Driving Miss Woke Daisy

Hollywood never gets the South right.

This is mostly because they have a conception of the South built by sensationalized television coverage and an establishment education system that has been openly hostile to the region for half a century, particularly in the universities.

Or maybe it was just because of George Wallace.

Take Forrest Gump, for example. If you watched that movie, you would think that Southerners are the most idiotic people in America.

The movie has its funny moments, and it is a nice love story with a tragic character in Jenny (who is more of an indictment of the 1960s than anything else), but regardless, most people outside of Dixie view Southerners as Forrest Gump clones.

And then there’s Driving Miss Daisy, a movie packaged as a charming story of friendship in a difficult time in American history.

Paul Gottfried blasts holes in the entire narrative.

This piggybacks nicely with what I said yesterday about the Confederacy and Nazis. According to Hollywood, every Southerner in the 1950s hated Jews and wanted to lynch blacks.

That isn’t remotely true. Martin Luther King wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail because most Southerners were moderates, meaning they did not think much about segregation or integration or the Civil Rights movement.

Remember, an all white jury in Alabama failed to convict King on tax fraud. According the Hollywood narrative, that would never happen.

Except white and black Southerners had more contact on a daily basis than most people realize. In fact, most Northerners had very little contact on a regular basis with anyone who wasn’t a white Christian. That wasn’t true in the South.

But you would think so if you watched most mainstream films.

I discuss Gottfried’s article and Driving Miss Daisy on Episode 584 of The Brion McClanahan Show.