Look Away, Dixieland

The first thing I thought of when I heard about “Accidental Racist” by Brad Paisley and LL Cool J was a conversation I had with a person I supervised back in the 1990s.  She was a young woman, about 17 years old.  Her boyfriend would pick her up from work at the end of her shift.  The first couple of times the boyfriend picked her up, he pulled into the parking lot and blew his car horn.  The car horn played “Dixie.”  In the interest of not aggravating the African-Americans on the staff I asked the young woman to tell her boyfriend to not blow the horn to let her know that he had arrived to pick her up from work.

“But that’s his Dukes of Hazzard horn,” she told me. 

That conversation was one of my first clues that many people have little knowledge of history.  Millions of my fellow citizens do not understand the significance of “Dixie” or the Confederate battle flag.  They do not know that hundreds of thousands of Americans died to liberate other people from slavery, or that hundreds of thousands of other Americans died fighting to retain the right to keep human beings as property.  I have the impression that Mr. Paisley was one such person who knew little about American history until his encounter with a clerk at Starbucks while wearing a t-shirt with the Stars and Bars on it.

The second thing I thought of when I heard about “Accidental Racist” was my father telling me as a boy that there are no such things as accidents.  Bad things happen because of lack of preparation or lack of foresight.  Ignorance is no excuse.  If you don’t know that a car horn that plays “Dixie” or wearing a t-shirt with the Stars and Bars will offend your neighbors, you need to think about whether you make decisions about who you talk to based on race.  I wish they still taught about the Civil War in schools.