Makin’ their way
The only way they know how
That’s just a little bit more
Than the law will allow”–Waylon Jennings, Theme from The Dukes of Hazzard
Among the various kitschy pop culture franchises populating my adolescent/young adult world was the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard. It was a show about the escapades of two hunky southern cousins who were on parole for moonshining. Waylon Jennings assured us in the show’s theme song that really they were “just good ol’ boys.” They drove around mythical Hazzard County, Georgia in The General Lee, a bright orange 1969 Dodge Charger with an American Swastika painted on the roof. “The General” was central enough to the series to be considered a third character in the show’s redneck ménage à trois. The three of them–Bo, Luke, and “The General”–mostly whiled away the days getting into dirt road car chases with the police.
“Hey, hold on a minute!” you might be thinking (unless you’re from the south, in which case you’re thinking, “Whoa Hoss!“). You saw what I just did there, right? I called the ‘Rebel Flag’–the ol’ stars and bars–an ‘American Swastika’.
Isn’t that a bit much? Don’t I need to settle the hell down a little? Yeah sure, the Civil War. Yeah sure, slavery. But isn’t the Confederate flag just as much a romantic emblem of rugged ‘outlaw’ individualism? One with a southern accent? Not Al Capone-Pablo Escobar style outlaw, mind you. More like Waylon and Willie ‘country outlaw’. Get it? Not actually breaking laws and shit but, you know, just….rebels! Rebels who yell the rebel yell. Rebels like James Dean (Rebel without a Cause!). It don’t mean nothin’, really. It’s just harmless hell raisin’. Jack Daniels. Skynard. Molly Fuckin’ Hatchet!
Sorry Hoss, no. I’ve heard this apology a thousand times, but no. No one buys this bullshit anymore. Even white people slow on the uptake (I’ll include myself here) understand now what African Americans have known all along. The rebel flag most definitely has a cause: white supremacy. It’s always had this cause. It was born to serve this cause. This is hardly controversial.
You want to say the Confederate flag is a symbol of southern heritage? Fat lot of reassurance that offers. Southern heritage is inextricably linked to white supremacy. This, too, is hardly controversial. “The south will rise again!” the defenders of southern heritage love to say. Reflect on that for a moment. Think about the last time the south ‘rose’ and let the horror wash over you. It requires no great feat of imagination. We all caught a glimpse of it last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Defending Southern Heritage
I lived in Georgia during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta when the State flag, which at the time incorporated the Confederate battle flag, was a source of international shame. Attempts to remove it were met with much deep and miserable bellyaching and caterwauling. What about preserving our southern heritage? This, even though the Confederate flag version wasn’t the traditional state flag to begin with. The Georgia legislature added the Confederate stars and bars in 1956 as a racist act of vengeance and resentment aimed against the US Supreme Court’s 1954 racial desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Southern heritage my ass. This was straight up white supremacist revanchism.
For several years I taught at Clemson University in South Carolina, a state that actually flew the fucking Confederate battle flag at the capital as a revanchist testament to its deep commitment to white supremacy. The practice began in 1961 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of South Carolina’s most shameful act in American history: inaugurating the Civil War in the hopes of preserving the “right” of white people to own human beings as property. This practice didn’t end until 2015, following the intense moral outrage that arose after a Confederate flag waving white supremacist murdered nine people (all African American) during a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston. The terrorist said he committed the murders in the hopes of inciting a race war.
The Dukes of Hazzard as White Supremacist Utopia
The Dukes of Hazzard was a show awash in cartoonish southern clichés. I lived in the south (in North Carolina) during The Dukes of Hazzard era, and I consumed this pop culture kitsch in the fashion of my generation (X): ironically.
To suggest that The Dukes of Hazzard was designed with a hidden white supremacist agenda is more than a bit of a stretch. What I imagine is that the folks at Warner Bros., developing a light-hearted action-comedy set in the south, decided to load the show up with a bunch of “stereotypical southern shit” (whatever they thought that was from the perspective of Hollywood, California). Make them moonshine runners (even though prohibition ended many years ago). Give them a NASCAR. Southerners love fuckin’ NASCAR. Paint a race car number on the side. Weld the Charger’s doors shut so they have to enter and exit through the windows. Call it the General Lee and paint a Rebel flag on the roof. When you honk the horn it plays Dixie! Ha! The only things missing are a Moon Pie and a Coca-Cola.
