the Lost Cause narrative was a belief
Speaker 1: that the South had been noble in its defense of slavery,
Speaker 1: that it was a righteous way of life, that northerners
Speaker 1: had plundered, the South, had violated the Constitution, you know, essentially,
Speaker 1: had had done this illegal occupation, and had set the
Speaker 1: nation on this ruinous path by upsetting the natural order
Speaker 1: of things, which in the most explicit way, was putting
Speaker 1: black men politically on an equal plane with white men.
Speaker 1: And that lost cause narrative shaped shaped an entire several
Speaker 1: generations of Southerners well into the twentieth century, and arguably
Speaker 1: is still still with us today.
Speaker 2: And as you said earlier, that this is a school
Speaker 2: that is grappling with that past in all sorts of ways,
Speaker 2: even that it likes to be called Suwanee now rather
Speaker 2: than the University of the South. That's you know, it's
Speaker 2: better marketing. And the two of us arrived that were
Speaker 2: there for this conference. And even though I told you
Speaker 2: that that I lived in the South, I never felt
Speaker 2: Southern in any way. And I lived in Texas also
Speaker 2: for a while, I always felt like a visitor. And
Speaker 2: so the whole idea of being Southern, it seems alien
Speaker 2: to me. And like, you know, we were talking about
Speaker 2: this fraud history, and I can always say that's over there,
Speaker 2: that's not me, that's somebody else. But I got to
Speaker 2: say that that being on campus and talking to all
Speaker 2: these amazing people for several days, it made me think that,
Speaker 2: you know, we are all kind of Southern in the
Speaker 2: sense that this is our history, it's American history, and
Speaker 2: we can't say it's over there or down there. It's
Speaker 2: something that we all have to to to think about
Speaker 2: and wrestle with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, that's I mean, that's fascinating because to
Speaker 1: some degree, until we got in the car with our
Speaker 1: driver singing, you know, and his own total in bir
Speaker 1: of like country music, I had also been feeling a
Speaker 1: bit alienated and disconnected from like this this whole idea,
Speaker 1: like what is it that we're actually doing. But when
Speaker 1: I got there and I started meeting people and I
Speaker 1: started thinking about the question on the table, what does
Speaker 1: it mean to be Southern? What is the Southern identity?
Speaker 1: It really forced me to be honest about the fact
Speaker 1: that I am third generation removed from Mississippi and Georgia.
Speaker 1: I mean, my grandmother was born in Georgia, my great
Speaker 1: grandfather was born in Mississippi. And while I knew my
Speaker 1: grandmother and not my great grandfather, there the stories they
Speaker 1: carry with them who they are forced me to think
Speaker 1: more carefully about my relationship to the South. And and
Speaker 1: you know it's it's a little bit painful, but it's
Speaker 1: also part of me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well, let's take a short break and when
Speaker 2: we come back, we're going to talk about this big
Speaker 2: question of what it means to Southern can to be
Speaker 2: more expansive.
Speaker 8: And the mocking Berg and sing like the Crime of
Speaker 8: the And I can't tell my daughters all the things
Speaker 8: that I'm scared up, but I am not afraid of
Speaker 8: that bright glory up above, dines. Just another way to
Speaker 8: lead the one love.
Speaker 2: We are back on. Some of my best friends are
Speaker 2: at the University of the South Swane giving you the
Speaker 2: Sounds of the South.
Speaker 1: That's right. We are at this conference attending a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of programming, listening to really smart people, and every
Speaker 1: thirty of us attendees would gather, I mean it was
Speaker 1: awesome for what they called salons and would open with
Speaker 1: a song or a poem like the one you just
Speaker 1: heard that was from this amazing guy named David Proctor.
Speaker 1: Such a beautiful song.
Speaker 2: Yep, yeah, I loved it. I loved it. And it
Speaker 2: really set everyone in this intentional mood to have these
Speaker 2: deep and honest conversations which are about Southerness, about what
Speaker 2: it meant to be Southern. And so on the first
Speaker 2: day that we were there, the two people leading the
Speaker 2: salon conversation. One was Woody Register, a white historian from
Speaker 2: Alabama who attended SWANI as an undergraduate and is now
Speaker 2: a professor there. And the other person was Andrea Abrams,
Speaker 2: a black anthropologist and a writer. She's from Mississippi and
Speaker 2: she now works at a college in Kentucky.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you forgot to mention, much to our surprise
Speaker 1: while we were traveling with Andrea, is that she's a
Speaker 1: sister of Stacy Abrams Abrams, Yeah, the voting rights advocate
Speaker 1: who ran for governor and Georgia and is now a
Speaker 1: Howard University professor. That Abrams family is one talented family.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they definitely represent a kind of way of
Speaker 2: a new South, a different way of thinking about the South.
