The Problem - from "The Problem South: Region, Empire and the New Liberal State: 1890-1930" by Natalie J. Ring (2012)

I enjoyed this week's read immensely. Throughout the course of this semester, the texts tackled by myself and my cohort have journeyed through 19th-century America with an eye for issues concerning race, citizenship, gender and how the taxonomy of such arose and developed in our nation. In The Problem South by Dr Natalie J. Ring, we step beyond physical Reconstruction to a cultural Reconstruction that while it began in the South, impacted and continues to impact the entire country. As Dubois wrote in 1903, "the problem of the twentieth century, is the problem of the color-line" (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903).

Ring introduces Victorian sociocultural evolutionism as the method leading social scientists used to "diagnose" the "ills" of the South (44-45). This coincides with the voices of the class of black intellectuals of the era who wrote on the roots of American regionalism. These individuals of color were largely male, and academy-trained. They were sociologists, historians and anthropologists from some of the nation's leading Historically Black Institutions and primarily-white institutions as well. This book contextualizes the rise of social science and liberal arts education for black Americans and subsequently observes a shift of the the "burden of responsibility of blacks" to blacks themselves. During this era, my own alma mater where I received initial social science training was founded (134 years ago yesterday!). This book is useful in understanding the influence of all branches of social science not unlike Victorian sociocultural evolutionism, and the scholarship that emerged from black academics like DuBois and Miller, and lay-person ground-zero activists such as Ida B. Wells.

Ring also leans heavily on the rhetoric and metaphor of the time that frequently employed militaristic language (68) to combat the "Menace of the Diseased South" and the "White Plague of Cotton," the clever titles of the second and third chapters, respectively. Chapter two ties early tropical medicine and labor productivity to health outcomes among poor whites in the South. The region was beginning to be compared to "similar" locations worldwide, thus situating the American South in the larger "Global South." Chapter three exposes the banana republic status that King Cotton forced, and the Farm Demonstration Movement that saw the Federal Government push crop diversification and agricultural reform and efficiency - all of which challenged not only King Cotton, but the legacy of slavery. The Farm Demonstration Movement tied the natural sciences of entomology, geology and horticulture to the sociology, economics and again, comparative studies with other nations (123). These venues which operated their economies on a color-coordinated division of labor together made up the Global South.

In the sense that the North "occupied" the South financially (by means of commercial investment in slaves and cotton and legal control during Reconstruction) the South could be considered a colony no different from colonial contemporaries such as the Philippines and South Africa. So what then, if anything, makes the "problem" of the American South unique? The presence of Black Americans. No longer African, and no longer enslaved, the vociferous efforts of black people to obtain democracy in postbellum America were remarkable. Their initiative complicated the core of Southern society which was fixated on white supremacy. When industrial blacks began to aggressively pursue education and citizenship on their own terms and by their own means, the propaganda of the "forgotten man (and woman)" meaning the poor white, began to surface as a rebuttal (153). The recurring theme of Ring's book is the paradoxical nature of South, that for all her promise and potential, her dedication to racial taxonomies would mar her lovely nose to spite her face. The "problem" of the South was the South herself. Even as she pushed into the twentieth century full of momentum for educational reform and gender equality, she was hindered by a nostalgia for power to wield. As long as the "poor white" was white first, the South's desperate grab for racial privilege would plague its efforts to mature.

Often white reading, I found it difficult to situate this book chronologically. The symptoms that the North saw in the South I derisively identified today in the social trials that the ghosts of Sean Bell and Eric Garner had to endure because they had been Black men (in the North) during their lives, and arguably (?) killed for that same reason. The problem of the south remains a problem today with the myriad positive and negative responses to the police violence against blacks nationwide. Our nations leaders cannot agree or admit to the disease that is state-sanctioned violence against people of color. The whitewashing of the #BlackLivesMatter movement to #AllLivesMatter is my generation's "forgotton man" mantra. We can still examine the American problem (no longer Southern, if it were truly ever just that) with race in comparison to Brazil, South African and India among other places. The problems of yesteryear documented in Ring's text remain relevant, is problematic in itself.