by Chauncey DeVega
May 23, 2023
-MSN
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a true daughter of the South in some of the worst ways possible.
Last week, the Georgia congresswoman showed the world, again, that she is a white supremacist who represents the worst of (white) Southern culture and history when she lied about Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who is a Black man, after they had a public “argument” outside of the Capitol. Greene claimed that she was terrified and felt threatened by her Democratic colleague.
Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s lies are the same ones that white women across the South (and other parts of the country) told about “giant negroes” and “black beast rapists” and other “black predators” in order to get thousands of innocent Black men (and Black women and Black children) lynched. In all, the South that Marjorie Taylor-Greene honors is one of white supremacy in its varied forms such as white-on-Black chattel slavery, Jim and Jane Crow, lynchings, and other examples of white racial terrorism, white violence, and racial authoritarianism more generally. This South is the place that historian Joel Williamson famously described as having “a rage for order” that means white domination and control over Black and brown people in order to keep them in “their place.”
Greene is a product of the racist culture and white supremacist environment of Forsyth County, Georgia.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s South is a place where white-on-Black chattel slavery was a “benign institution” and the Black slaves were “happy”, and the white slavers were “benevolent” and “kind”. Greene’s world is also a place where the white supremacist fantasies of “Gone with the Wind” and the white utopia of “The Andy Griffith Show” and Mayberry were actually real. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Southern dreams are an opine and nostalgia for a reborn Confederacy and other cursed fantasies of Whiteness and the Trumpocene and MAGA movement’s promises and threats to “Make American Great Again” – which in practice means “Make America Fully White Again.”