Speaker 2: And so we're in the salon and Woody and Andrea
Speaker 2: talked about their very complicated relationships to their own Southern identity.
Speaker 2: They said that they were both on a kind of
Speaker 2: life journey of confronting and trying to deal with their
Speaker 2: own roots. Yep and Wood. He told this incredibly powerful
Speaker 2: story about the time after he graduated from college and
Speaker 2: he goes up to New York City to get advice
Speaker 2: from one of his mentors, who is a history professor
Speaker 2: at NYU.
Speaker 4: I was telling you that I was playing going to
Speaker 4: graduate school the next year, but that I was afraid
Speaker 4: to leave the South. And he said, you can't leave
Speaker 4: the South, said, he said, even if you leave the
Speaker 4: South and won't leave the South, I said, no, no, no,
Speaker 4: don't be and I want to get out of the Son.
Speaker 4: And he said, well, every time you open your mouth,
Speaker 4: I her slavery. Every time in your voice, I hear
Speaker 4: the history of slavery.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, no, I mean I remember when he said
Speaker 1: it sitting there, and.
Speaker 2: Every time you open your mouth, every time you open
Speaker 2: your mouth, I hear slavery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my mouth drops.
Speaker 2: That's what I hear when you talk.
Speaker 1: And but honestly, it's just putting words to an experience
Speaker 1: that I've always experienced, meaning that someone white and Southern
Speaker 1: speaks in that way, as as Zora mil Helstein would say,
Speaker 1: you know, the map of Dixie is on their tongue,
Speaker 1: and and it's like, you know, you're your suspicions go up,
Speaker 1: at least for me. And so when Woody said that, well,
Speaker 1: wood he said that, I was like, Oh, it's not
Speaker 1: just me, like that is a.
Speaker 2: Thing, even white people among themselves saying that to one another.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And if I'm really honest, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: not unconscious bias. This is explicit bias. Like again, if
Speaker 1: I'm in a space and a white person opens their
Speaker 1: mouth and that's what comes out, you know, my sensibilities
Speaker 1: are sharper. It doesn't mean I feel like I'm threatened
Speaker 1: her in any imminent danger. It just means my sensibility shift.
Speaker 1: I'm aware of something that is that is the historical
Speaker 1: legacy of this past.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And what he was telling a story, and what
Speaker 2: an open and wonderful person to do it that he
Speaker 2: wanted to run away from this, and his mentor was saying, hey, man,
Speaker 2: you can't, like you have to and even in your
Speaker 2: work and your life's work, you have to deal with
Speaker 2: this because it is who you are.
Speaker 1: So after wood he spoke. Andrea spoke next, and she
Speaker 1: talked about for her as a black woman, how she
Speaker 1: equated Southern identity surprise, surprise, with whiteness. That was a
Speaker 1: mouth drop too, And.
Speaker 9: Southernness is whiteness. Southerness is the Confederate flat, Southernness.
Speaker 7: Is white cookbooks that don't talk about black black people.
Speaker 9: Southernness is white hospitality. Southernness is your door, wealthy and
Speaker 9: William Falk is the best writers. Southern heritage is the
Speaker 9: erasure of blackness.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then and then Andrea said that you know here
Speaker 2: she is a black person. And she said that as
Speaker 2: a girl in Gulfport, Mississippi, she and her family would
Speaker 2: drive past these gorgeous plantation houses and what she wanted.
Speaker 2: She wanted that she wanted to be part of that culture.
Speaker 1: It was gray, and.
Speaker 7: It had two white, curving staircases that led to the
Speaker 7: second floor back document And when we drove by, I
Speaker 7: would imagine myself coming descending the staircase in my Southern
Speaker 7: bell dress to meet my suitor.
Speaker 9: And we would walk along the beach right, not thinking
Speaker 9: Andry who had been at the back of the house.
Speaker 7: So I understood slavery.
