This morning my time, Cindy Hyde-Smith conceded defeat in the Mississippi Senate race. There’s nothing really noteworthy I can say about the 2026 midterm elections in the United States that hasn’t been said by countless more talented and tuned-in interlocutors. But it’s still hard not to be impressed by the accomplishment of a black man, and a progressive to boot, Scott Colom, representing Mississippi in the US Senate for the first time since the state and its plantation ruling class were forced to accept black majority rule by the US Army, before their vicious revanchism afterwards.
And it is fascinating to me that on the less prestige side of the news spectrum, one of the big tabloid stories has been a group of white Ole Miss coeds making monkey noises into the Ring camera outside a black student’s apartment. At first, I thought this was a usual case of dumbasses being dumbasses – why yes, I know you are recording me, so I will go out of my way to be visibly racist with my full face showing and easily identifiable – but there’s a more interesting story here than I had thought.
I visited Mississippi for the first time as a teenager, with my dad, a proud Southerner who felt himself to be an aristocratic gentleman, born early on one frosty mornin’ and all, exiled hopelessly in a Northern town that had the audacity to be hayseed without any attendant rustic charm. And as the accents took on a twang around Hannibal, his heart sang – we were back in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten.
He understood the rules and codes of this place. I did not. He knew how to banter with the old ladies selling tchotchkes and Baptist devotionals, could say “y’all got some of that sorghum syrup?” with impeccably Lexingtonian patrician diction, letting the drawl hang for just the right number of milliseconds. And the tone shifted, incrementally, based on the race, class, gender, and age of whoever he was talking to – always respectful, always warm, but with a native speaker’s knowledge of a high-context society in which I was decidedly an outsider.
And while there was a familiarity with the borderland mid-South – a place I knew well enough from family trips – things changed markedly once we got south of Memphis. We went through the casino sprawl of DeSoto and Tunica Counties, where Skip James lay in a hospital bed forgotten and alone, where Jerry Lee Lewis murdered beat and raped and murdered his child brides, down into the Delta, to Clarksdale where the devil sat at the crossroads, through towns with hand-painted sings – “PIGS FEET CHITLINS COON MEAT POSSUM MEAT” and rows of antebellum slave cabins with people still clearly living in them, chickens running through gully-washed red dirt roads and light filtering through the rose of Sharon trees around the burned plantations, and the gold finger of Zebulun Butler, pastor of First Presbyterian at Port Gibson, still pointed heavenward atop the steeple.
This was another world. Where my mother is a fish, as the writer said.
“Bless her heart,” Senator-Elect Colom said to Senator Hyde-Smith. Translation from the Mississippian: “Get fucked, bitch.”
Which brings us to the Ole Miss coeds hooting into the Ring camera.
The woman in question claims that she was making multiple animal noises at multiple cameras, and to have been unaware that the residents were black, and while I find that a bit too convenient, it’s also not entirely outside the realm of possibility. The Ole Miss student in question who has been at the center of the media circus was not from the South. Rather, she was from Wisconsin.
When I saw the footage, and saw her hair and outfit, my first thought was “dealership money.” Turns out I was 100 percent right. Her family runs Kunes Auto Group, a major dealership chain in Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, which has faced criticism for racist treatment of black customers as well as the vocally pro-Trump politics of the family patriarch on short-form video (shocker, a wealthy older man is a Trump supporter, who would have thought). And this to me is also a clue.
Charitable interpretation: She made noises at all the cameras in the building like an annoying drunk 18 year old would, and not knowing the racialized codes of Southern life, made monkey noises at the poor black girl as an obnoxious edgelord joke. “Oh you didn’t!” the other girls giggle into their peach White Claws.
Uncharitable interpretation: She chose Ole Miss because she didn’t want to deal with the wokeness in Madison, hoping for a cotillion world of old, and knew exactly what the fuck she was doing. I remember a guy I knew from college who went to grad school there and was mortified by the casual performative racism of the white students. It seems they flock there from all over the country, like American traditionalist Catholics descending upon Verona and Budapest, people for whom Southern charm is resting assured in the knowledge that the Help will know their place.
And the thing is… how much better is the North, really? Her hometown lies just outside Milwaukee which, last I checked, was America’s most segregated city, the red line between black and white Milwaukee as precise as a mapmaker’s meridian. I can count on one hand the number of white people who have fully, unironically N-bombed at me, not quoting hip-hop lyrics or making fun of racists or blushingly saying that they are doing that thing with their cigarettes, just straight up maliciously hard-R’ing. One each from Iowa, Washington State, Kansas, and Canada (oh, and one from South Africa, but that’s a whole other ballgame). Seeing a pattern here?
Maybe it’s that the conservative Southerners I’ve spoken to know the codes too. They’re not going to go hard R in front of this limp-wristed Northern progressive. They, perhaps, know that their attitudes are not going to be received well, and reserve their viler invective for segregation-academy PTA meetings and parlors with closed doors and campfires after a few too many Lone Stars. Even if they have black friends and a biracial relative or two. Maybe even if they have a biracial child or two. You see, they know the codes. And in their minds, they have drawn a clear difference between an upstanding black gentleman and a…
But regardless, I get a queasiness around Northern self-righteousness. It’s the same queasiness I get around Canadians and Euroids who proceed to tell me how ignorant I must be as an American, especially vis-à-vis my own country, and how they, the Enlightened, must inform me of my failures and stupidities.
But of course don’t ask them about the historic and current role of their countries in the same international systems that reproduce racialized inequality, or for that matter their own personal opinions about Gypsies or Moroccans.
The freshman in question withdrew from the university recently, after a half-hearted apology, issued through her lawyers. Not that this is anything other than an example being made at best. I’m sure countless students, from both North and South, impeccably dressed in their Lacostes, whistled nervously through their impeccable straight white teeth at the prospect of being scrutinized themselves, making sure to note that even if they disagree with his politics, it’s a real landmark moment, Senator Colom’s ascent, lest their promised position at their dad’s friend’s SaaS enterprise in suburban Los Angeles dematerialize. And as the saying goes, maybe they were whistling…
There’s buckwheat cakes and Injun batter,
Makes you fat or a little fatter!
Look away, look away, look away…
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