ABSTRACT
The South's multiple personality is obviously causally connected to its being both a part of the national story and at various times an impediment to that story. White Southerners and black Southerners share the double history of the region even though they may experience their relationship to it in ways that are inverse to each other. Southern blacks and whites have been locked in a mutually modifying embrace, shaping and being shaped by each other and by a society whose core element is its biracial nature. In addition to complications of racial identities, there also exists great variety along other dimensions of Southernness. To be Southern is to be formed by a religious culture of contradictions, contradictions that are resolved by transcendent belief. To be Southern is also to be created in the conversation between the American identity and dissenting critiques of the American identity. To be Southern, either black or white, is to be profoundly contradictory.
