The Work of Southering: "Southern Justice" and the Moral Landscape of Uneven Racism

This article seeks to stimulate a discussion about the ways in which scholars may reproduce the identity discourse of internal orientalism (here called “southering”) and the moral landscape of uneven racism in the process of critiquing injustice in the southeastern states. It points to the problems with making explicit and unsubstantiated comparisons on issues such as racism between the “South” and “North” and highlights discursive forms that risk triggering reader interpretations (such as the idea of “Southern distinctiveness”) that may be inconsistent with the intentions of the author. It ends by considering a few strategies for minimizing the communication of unintended messages, including more precision with regard to temporal and spatial boundaries, using a form of the “contrapuntal method” where generalizations about “the South” are accompanied by statements describing the status of the problem in question in the rest of the country, employing a materialist definition of racism as well as a dialectical analysis that focuses on process and relation