Call it the General Lee and paint a Rebel flag on the roof. When you honk the horn it plays Dixie!
You don’t see much of the dark side of southern culture on The Dukes of Hazzard. Apart from a bit of Hee-Haw Honey style gratuitous T&A it’s all good, clean, family entertainment. There are no racial slurs, no bigotry, and no spectacle of Jim Crow. How could there be? There are no black people on The Dukes of Hazzard. Where in the fuck in Georgia is this anyway? No black people? I lived in Georgia for nine years (Ben Jones who played Cooter was my Congressional Representative for part of that time) and I never visited such a place.
Come to think of it, there aren’t exactly a lot of Asians and Hispanics in Hazzard County either. In this regard, and quite unintentionally I’m sure, The Dukes of Hazzard functions as a kind of white supremacist utopia, a culture that has achieved post-racial status through the eradication of minorities. There’s nothing left but fast cars and hot chicks–exemplified by buxom and leggy sexpot, Daisy Duke.
Daisy Duke famously wore “Daisy Dukes,” ultra short short, jorts so iconic that they were named for Catherine Bach’s character. Under these ultra short shorts she wore panty hose, lending the impression that when she wasn’t waitressing at the Boar’s Nest or talking to Bo and Luke on the CB radio with her ass hiked in the air she moonlighted as a Hooters uniform prototype tester.
If Daisy’s status a Duke cousin might have barred her from being a love interest for Bo and Luke, subtle allusion to hillbilly incest taboo transgression took care of that. In one episode Bo Duke exclaims, “If you weren’t my cousin, I’d marry you Daisy” (wink, wink!).
White Supremacist Victim Culture
Okay, so there are no minorities in mythical Hazzard county. Still, how can I possibly describe it as a white supremacist utopia when the good ol’ Duke boys remain the underdogs? They don’t reign supreme. They’re constantly being framed, set up, and falsely accused. They’re constantly being persecuted. They suffer relentless attacks and harassment from the rotten-to-the-core, corrupt government (represented by Hazzard County Commissioner J.D. “Boss” Hogg and his inept lackey, Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane). They ended up on parole simply because they refused to play along with the government’s whiskey tax theft scheme. Now as parolees, they’re denied their God-given 2nd Amendment rights. They have to resort to tying sticks of dynamite to the end of arrows as their only available means of self-defence. How is this a utopia?
Well I’m afraid that this objection has no merit. Not only is this set up consistent with white supremacist utopia, white supremacist utopia simply is not possible without such a set up. White supremacy is reactionary and fueled by ressentiment. It requires something to react to, an oppressive “Other” to blame for its frustrations, an enemy to scapegoat rather than accepting culpability for its own moral failings.
Not only is this set up consistent with white supremacist utopia, white supremacist utopia simply is not possible without such a set up.
There is a formula to most Dukes of Hazzard episodes. Bad people from out of town commit some kind of crime and end up in Hazzard county. The crime gets pinned on the Duke boys who, despite being convicted criminals, are always innocent. They spend the rest of the episode trying to clear themselves.
The fact that the bad people are from out of town is key to white supremacist xenophobic scapegoating. They’re not “one of us,” these bad people. They’re the wicked Other. In most cases they’re from the Big City (urban elites), but they could just as well be Mexican immigrants or Muslim refugees.
In the white supremacist’s manichean world of moral identity there are only agents and victims. Only agents have moral culpability, because only agents act. Victims are never morally culpable because they’re not actors. They’re simply the patients of action. By assuming the identity of victim, white supremacists are able to shirk moral responsibility for evil acts and complain about being persecuted all the while they’re committing them. It’s fucking genius, really. But we mustn’t allow ourselves to fall for it.