Speaker 9: I understood presstory racism, and yet when I imagine the
Speaker 9: South and myself as a Southerner, I was white.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that last line that she just said, when
Speaker 1: I imagined the South and myself as a Southerner, I
Speaker 1: was white. That's what I meant by another mouth drop moment,
Speaker 1: Because like she's a well educated doctor of anthropology, she's
Speaker 1: written extensively about race in the South, and yet what
Speaker 1: she's saying is the power of whiteness to define nationality,
Speaker 1: to define who counts, whose lives matter, was so blinding
Speaker 1: in her childhood that when she imagined herself as someone
Speaker 1: pretty and successful and someone whose life mattered, she imagined
Speaker 1: herself in a white woman body. That's that's that's that
Speaker 1: is something I mean, I don't know quite what the
Speaker 1: word I want to say is, but it's that's a lot.
Speaker 1: It's a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you might to be like, that's fucked up. But
Speaker 2: as Andrea and wood You were talking in front of us,
Speaker 2: Woody responded to her by saying, I also wanted to
Speaker 2: be in that plantation house, and it was also denied
Speaker 2: to me. I had no access to it. Yeah, what
Speaker 2: did you think he meant?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well it was it was puzzling at first,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, of course, right, this is
Speaker 1: about class because the plantation elite was a tiny minority.
Speaker 1: The overwhelming experience of white Southerners was to be part
Speaker 1: of a yeoman class, meaning working class at best, landless
Speaker 1: and poor at worse. And what wood He was admitting
Speaker 1: in this moment is that the Southern gentry represented the
Speaker 1: aspirations of everyone. That yeah, that he couldn't embody it,
Speaker 1: but he wanted it, yeah, And that that helped me
Speaker 1: think a lot about what he'd said earlier too, when
Speaker 1: the professor had said to him, wou do you have
Speaker 1: to go back? Because I think part of that connection
Speaker 1: is that Woody was someone who was in touch with
Speaker 1: himself enough to do something positive with that history, to
Speaker 1: make something of a different kind of self.
Speaker 2: And both of them are I mean, they talked about
Speaker 2: being on a life journey and trying to run away
Speaker 2: from their past of being Southern and actually coming back
Speaker 2: to it and reclaiming it in some way. And we
Speaker 2: you and I had conversations with you know, many of
Speaker 2: the attendees there and other black Southerners, and I remember
Speaker 2: another person telling us, a black Southerner saying that you know,
Speaker 2: he and others thought of themselves as born again Southerners,
Speaker 2: that they had escaped the South, but they came back
Speaker 2: and they're like, you know, embracing it on their own terms.
Speaker 2: Now they're redefining it southern as not as Andrea said, whiteness,
Speaker 2: but also as blackness. They were expanding the definition of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I really appreciated that because it helped to
Speaker 1: put in context that that part of what's been happening
Speaker 1: in this country is that people were like, why should
Speaker 1: we give up our own heritage? I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it was a it was a terrible experience for black
Speaker 1: people in the context of what happened, you know, both
Speaker 1: during slavery and afterwards. But it's still their roots. And
Speaker 1: so this whole notion of like born against Southerner return
Speaker 1: migration was very much a sub theme of many of
Speaker 1: the conversations of that people had.
Speaker 2: Yeah, someone I remember somebody talking at the conference and
Speaker 2: saying that the whole notion of Southern is so unlike
Speaker 2: any sense of identity in America. This vast region you
Speaker 2: know that expands from like you know, whatever, Oklahoma to
Speaker 2: Florida or something, and it's so varied and to say,
Speaker 2: like we're all stamped by this. Nowhere else in the
Speaker 2: country do we identify regionally that much? Yeah, And so
Speaker 2: he was saying basically like maybe you abandoned this concept
Speaker 2: al too other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And and the other side of the coin, right
Speaker 1: is like, you know, America is a big place. We've
Speaker 1: talked about the fact that the Confederacy never die and
Speaker 1: is indeed elements of it are resurgent, and no part
Speaker 1: is is uncomplicated by race and racism. But like, do
Speaker 1: I want to be in a part of the country where,
Speaker 1: like it is the core values of the country, you know,
Speaker 1: this idea of of anti blackness as as we know
Speaker 1: it and as it's unfolded in places right now that
Speaker 1: are passing all this crazy legislation aimed at black history.
Speaker 1: You know, no, not for.
Speaker 2: Me, I meaning you, You're like, I'm just not going
Speaker 2: to go live in those spots.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna Yeah, I'm not. I'm not quite there yet
Speaker 1: with the born again Southern or even through three generations removed.
Speaker 2: Well, you you were never Yeah, you're right, see what
Speaker 2: you mean. You weren't born there in the first place,
Speaker 2: But you're saying your people were, That's right.
