Next up, the Dixie Chicks

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Is it time for the Dixie Chicks to rethink their name?

The trio took their name from a 1973 Little Feat album, “Dixie Chicken,” that is free of any overt politicizing. Its subtext, however, is a different story.

“Dixie,” for the record, is the epitome of white America, a celebration of a Southern tradition that is indivisible from Black slaves and those grand plantations where they were forced to toil for free. The origin of the word, though, is unclear. One theory links it to Jeremiah Dixon, who along with Charles Mason, drew the Mason-Dixon line as the border between four states that later became the unofficial separation between free states and slaves states. Other less likely theories trace it back to a slave owner from Manhattan as well as “dix,” a word written on Louisiana’s 10-dollar bills pre-Civil War that’s French for “ten.”

Regardless of its origin, for many Blacks, it conjures a time and a place of bondage. If a “Dixie”-loving Southerner today insist the word merely represents a deep appreciation of their homeland, they’re probably white.

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