“I will agree that the majority of blacks have not evolved. . . .”
The woman at center, in the light colored sundress and glasses, is Debbie Sidle, leader of the Mid-South Flaggers and one of the most prominent Confederate Heritage organizers in the Deep South. She has put together some of the better-known events in Mississippi, and is currently stirring the pot over the University of Mississippi’s rejection of Confederate symbols. Debbie Sidle loves the Confederacy, and she loves black people who love the Confederacy, like H. K. Edgerton the late Anthony Hervey, a man from Oxford, Mississippi, who adopted a Confederate persona to highlight his (somewhat unfocused) critique of modern America.
Her tolerance and mutual respect for African Americans in general seems to be limited, though (nastiness after the jump):
Michael Hill is the long-time President of the League of the South. Y’all remember him, right?
These people are who you thought they were.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
On a long weekend trapped in front of the screen by work obligations, my only distraction has been social media dollops of misogyny, rancor, lies, racism, bigotry, and the fill-in-the-blank activities that the heritage groups are engaged in. Coming at the end of the line, I almost did not open this post based on the opening salvo, but I am glad that I did. Why? Because I fail myself and the communities of people who are under siege by frighteningly retro-klan cretins when I turn away out of the luxury of choice. We must never get “used” to reading such disturbing words. We should never be too tired to react. I was full of glib responses earlier in the day, but now its good old fashioned anger, which is better than feeling nothing at all. I had family members who devoted 50 years of their lives standing up to hate; I cannot possibly give in to fatigue after a mere few months.
I have great respect for all of you who diligently patrol the social media universe and let the rest of us know what kind of digital garbage is out there.
Patrol is not really the right word for what I generally do; thats suggests something more systematic than actually occurs. What I do find useful sometimes is looking at social media to get a better idea of what people actually think and believe. Folks tend to be a little more candid there than they are when they are deliberately writing for a larger audience.
Sidle’s Group, the Mid-South Flaggers, apparently provided the stick flags that were part of the kerfuffle last weekend at the Ole Miss football game. They provided flags on sticks that were over size according to long-standing university regulations for the stadium (along with stick flags of any kind), and one of them ended up in the hands of some doofus who ended up getting popped for public intoxication and MIP. The heritage folks are hoping to make a civil rights case of this, just like they wanted to three years ago with Tripp Lewis in Richmond. But as in that case, the actual offense cited at Ole Miss has nothing to do with the flag, and is entirely incidental to the criminal case in hand. They want to make this kid a martyr to politically correct oppression, cultural genocide, blah, blah, blah, when in fact He’s nothing more then the epitome of undergraduate dumbassery on game day. It’s quite the goatscrew.
It seems to me that African Americans are evolving at a much faster rate than neo-Confederate Americans, who seem perpetually stuck in 1861. ;-). It’s too bad that “punctuated equilibrium” doesn’t actually exist, because that’s an isolated population that could really benefit from it.
That’s not far off the mark. At its core, the Confederate heritage movement has a little to do with the events of 1861-65, and everything to do with pushing back against political, cultural, and social changes in the United States. It is a refusal to deal with change.
They can’t even deal with the changes that occurred in 1865-68, let alone what happened in the 1960s. They’re stuck in a time warp. Using the word “stuck” here is probably subconsciously meaningful. My almost two-year-old granddaughter, who in 19th Century terminology would have been a quadroon, loves the word stuck. She’s already much more evolved than a neo-Confederate! 😉
Having taken a upper division course in Population Genetics, I think I can categorically say that evolution (in the biological sense) has absolutely nothing to do with political beliefs.
I learned one very funny fact in that class. That was the effective breeding size of a mammalian population.
Wow, neo-Confederate neo-Darwinians! Guess the Southern heritage doesn’t include Christianity.