Since it's a blog post, not an ariticle in the magazine, Hendrik Hertzberg's impressions of William Faulkner's home town at the New Yorker site are "A Missive from Ole Miss" instead of a "Letter from Mississippi," but, whatever you call the piece, it makes for good reading, like everything else he writes. His deconstruction of the inscriptions on the statue of the Confederate soldier remind me of my own bafflement, around twenty years ago, when, strolling around on the Ole Miss campus, I saw a young woman wearing a t-shirt that on the front displayed the Confederate flag and on the back declared "PROUD OF MY SOUTHERN HERITAGE."
What, exactly, was she proud of?
Hertzberg mentions that he saw some Obama stickers on cars parked around Oxford's Courthouse Square. That was enough to make me look up the election results in Lafayette County, for which Oxford serves as county seat: McCain, 56%; Obama, 43%--a perfect reflection of the statewide result. Still, the county has some plausible claim to being relatively enlightened. Only a quarter of the residents of Lafayette County are African American, as compared to over a third in the whole state, so it seems reasonable to assume that Obama did somewhat better with the county's white voters than he did in the rest of Mississippi. It's those university "elites"!
But it's easy to get carried away. Obama won just 11% of the white vote in Mississippi, so it wouldn't take more than about 1-in-5 white votes to make up for the relative dearth of African Americans in Lafayette County.
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