As an out-of-state student, I have always felt like the spectator when it comes to the turmoil going on in Mississippi. The whole country has lately tried to find a balance of political correctness and preserving history and heritage.
Last year, when ASB decided to take down the Mississippi state flag on campus, I was hesitant to put in my two cents because it was not my state flag. I saw great points for both sides. Ultimately, as far as I was concerned, as long as Ol’ Glory and the Lone Star soared up high, I would be all right. Therefore, I tended to stay out of the arguing that was tearing friends, the campus and even families apart.
This year, it has gone too far. I may not have a place in the fight over the flag, but this is my school, too, and at Ole Miss, before every football game, the Pride of the South would play a chilling, goosebump-tingling tune that all from the South have come to love. “Dixie” is so beautiful it could bring tears to my eyes in the stands – and I am not ashamed to say that it did before we beat LSU last year. The only thing more emotionally moving is the tribute to the United States directly after the playing of “Dixie.” I understand censoring the line “The South will rise again”; I will give that ground, but to cut out the seven-decade-old tradition entirely? This is absurd. I am surely no racist, but I am a proud Southerner. We cannot erase our past, no matter how ugly. Just because we take down a flag does not mean racism will end and old disgruntled white supremacists will get over losing the Civil War, and just because we stop playing “Dixie” at our football games does not mean “Dixie is dead.”
I think I can speak for the majority of the student body that wants to keep its beloved tribute to the South when I say that we do not love this song because we hold hate in our hearts for other skin colors and ethnicities or contempt for losing a war in the 1860s. We love this song because we love where we are from and where we live and where we go to school. This tradition is an amazing way to display our affection, but instead, its connotation has been twisted to convey an awful and outdated message; that is sadly why we will no longer hear its melodious sound in Vaught-Hemingway. I am not mad, I am disappointed – and a little scared. We can not keep letting this happen, what’s next? Are we to erase “Ole Miss” next?
Michael Lanagan is a Political Science and Economics major from McKinney, Texas.
