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