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New Charleston

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New. 

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

Truth & the Confederate flag

So it turns out that the ACC -- the once-upon-a-time Tobacco Road conference that now stretches from Miami to Boston -- has ditched Myrtle Beach for its 2010 baseball tournament because of the Confederate flag that still flies on the Statehouse grounds. 

Let's be realistic up front. Nobody cares about the ACC baseball tournament. As big league college sports goes, this is about as small as it gets. And let's be clear: South Carolina's fringe passion for the "heritage" of a Confederate flag that didn't fly above its Statehouse until 1963 is about as dumb as a box of rocks. 

But here's the part of this story you wouldn't get if you were just dropping in from another part of the country, South Carolina is an equal opportunity state when it comes to stupid politicians of any race. We didn't suddenly invent idiot politicos like Mark Sanford and Andre Bauer. They're a tradition.

We are beneficiaries

After Monday's Charleston premiere of the Northern Light documentary Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968, filmmakers Bestor Cram and Judy Richardson opened the floor to questions and comments. Some were interesting. Some were moving. Some were neither.

But one moment stood out to me, and it's stayed with me since. It came when Osei Chandler, an important figure here in the city, took the microphone and talked about the significance of the civil rights movement to a generation of young people who grew up in its wake. Here's what he said:

Too often, people think we're victims. But we're beneficiaries... Beneficiaries have rights and responsibilities, and (young people) owe us better.

Afterward, a woman picked up the "beneficiaries" theme in her comments, and I found myself wondering about its power. Because it seems to me this isn't just a 60-year-old African-American calling on younger African-Americans to step up and "recognize that they stand on the shoulders of giants." It also seemed to be a big statement in a new context.

Things are pretty bleak right now, and we still don't have justice for Orangeburg 41 years later, but the American dream just got more credible last month.

Which one is smarterer?

Does Anyone Live in the South?

One of XARK’s categories is “The South,” and it seems to me fitting that we allow the category to once again force the question, “What is the south?” 

My very first post on XARK was a review of the film, “Searching for The Wronged-Eyed Jesus.”  The film is a documentary in which, more or less, an “outsider” explores, and attempts to discover, an authentic South.  Ultimately, my review turned into a rant about how ridiculous and off-putting are many representations of the south.  Here, I want to take another brief turn at this topic.  Or rather, I want to urge you to help me interrogate the topic by recounting two recent conversations I’ve had with colleagues (University faculty) who have lived for lengthy periods of time in some portion of the  southern US.

In the first conversation, I was talking to a friend of mine who teaches at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.  We were discussing one of our mutual friends who claimed that she would never take a job at any university in “the south.”  While I always bristle when I hear such a statement, I’m honestly not all that surprised.  It’s an attitude I’ve heard a great deal, especially from some of my Ivy Leagued educated colleagues and circle of friends.  However, my colleague at NCSU gave a response to our mutual friend that was problematic on its own grounds.  Here’s what he said (I’m paraphrasing):  “I told her that she shouldn’t be so silly.  She could move anywhere in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area because it’s really not the South.  It’s not like that at all.”

Images of the road

So we're back from our tour of the Deep South: 7 days, 6 states and plenty of gas ($3.17 a gallon in Alabama).  I've taken some of my photographs and put them in a gallery. There was snow and cool architecture and plenty of new ideas and new friends. Check it out if you have time.

Deconstructing the Confederate Bass flag

Cultural Artifact Record
Description: Full-color Confederate Flag bumper sticker with a black-and-white picture of a large-mouth bass superimposed roughly over the center of the image.
Collected: At a convenience store off US 78 in Winfield, Ala., on Feb. 24, 2008.
Variants: Numerous metal license tags with the same basic image, only with a colored image of a large-mouth bass and without the aspect-ratio distortion of the Confederate Battle Flag. These faux license plates were witnessed on pickup trucks in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
Possible translation: "Damn right I'm a bass fisherman. You got a problem with that, hymie-boy?"

Readers with insights into the true meaning of the Confederate bass image are encouraged to pass them along, since this one has always stumped the band...

South Carolina Primary Numbers

So here's a few numbers from the South Carolina Democratic Primary. They are, of course, unofficial, and gleaned from sites such as CNN and Charleston.net:

Total number of votes cast
Dem Primary (1/26):     530,322 (54.5%)
GOP Primary  (1/19):     442,918 (45.5%)
Total:                                 973,240

87404 more voters went to the polls in the Democratic Primary than GOP primary. Yes, it was raining and cold on the 19th. It was overcast and cold on the 26th as well. In fact, as Dan and I walked to our polling place, it was sprinkling and windy and made my eyes water.

2004 Dem primary:      280000

Using the total number of votes in both primaries, here are some figures calculated by xark and rounded:
Percentage of total votes in both primaries:
Obama             30%
McCain            15%
Clinton          14%
Huckabee      13%
Edwards           9%

Another fun figure:
If you take the top two vote-getters in each  primary,  Obama and Clinton  for Dems and McCain and Huckabee for GOP, the Dems got 44% of the total  number of votes cast, compared to  28%  for the  Republicans. Interesting, if nothing else.

The Seduction of Identity

I came relatively late to Jim Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.  Indeed, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I knew very little of Webb at all until I watched him from time to time during the 2006 Senatorial campaign in Virginia.  From the first time I saw him speak, however, I was hooked.  There was something about the gritty, plain spoken demeanor that was comfortably familiar to me. 

After hearing me talk about Webb ceaselessly after his election, and after watching me do endless imitations of him, Bonnie threw her hands up and bought me a copy of Born Fighting, hoping, I think, to either get me over my fascination or to not have to listen to me during the times when I was reading.  It didn’t work.  Each night I read the book and would shout out lines in an almost giddy fashion.  For one born and raised in the South, especially close to the highlands in North Carolina, this book did so much to affirm me—perhaps to a fault—that I’ve only gotten louder.

What Joe said

"One of my first lessons from Joe — when I failed to remember the name of someone to whom he had just introduced me: 'If you care about people, you can remember their names.'"

--Richard Franck remembers Chapel Hill activist and politician Joe Herzenberg in the comment thread on orangepolitics.org