 There ain't nothing sweet about the history of the Southern Bale. The idealized image you see today has about as much to do with the South's real history as Florida-Georgia line has to do with real country music. The modern image of the Southern Bale was actually created by the Southern Gentleman as a way of coping with losing the Civil War. See, after Dixie tasted defeat, the South had an opportunity to confront its history of oppression. To soberly assess their past wrongdoings, apologize for those sins, and commit to a path toward equality and justice for all, all of which they did not do. They just started making s*** up to make themselves look better. Just like Southern historians try to convince America that slavery was like a trip to Sandals, South Carolina, the myth of the Southern Bale played a crucial role in trying to justify the segregation and racial violence that followed emancipation. I kind of think that this is arguably worse than Holocaust denial, even, because with Holocaust denial, they're acknowledging, oh yeah, Holocaust, that would be a terrible thing, which is why we never did that, right? That's their lie. But with the South in slavery, it's like, oh, slavery absolutely happened. It just wasn't that bad. Because they don't have weddings at Auschwitz, but they sure do throw weddings and plantations in Charleston, so... All the time. Actually, when I was engaged, somebody even made that suggestion to me. They were like, you should totally get married on a plantation. And I went, oh, have we not seen my face? No. See, the Bale was a physical incarnation of the sophistication and gentility of the Old South. Perfect hair, flawless manners, and hoop dress is so big, you can hide centuries of human rights abuses under. And precious flower that she was, the Southern Bale's purity had to be protected from the threat supposedly posed by newly freed slaves. What we begin to see in the Reconstruction era is the role of the Bale becoming a cover story for the rise of the Klan and for racial violence. This dynamic was presented in Birth of a Nation, a three-hour-plus revenge fantasy released in 1915 that would make John Whitbush. The film portrays white women in the South as fragile and virtuous, as needing to be protected both from African-American men, former slaves, and from Northern carpet baggers who've come down to the South. So the film really helped give great life to the myth of the Southern Bale, and create a notion that Southern women needed to be protected. And that ties up with the myth of the black male rapist, which is still used in the South that's a kind of scare tactic. Now I want to clarify something, even if this image of the Southern Bale as the genteel, pristine symbol of Southern beauty were true, the violence it attempted to justify would still be wrong. But here's the thing, that image was bullshit. Very few white women would have led the kind of grand life portrayed in a film like All in the Wind. Most were yeoman farmers, but the myth of the Southern Lady helped serve a kind of compensation because it made whiteness better than blackness. Not exactly the stuff of Pinterest memes. You know, the Southern Bale is a married white woman with a status, and you know, as a black woman in the South, I am not either of those things. I am not a married lady, I'm not a white lady, and I don't have any status. So why does the myth of the Southern Bale persist today? Well, because don't nobody know this shit. In the South, there's a certain amount of Southern brainwashing that goes on. Also, people are receptive to the idea that they were not the bad guys. Do you know what I mean? Well, because Southern Bale sounded way better than supportive slavery. Right, who wants to be called Assistant Slave Master? Nobody wants that title. The image of the Southern Bale has been fully packaged and sold, and the history has been left behind. Just listen to the admiration and the voices of the cast of Bravo's Southern Charm as they give their definition of a Southern Bale. A Southern Bale is always quaffed and perfect looking. Being a Southern Bale is just all about manners. A true Southern woman can charm the do right off a honeysuckle. So do I blame folks for continuing to uphold the Southern Bale archetype today? Not really. I mean, being from the South myself, I get that we have to be really selective about honoring our history if we want to be able to sleep at night. It's like rummaging through a scrapyard to find a functional carburetor amid the husk of rotting pickup trucks. So if you want to post a picture of yourself sipping a mint julep on the front porch with the hashtag Southern Bale, that's fine. I definitely don't want no smoke from Charleston's answer to Snooki. But we shouldn't put the issue to bed either. Primarily because the psychology that fueled the creation of the Southern Bale is still active today. In fact, when a white terrorist walked into a church in South Carolina and began gunning down parishioners, survivors say he explicitly mentioned black men raping white women as the motivation for his racist killing spree. So even if we don't stop calling our daughters Southern Bales, we might want to stop treating them like one. And let's raise our mint juleps to the idea that Southern women are our equals. Except for Tammy Wynette. She's way better than you and me.