Tara McPherson “I’ll Tale My Stand in Dixie-Net”

In Tara McPherson’s article “I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net: White Guys, the South, and Cyberspace” she confronts websites such as Dixie-Net, The Confederate Network, and The Heritage Preservation Association on their acts of racism through cyberspace. McPherson writes of how she discovered websites such as these through searching museum when finding a link for the Confederate Embassy in Washington D.C. She then followed the neo-Confederate trail through cyberspace. As she described it was a way of “prosthetic living” and “rapid alterations of identity”. Cyber communities such as the neo-Confederates were making reference to place which in time made reference to race and racism. These were the identities of Southern masculinity through the language of the civil rights struggle. Many people questioned McPherson’s research and wondered how she could stand all of the investigations on such racist people. When she was exploring the Virtual Dixie, the websites primarily labeled their meaning behind “preserving Southern heritage” and often referred themselves to “Southern Nationalist” or “Southrons”. Many of them even practiced in southern heritage groups offline. They referred to “heritage violations” as attempts to ban or remove symbols of Confederacy and especially confederate flags. Many of these sites advocated Southern separatism or nationalism, sometimes through secession. They also made clear the vision of a “new confederacy” and a virtual secession at precisely the moment that Black Americans are moving to the South in greater numbers than they are leaving it for the first time since the civil war. This virtual battle still exists and is being fought to defend a very specific Southern heritage that is predominantly white. Whiteness itself is not mentioned in these websites, Anglo, Celtic and European are. McPherson writes that “these men struggle to find ways of securing the meaning of whiteness”. According to McPherson, to her the definition of Southern Heritage is conservative, white and mostly male.
I think McPherson describes why these cyberspace groups are so popular is because they are completely hidden from society. Unless you are specifically searching for rebel groups such as these, the chances of you running into something so racial as these websites is almost impossible. It gives the advocates of these websites, a way to show their racism without the possibility of someone seeing it. There is no one telling the creators or users of the cyberspaces to quit what they are doing. There is absolutely no stopping the things that are done on the internet.