What does this look like in action? An intimidating group of white supremacists shows up in the public square to “defend their heritage”. Maybe some right wing militias who arm themselves in public with loaded semi-automatic weapons come to town to defend them. They chant “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!” and other racially threatening, antagonistic Nazi slogans. People confront them, and the white supremacists begin their whiny caterwauling. “Oh my freedom of speech! I’m being oppressed by liberals and radical left extremists!”
Maybe some of them are caught on film, identified, and publicly admonished for their hateful racism, like 20 year-old University of Nevada, Reno student Peter Cvjetanovic, who travelled all the way from Nevada to express his white supremacist views. A photograph of Cvjetanovic screaming in anger in Charlottesville went viral and made him the poster child for white supremacist rage.
“I hope that the people sharing the photo are willing to listen that I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo,” Cvjetanovic later pleaded. Sure he’s a white nationalist. But he’s not the angry racist shown in the photograph that he fully acknowledges is a photograph of him. Confused? Don’t be. Cvjetanovic makes it clear for us. He’s not racist (an active term indicative of a moral agent). He’s just “pro-white” (a neutral term indicative of a victim).
The Casual Supremacist Wear of Charlottesville
If The Dukes of Hazzard is a white supremacist utopia, you might retort, it still seems pretty innocuous. You might say it’s almost folksy and wholesome. But don’t be fooled. This is precisely what’s so disarmingly deceptive about all of this “southern heritage” window dressing. The manners. The clean cut looks. The famous southern hospitality. Behind this veneer of kindness and charm one would never imagine that only a generation ago many genteel white southern families traded amongst one other postcards with photographs of lifeless, lynched black bodies (Google at your own risk–this is the mother of all trigger warnings). I’m not suggesting that all families did this, but I am saying many. Some of them even took the photos, and others still actually committed the murders. Within a culture where black lives most definitely do not matter, they did so with perfect impunity. There’s not a damn thing funny about it. This is a cultural legacy of brutal, savage, barbaric, radical evil.
Nowhere is the disarmingly deceptive wholesome appearance of white supremacist culture more apparent than in white supremacist fashion. I’m not talking about Daisy Dukes here. I’m speaking of recent fashion.
Historically speaking, American white supremacist fashion was effectively utilitarian. The pointed white cloaks of the Klu Klux Klan were designed to intimidate, but also to hide the identity of the wearer. It certainly was nothing like the sexy, vampire goth, BDSM fetish wear of Nazi Germany, with its shiny black knee-high leather jackboots, its long, high-collared overcoats, and its stylish Darth Vader army helmets. The recent fashion I have in mind, however, is nothing like either of these.
In this week’s GQ Magazine, Cam Wolf describes The New Uniform of White Supremacy, Referring to the tiki torch-bearing demonstrators assembled to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, Wolf remarked that they looked like “an army of JC Penney mannequins.” These were very clean cut young men in “crisp polos and khakis”. The new uniform of white supremacy, Wolf tells us, is “business-casual blasé.” If you’ve seen the photographs and the videos you surely know what he’s talking about. They looked like college frat boys. Surely some of them were.
This new uniform is noteworthy for at least two important reasons. First, unlike the masked Klansman of old, this uniform involves no face covering. This constitutes, I would argue, one of the fundamental messages of the protest–namely that from now on it’s perfectly acceptable to be out in the open about your white supremacy. No one has to hide. White supremacy is mainstream, thanks mainly to white nationalist President Trump and his cadre of white nationalist advisors. This is the president who can’t see the Nazis for the khakis and instead paints a morally muddy picture of violence “on all sides”.
Second, as author Susan Campbell Bartoletti notes (quoted in Wolf’s essay), “They’re putting the face of a gentleman on values that are, in my opinion, anything but gentlemanly.” This effectively masks the savagery of their ideology by giving it an air of civility. They look about as intimidating as an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. Even their citronella tiki torches looked more hoaky than threatening (until they began beating people with them). It all looks so harmless until one day, instead of jumping over creeks and ravines in a Dodge Charger, a white supremacist is running over counter-protesters in a Dodge Challenger.
NOTE: Nine months after publishing this piece I wrote another essay reflecting, with the benefit of time, on the events of Charlottesville entitled On Facing the Possibility of Losing the Civil War.
