A Southern Strategy for the 21st Century

Glory days well they'll pass you by
Glory days in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days

Bruce Springsteen’s song about constantly living off of past achievements in the present comes to mind when the story of Julious Threatts is considered:

A 21-year-old man impersonated a 14-year-old by playing in a youth football league and attempted to enroll at a Hillsborough County Middle School, according to league and school district officials.

Julious Threatts, 21, used the name Chad Jordan to register and play for the Town N’ Country Packers on Aug. 21, said Packers athletic director Ray McCloud. The Packers are made up of 13- and 14-year-olds and play in the Tampa Bay Youth Football League on Aug. 21.

On Tuesday, he attempted to enroll at Webb Middle School at 6305 Hanley Road, again under the alias, Chad Jordan.

Steve Hegarty, Hillsborough County School District spokesman, said Threatts showed up alone and without the proper paperwork at Webb. Threatts told administrators he was homeless.

Hegarty said the Department of Child and Families was called in, while Threatts waited in the cafeteria where he was given a snack.

According to Hegarty, Webb Principal Marcos Murillo walked through the cafeteria at that point and saw Threatts. Hegarty said Murillo told him, “He looks too old to be in middle school.”

It has been argued here that sports offer the only positive image of Black people in America and that it was sports which allowed the construction and erection of Black Run America (BRA). Without the need to constantly appease Black athletes by keeping them happy and content for the fear that they might boycott an academic institution and fail to provide entertainment and winning teams, BRA would never, ever have become the law of the land.

One Southern school can't run away from its heritage fast enough, for fear that no Black athletes will grace the Oxford campus if they don't stamp out all memories of the past.

It’s too late to stop BRA now, much too late. Every institution and entity in America is under the power and omnipotent influence of BRA, whether it is the conservative movement, the financial industry, the fast food franchises, the airlines, education and, of course, the government.

Interesting that on a day the story broke of a 21-year-old trying to prolong his football career by impersonating a middle schooler, St. Louis announced incentives to keep kids in school by paying them money:

Stacey Wright had more than a dozen choices when it came to enrolling three of her children in an elementary school, from charters to magnets to traditional public schools in every corner of the city.

She chose Jefferson Elementary School, the brick St. Louis public school across the street. And for that, she may get $900.

For the first time, a local organization is offering parents a cash incentive to enroll their children at Jefferson. The money is limited to students who didn't attend the school last year. To get it, the kids must finish this semester with near-perfect attendance and receive no out-of-school suspensions; the parent must attend three PTO meetings. The program is being offered to families in three mixed-income housing complexes surrounding the school, where most of the students live.

We pointed out before that a career in professional sports is the dream vocation for most young Black males and how few of these individuals have any other dreams to fall back upon. This must explain why Julious Threatts went back to school in the first place:

"I brought him into this room with seven of our board members and coaches and said, Come on now, tell us the truth, who are you?" Ray McCloud, one of the youth coaches, told MSNBC. "He looked me right in the eye and said, 'I swear I am who I say I am. I'm Chad Jordan.'

"This guy had us all fooled. I mean this guy acted just like a little kid. Everything about him was a little kid. He's a total scam artist."

Not only did Threatts' story include his own acting ability, it came with documentation. According to media reports, Threatts had a falsified birth certificate as well as a detailed scouting report from a high school recruiting scout alleged to be from Rivals.com. The report analyzed Chad Jordan and said that he is "a very special prospect" who "hasn't signed" but has "offers from USC (University of Southern California), Texas and Florida."

It seems that Julious Threatts doesn't need prison as much as he needs a good psychologist. Some people will go to dramatic lengths to re-create their youth, and I am curious as to whether or not Threatts truly accepts or realizes that he is no longer a 14-year-old.

I once recall speaking to a young black male who was 20 years old and still in high school. He was dropping out soon, since he'd failed so many grades that the school no longer desired his presence on campus. He was completely illiterate and unemployed. I asked the young man what he wanted to do with his life, and he said, "I want to be a football player."

This isn’t the first time that a Black person has pretended to be younger than they really are so that they could extend their high school days, reliving glory days long passed. It happened just three months ago in Texas. Interestingly, Dallas recent passed a law that would not allow high school students over the age of 21 to attend classes, citing the gross disparity in age that represents.

Taking off the SBPDL hat for a second, I must state something that many might find shocking: the South must be abandoned. It took the integration of sports to topple the last holdouts to the Civil Rights era legislation and as this Web site has shown, once that wall came down Black Run America was built in its place.

We have shown that the future of the South is one where more than 50 percent of the young people come from families dependent on the government for sustenance; where the major cities are in shambles economically and harboring a large percentage of criminals that disqualify them from as areas worthy of putting down roots and raising a family; and how one major disaster spells doom for those unlucky enough to be in a geographic area that contains 54 percent of the nations Black population. Plus, Black people are moving back to the South from areas they helped make inhospitable and unattractive to outside capital and investments:

Discouraged by the avalanche of foreclosures around them in Detriot, Mona Ramsey and her husband started looking at states where they would move.

They considered North Carolina, Florida, Texas — and finally tacked Tennessee to the end of their list. In 2007, they moved to Nashville.

"I was even doing eeny, meeny on whether to pick San Antonio or Austin," she said. "I had a friend call, and I had an interview with the state of Tennessee. As God would have it, we moved here."

Ramsey represents not only continuing strong black migration to the South but also the trend's economic and cultural impact. Ramsey started an online business, Sole Sista Shoes, to appeal to a black clientele, and continued running the makeup company she launched in Michigan, Phenom Cosmetics.

Demographers noted a growing trend of black families resettling in Southern states, reflected in the 2000 census. The region had gained about 3 million black residents since the 1990 count. It added nearly 2 million more from 2000 to 2008, U.S. Census Bureau figures released this month show, by far the largest gain in black population of any region.

In the 1990s, many black, college-educated professionals wanted to leave the worsening economic conditions in the urban North while some wanted to move closer to family, a report by the New York-based Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture shows. Others moved with companies relocating in the South.

It was a reversal of the decades-long flow of Southern black residents leaving for opportunities in Northern urban centers.

Here is a PDF that shows the Black population by regions in the United States.

The South is held captive by a morbid fascination with sports. College football is king in the South, and the majority of the stars and starters for these schools are Black. Thus, the South – though colleges and universities are majority white – is held captive by Black college football players.

This won’t change. See here for a video explaining this captivity.

Once, the Republicans took power by utilizing The Southern Strategy, an idea they have abandoned and even apologized for, since it meant pandering to a logical constituency.

Now it is time for a 21^st Century version of The Southern Strategy: leave it behind.

Bruce Springsteen's song Glory Days fits the bill for the South. Demographically speaking, its glory days are long gone and the South is unlikely to rise again anytime soon.

A new Southern Strategy: move away.

We have shown here that no peace will ever be made; no amount of groveling will ever be enough to make up for the original sin of the 21st century (being born white) and put an end to the question And then?; so it is time that those clinging to the glory days of the South leave it behind permanently.

And don't look back.