Last week I got sucked into an internet slapfight on the naming of a science fiction award. This was sparked by the news on File 770 that at last weekend’s DeepSouthCon, the Phoenix Award, for the professional (writer, editor or artist) who has done the most for Southern Fandom, and the Rebel Award, for the fan who has done the most for Southern Fandom, were both presented. (Photo from ceremony on Facebook)
The name of the latter award jumped out at me. It’s kind of difficult to see the word ‘Rebel’ being used for a celebration relating to those who live in the former Confederacy, and not draw the obvious conclusion. I therefore asked,
The Rebel Award presumably commemorates the defenders of slavery?
This provoked a defensive and vituperative set of responses, mainly from a former winner of the Rebel Award, which really failed to convince me (and other commenters) that the name of the award was intended to have any other meaning than commemorating the defenders of slavery. (Although the case for changing its name was none the less conceded as having been made.)
During the discussion, my attention was drawn to a flier for DeepSouthCon III, held in the centenary year of 1965, where the Rebel Award was presented for the first time. The flier informs us that:
Any of the Trufen wishing to pay in Confederate money should apply to the Chairman for conversion rates between real money and that of the USA.
Ha ha, very funny.
Here is the membership badge for that DeepSouthCon III in 1965 (which by the way had only 19 attendees, so numbering the badges up to 74 was optimistic):
I think it is fair to say that there is a pictorial element of this badge which weakens the assertion that no reference to the defenders of slavery was intended, and I said so, provoking another vituperative response:
…even as late as the mid-1980s that flag was a key design feature of the paint scheme of the General Lee, the automobile that was an iconic image of the popular CBS prime time television show The Dukes of Hazard. It was after that when the flag became hijacked by racist white supremicists as their totem.
If it was only after The Dukes of Hazzard that the flag was hijacked by racist white supremacists, who was using it between 1861-1865? (Actually a question with a slightly more complex answer than might first appear, but not by very much.) And let’s not forget the Dixiecrats who won four states in the 1948 presidential election on an explicitly racist white supremacist platform, under this flag – and held their founding convention in Birmingham, Alabama, just seventeen years before DeepSouthCon III.
And as for The Dukes of Hazzard themselves, hmm, what was the name of that car again? General who? What was he fighting for, and in which army?
See also an interesting 2015 retrospective piece on The Dukes of Hazzard from Time, which points out that:
You can’t feature the flag of Dixie and not be about the South and race, like it or not, even if only by passively feeding into the argument that the flag is only about family pride, good ol’ boys and good ol’ times.
The debate (such as it was) was terminated by the appearance in the discussion of the Administrator of the Southern Fandom Confederation, who actually administers the Rebel and Phoenix Awards:
Anyways, here’s my thoughts on the Rebel award name. I think it is clear that the name is meant to reference Confederate iconography. It’s paired with the Phoenix award, which is another common Confederate symbol. It was adopted during the centenary of the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement when southern states started really leaning into the Lost Cause as a reaction to the gains made by blacks. I cannot claim to know the hearts and minds of the people who made these decisions more than a decade before I was born. But I think it’s unavoidable that this was an influence on their thinking. It may have meant pride in their heritage to them. But Confederate iconography and Lost Cause propaganda is harmful and has always been, even if not everyone realizes that.
I appreciate her honesty about what the name of the award clearly meant and means, and actually I did not expect to see the question extended to the Phoenix Award as well. It’s easy to see how the iconography of the phoenix could tie into the narrative of the Lost Cause, but I found it surprisingly difficult to identify real-world examples of this (internet searches kept bringing me instead to the handful of Confederate monuments near Phoenix, Arizona). However, I’m also certain that the Southern Fandom Confederation has done more research on this question than I have, so I will take their word for it.
I wish the Administrator and her colleagues well in the search for new and more acceptable names for the awards. For the other participants in the debate, perhaps a reminder that “Shut up, you fugghead!” isn’t the clincher argument that some of you seem to think it is. There are actually some interesting things to be said about how the Rebel Award came into existence, but you chose not to make those points, and I’m not going to make them here either.