Speaker 1: All right, yeah, yeah, And so we're going to take
Speaker 1: a quick break. We'll be right back, all right, Ben.
Speaker 1: So look, the past is a past, but of course
Speaker 1: it's not even really passed. So one of my favorite
Speaker 1: things was talking to one of the professors there at Sewanee,
Speaker 1: a black woman named Tiffany Mohman. We learned so much
Speaker 1: talking to her about her work as a public historian,
Speaker 1: and she shares so much with us about what it's
Speaker 1: like to be a black faculty member, to be a
Speaker 1: black person in a place like Siwani.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, Tiffany told us that she is from Memphis.
Speaker 2: It's also a predominantly black city. Nashville is predominantly white,
Speaker 2: and here we are even further east and further south
Speaker 2: on this mountain top.
Speaker 3: But what I love about Memphis is just the culture,
Speaker 3: like that African American history, that culture is just bubbling
Speaker 3: out of the ground. When I hid from Nashville down
Speaker 3: in Memphis on I forty, as soon as I hit
Speaker 3: those Memphis exits, the sun roofs, open the windows down
Speaker 3: because I'm like, we have to take all of this in.
Speaker 3: And the thing that I loved so much about growing
Speaker 3: up in Memphis was that blackness was celebrated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, No, Memphis is a really powerful place. Of course.
Speaker 1: You know, it has a tortured history, from King's assassination
Speaker 1: to the recent Tyree Nichols killing. You know, but it's
Speaker 1: the place that embodies all those contradictions. And you know,
Speaker 1: Tiffany ends up leaving her home city of Memphis and
Speaker 1: she heads to the mountains. She has to the University
Speaker 1: of the South, where you know, it's a small number
Speaker 1: of black students, a small number of black people. They
Speaker 1: only tenured their first black professor and like, you know,
Speaker 1: hired their first black professor, like nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we had at the conference a few
Speaker 2: black graduates of the school. And I remember one woman
Speaker 2: told me about going to Swane in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 2: and out of about seventeen hundred students, she said, thirteen
Speaker 2: were black students.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like, wow, that's a.
Speaker 2: Pretty small number.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there're more.
Speaker 2: It is a higher percentage today, but it ain't that many.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 1: And Tiffany told us something that happened her first year
Speaker 1: teaching at Sewanee. There was a racist incident at a
Speaker 1: lacrosse game. She said that Suwanee white students in the
Speaker 1: stands watching the game yelled racist epithets at the opposing
Speaker 1: teams black players bananas, and it made national news. Some
Speaker 1: Swanee students were protesting and demanding that these students from
Speaker 1: their own school be reprimanded, and the whole thing just
Speaker 1: like was very unsettling to Tiffany.
Speaker 4: I was so.
Speaker 3: Uncomfortable that I went back to my office. I wrote
Speaker 3: my students an email and said, I don't feel comfortable
Speaker 3: here today, so we're I'm going to cancel class. I'm
Speaker 3: going back home. I'll see y'all in a few days.
Speaker 3: Because it was just something bubbled up in me that
Speaker 3: was like, you have to get out of here.
Speaker 1: So I mean, yeah, like, uh, this is even crazier,
Speaker 1: right because Tawani had actually hired its first black president.
Speaker 1: He carried the title of president of the university, and
Speaker 1: he was the vice chancellor, which is the title subordinate
Speaker 1: to the episcopal bishop who is the quote unquote chancellor.
Speaker 1: He's president at the time of the lacrosse incident. And
Speaker 1: what comes out of this is that he has to
Speaker 1: represent this school with this racist, fucking historysed so like
Speaker 1: the whole world.
Speaker 2: Is to her, he lasts less than a year there.
Speaker 2: He quits after a year.
Speaker 1: Well he quits after a year, but but he quits
Speaker 1: within the context where his home is vandalized and there's
Speaker 1: racial epithets you know, directed towards him on campus. And yeah,
Speaker 1: people you remember, like people told us that he told
Speaker 1: them that he was wearing a bulletproof vest on campus
Speaker 1: because he didn't feel safe.
Speaker 2: That is crazy, That is totally crazy. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 2: So that that also gets me back to Tiffany's work.
