Quiz 6 Post - I'll take my stand in Dixie-Net

1. Tara McPherson’s article, “I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net” is explaining how many white men in old Confederate states are trying to create a new Dixieland in cyberspace.
2. She begins the article by telling us how she first encountered these Dixie web pages. But she found that in these web pages blacks were hardly mentioned. She explains this when she says, “Cybercommunities like those of the neo-Confederates invoke specific registers of place, yet these places, like the majority of writing bout cyberspace, evade précis discussions about race or racism.” This even though blacks were a huge part of the south’s history. The creators of these websites say that they created them to preserve Southern heritage. She explains that most of the websites link to other neo-Confederate websites. One of the main facets of the heritage was the war. McPherson exclaims this when she says, “The war itself becomes the ground upon which claims to heritage are waged, though here heritage clearly functions as a universal and naturalized category which only some can lay claim to and which all “real” Southerners would die to defend. The South’s complex racial history and its relationship to the Civil War disappear as the war is rewritten in univocal terms.” She also says that numerous maps show the 11 Confederate states separated from the rest of the United States. These maps signify the way the south could have been had the war turned out differently. The “Lost Cause” is then mentioned as their remembrance of the Civil War. Even though the racism is covert, it is still clear in these websites. The heritage that they mention is undeniably white. Her point in the article is that these websites are meant to encourage a covertly racist southern society.
3. For my analysis I visited the Confederate.net website. I actually found it to be fairly disappointing. According to McPherson, this was one of the big three sites for this neo-Confederate movement. I didn’t think it had all that much Confederate stuff on the site. From reading the article, I thought it would have a bunch of discussion boards with people talking about how great life would be if there was a Confederate nation. But on the site there were only two links on the main page that had anything to do with this movement. I figured the whole site would be dealing with the Neo-Confederate movement. I was extremely surprised to find links to foreign resort vacations, adult sex, and a bunch of random sports. Another thing that surprised me about this site was that the color combinations and format of the page had nothing to do with the Confederacy. The page was purple with a random picture of a woman pouring water on herself. The confederate link at the home page linked to two Confederate on-line stores to buy Confederate merchandise. The Confederate States link just had a bunch of random Confederate pages on the internet. My final analysis of the site was that it was poor and was nothing like I expected it to be by McPherson’s description in her article.
4. I must say that the whole Neo-Confederate movement bothers me a little bit. I always wonder when I see a Confederate bumper sticker on a car, Why do you have a Confederate bumper sticker. We live in the United States of America. I honestly believe the Confederate goods should be outlawed. We live in the most wonderful country in the world, I don’t understand why people think a Confederate nation would have prospered. I hope that as I get older this movement doesn’t become an actual concern, because that would ruin this great country.