I wrote recently about Melton A. McLaurin’s analysis (in Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South) of the “patriarchal white-supremacist society” created by Southern males to assure their political and economic dominance. I noted that for McLaurin racism and misogyny dovetail. In his view, those who have make the rules for patriarchal white-supremacist society keep manipulating the central symbols around which that society revolves, in order to remain on top. And those symbols are projections of the fantasies of those on top—fantasies about dominating strategically targeted others in order to demonstrate one’s strength and unchecked power: McLaurin observes, “Both sexual and racial, the symbols used to manipulate the behavior of whites were projections of white male fantasies” (p. 66).
And if you doubt that it’s still going on—the coalescence of racism and patriarchy—particularly in the South, and that it’s reasserting itself as men used to being on top feel their unchecked power questioned, I suggest you read the latest reports about the recent raid on a gay bar in Atlanta, about which I blogged a few days ago (here).