Speaker 2: So part of her job at Sewanee at the university
Speaker 2: is to uncover and start to make sense of the
Speaker 2: school's racist past. She works with the school's Roberson Project
Speaker 2: on Slavery, race and Reconciliation, and through that project, she
Speaker 2: has to dig through the school's archives. She looks at
Speaker 2: old documents, old letters, you know, these personal papers between people,
Speaker 2: and it's really like yeah, but it's specifically like if
Speaker 2: only you looked at, you know, excavating examples of racism
Speaker 2: of when people who were part of the school did something. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so you know, she was in the So she's
Speaker 2: looking at the university sort of all their entanglements with
Speaker 2: slavery and segregation and racism.
Speaker 3: So Swannee is very much so the poster child for
Speaker 3: celebrating the Lost Cause. It doesn't go away from the
Speaker 3: very beginnings of the university, you know, words in our
Speaker 3: university charter saying that, you know, the university is founded
Speaker 3: in the land of the Sun and the slave founded
Speaker 3: to make benevolent masters slash and slaver. And it's just
Speaker 3: sort of this thing that never goes away, and that
Speaker 3: in many ways, the university begins to feed, right, And
Speaker 3: if you feed something, it grows. And you see that here,
Speaker 3: it's all over this landscape. You cannot throw a stone
Speaker 3: and not hit a building that has some kind of
Speaker 3: connection to the Lost Cause.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, I remember her saying that, and it made my
Speaker 1: skin shiver because in most context, you know, people are
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of the name on a building,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Building a singular building, one building. And I remember asking her.
Speaker 2: I was like, all right, well, let's start throwing the stones, like,
Speaker 2: let's look in all directions. She was like, yeah, it
Speaker 2: wouldn't just be the name of buildings, yep. She was like,
Speaker 2: it would be the names of grants and awards. And
Speaker 2: they actually like named trees and gardens. So it's like
Speaker 2: every tree too, like you have to look at those
Speaker 2: like there were placards, there were scholarships, there were literary societies. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean it was really meaningful to talk to Tiffany
Speaker 2: about this, a black professor at that college, at that
Speaker 2: university talking about these experiences, and it's both like she's
Speaker 2: physically there and then this is also her her actual
Speaker 2: work is to look into this past. And so before
Speaker 2: you know, I asked her the exact same question that
Speaker 2: we had been exploring at swani as part of these salons.
Speaker 2: What is this expanded notion of Southern identity? I wanted
Speaker 2: to hear what she had to say.
Speaker 3: I would say that being here at Swanee has not
Speaker 3: affected her how I see myself as a Southerner. I
Speaker 3: see my connection to Swanne as a completely different thing.
Speaker 4: To me.
Speaker 3: My Southern is who I am as a Southerner is
Speaker 3: informed by my roots. It's informed by my childhood in Memphis.
Speaker 3: It's informed by my parents' childhood and in Arkansas and Mississippi.
Speaker 3: And that that's what I latch onto it. It's a
Speaker 3: it's a for me. It's like an ancestral connection to
Speaker 3: the South. And despite the the some of the tragedies
Speaker 3: of the South. Right, some days it's it's when I'm
Speaker 3: in that archive and I come across some of those documents,
Speaker 3: it's hard to think of myself as as as southern,
Speaker 3: so I but it's but when I think of my
Speaker 3: family and the in the context of my life, that's
Speaker 3: where that that connection rings true and comes back home
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 1: Oh man, ma'am.
Speaker 2: She's holding those two things separate, She's telling us that,
Speaker 2: and even as she's saying it, they're like combined. It's like,
Speaker 2: I'm holding these two things separate, my southern identity as
Speaker 2: a black person and what we've been talking about. And
Speaker 2: then even as she's saying it, they get blended together.
Speaker 2: And there is something amazing about that campus that the
Speaker 2: coexistence of these and even the actual work of the past,
Speaker 2: like it is that you know, their boots are muddy,
Speaker 2: like they're in it. They're in it in a way
Speaker 2: that's meaningful, like because they're also they're also grappling with
Speaker 2: this past.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I had a little different experience with
Speaker 1: thinking about Tiffany's place there because I think this is
Speaker 1: where like the line between northern and southern gets really thin,
Speaker 1: you know, that sense of like carrying the contradictions of
Speaker 1: like I belong here just like anybody else, and yet
Speaker 1: so much of this place tries to erase me. Is
Speaker 1: not just something that you experience at Swani or anywhere
Speaker 1: in the South.
