The Assault on Southern Heritage: "A Cultural and Political Atrocity"

Concerning the modern assault on Southern history and culture, the esteemed historian Eugene D. Genovese writes:

To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation.  We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity -- an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage, and therefore their identity.  They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame.

--The Southern Tradition, the Achievements and Limitations of American Conservatism, Harvard University Press, 1994; as quoted by Gene Kizer, Jr. in his recent book Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States