Neo-Confederate – the other N-Word

To my knowledge, no one has ever called me a “Nigger,” but a few misguided, uncouth rednecks have called me "Nigger-lover."  That was back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was a young man, very active in fighting for integration during the civil rights movement.  Nigger-lover is a term defined by the Urban Dictionary as "A white person in the southern United States who has empathy with or is a friend with Black folk."   Although I eschewed the "N" word, "Nigger lover" was a badge I wore with honor.

It happens that I am a lover of mankind – all God’s children, just as I was taught while a kid growing up in Sunday School in Tennessee, “Red, yellow, black and white, they are precious in His (God’s) sight.”

Having descended from Scotch-Irish, German and Cherokee stock, I am an all-American hybrid. My father before me was a civil rights activist minister, going all the way back to the 1930s in Georgia.  My own color-blindness has been evidenced by the fact that when I was single I dated more than one girl of African descent, and I have been very happy to welcome Blacks, Chinese and Hispanics into my own family and the families of my siblings, either by marriage, birth or adoption.

That said, I have recently been surprised when a few readers of my this blog have called me the other “N” word – "Neo-Confederate." Whether spoken of me or someone else, that term is virtually always used as a pejorative political epithet – a term of ridicule and accusation - usually unjustified.

I did a Google search for “Neo-Confederate,” and in the first 50 pages to come up, every one of them used the term in a derogatory or negative light. Of all my many friends and acquaintances who love and venerate the cause of the Confederate States of America, I have never heard any of them refer to themselves as a Neo-Confederate. It seems to be a term used primarily in hate speech by people who despise those of us who honor and venerate our Southern heritage.

The prefix, neo, implies that defenders of the South are revisionists, trying to gloss over past sins and fabricate a new history of the Confederacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The so called Neo-Confederates are most often those of us who are well educated concerning our own history and culture and think it only proper to defend and preserve that proud and noble tradition of self reliance and resistance to an out of control federal empire. Our ideals are the same as those expressed by America's founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence.  They may be called “original” or “classical” but not “neo."  Politically correct moderns who hurl the “Neo-Confederate” epithet are either downright mean and nasty, or more likely, they are just ignorant folk who don’t know true history and have no idea what they are saying.

You may call me a “Southron.” You can even say I’m “Unreconstructed.”  But the Confederate ideals I espouse are more than 150 years old. They go all the way back to the secession movement of 1776.  There’s nothing "Neo" about it.