Speaker 2: You're talking about like the boys in the Tunis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the boys in the Tunis, but in just being
Speaker 1: black in America, I mean like yeah, And so there's
Speaker 1: something really visceral, I think in what Tiffany shared in
Speaker 1: that moment. And there's certainly something visceral about uh being
Speaker 1: surrounded from the flora and fauna to the signage and
Speaker 1: the plaques and tombstones with this celebration of systemic racism
Speaker 1: and white supremacy.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: But you only have to crash scratch the surface in
Speaker 1: so many other ways, in so many other parts of
Speaker 1: the country, uh, to get at that same route. And
Speaker 1: I applaud Tiffany for for being so honest with herself
Speaker 1: and with herself her colleagues about what she's experiencing. That
Speaker 1: to me is inspirational. It's courageous, is me fuel, you know,
Speaker 1: like the for these moments when I feel alienated in
Speaker 1: other places.
Speaker 2: Man, I want to say that I loved going on
Speaker 2: this trip with you. It was amazing to experience it
Speaker 2: all and to talk about it while we were going
Speaker 2: through it, and now get to talk about it a
Speaker 2: year later. I do need to add that my favorite
Speaker 2: moment of the entire trip, this poet was, you know,
Speaker 2: in a salon with thirty people. There was reading this
Speaker 2: powerful poem about animal cruelty and about caring for dog
Speaker 2: that was dying and was suffering, and it was like
Speaker 2: a metaphor for having to deal with this ugliness but
Speaker 2: still loving it. And she was deep into it and
Speaker 2: there was total silence, but all you could hear in
Speaker 2: the room was her reading and you chewing almonds, Like
Speaker 2: the whole room is looking at you eat almonds while
Speaker 2: this woman is reading this poem thirty people. That was
Speaker 2: my favorite moment. I'm sorry to say, I will die
Speaker 2: on my grave and remember that moment.
Speaker 1: Well, all right, so I wasn't being disrespectful, but I
Speaker 1: had no no, I had a choice to make. It
Speaker 1: would either fall asleep because that poem wasn't hitting me,
Speaker 1: or eat these almonds so I could try to stay awake.
Speaker 1: So I chose you. I chose the almonds.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just me. We went back to the
Speaker 2: dorm and I said, there was a group of twenty
Speaker 2: of us and I said, hey, just curious, did anyone
Speaker 2: here here Khalil eat those almonds in the whole room?
Speaker 2: Then talked about it for like three hours, like we
Speaker 2: had another salon just about you eating almonds?
Speaker 1: All right, man, fine, listen. I think there's one other
Speaker 1: thing to point out, and that is that in these
Speaker 1: conversations with people like Tiffany, with Woody, with Andrea, all
Speaker 1: these amazing people who share their personal connections to the South,
Speaker 1: help me understand the contradictions that they wrestle with and
Speaker 1: the courage that they have to help other people do
Speaker 1: better and understand and particularly Suwanee like to be a
Speaker 1: better institution, which in some ways is why we were
Speaker 1: all there. It was a very curated group of people.
Speaker 1: So amongst the curated group of people, you know, if
Speaker 1: Woody is representing a white Southerner from Alabama coming of
Speaker 1: age in the seventies, where was the you know, tennesseean
Speaker 1: white Southerner coming of age in the seventies who actually
Speaker 1: fought against desegregation of schools, who didn't believe that Suwane
Speaker 1: should be a place that welcomed black students and how
Speaker 1: do they fit into a conversation about reckoning with the
Speaker 1: school's past.
Speaker 2: Well, you kind of made me seem really shallow. I
Speaker 2: was talking about almonds and you came with this really
Speaker 2: deep thing. But I'll just say that it really was important,
Speaker 2: and I still think it is to explore this idea
Speaker 2: of like this expansive idea of sou because it really,
Speaker 2: as I said earlier, it made me think of an
Speaker 2: expansive notion of americanness, that this is our past, this
Speaker 2: southern past that we're talking about is our past. And
Speaker 2: as divided as we are today, as much as these
Speaker 2: issues are present, it is continuing to do this kind
Speaker 2: of exploration. And maybe it is always living with a
Speaker 2: kind of tunis, but finding ways to also reconcile that
Speaker 2: and to reclaim it.
Speaker 1: Man, man, look at you all right? All right, Doctor Austin.
Speaker 1: Proud of you.
Speaker 2: Next next time I'm on the trip, Man, I love you.
Speaker 1: Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me
Speaker 1: Khalil Dubon Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 2: It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our Associate producer is Rachel Yang.
Speaker 2: It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Kishell Will Williams.
Speaker 2: Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang and our managing producer
Speaker 2: is Constanza Guyardo.
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