I Have a Better Idea, Let’s Not Rise Again November 4, 2009
Posted by Matt in Football.Tags: race, Ole Miss Rebels, To Dixie with Love, The South Will Rise Again, offensive sayings
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One item in our local news recently has revolved around the Ole Miss football games. Now this controversy has nothing to do with Houston Nutt’s oftentimes laughable playcalling or the team’s rapid fall from the top ten earlier this year or their supposed Heisman trophy-quality quarterback who seems to have forgotten to play. No, this problem involves the marching band. Yep, you heard me, the band. You know, the people who wear those funny outfits and march all around the football field while Ole Miss faithful are either gathering more beer or ridding their bodies of already consumed alcohol in the bathroom (or maybe just on the ground, I mean, this is Ole Miss we’re talking about).
Well, it turns out that the Ole Miss band plays the song “To Dixie with Love” at games and at the end of that song, Ole Miss fans are known to yell out “The South will rise again!”
Due to numerous complaints about the obviously racist connotations of this sentence, the university’s Chancellor has laid down the law and stated that, if the student body again participates in this chant, the band will no longer play “Dixie.” In its place, school leaders have requested that the students yell “To hell with LSU.”
Maybe the Ole Miss student body will see the Chancellor’s point and gladly change the offensive cheer. Maybe, just maybe, this will lead those attending the university in a new direction that focuses on tolerance and no longer builds walls along old racial prejudices. Maybe they can lead the way into the 21st century as a symbol of a New South that no longer has some weird inferiority complex when dealing with people in the North.
But then again, this is Ole Miss we’re talking about…
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