Talkin’ Mississippi Equality Blues

I love my home state, Mississippi, warts and all. I feel lucky to come from a place where people still talk to strangers, where hipsters aren’t the only things tweeting, and that’s not even to mention the food, the music, the landscape.

But Mississippi has a less than stellar reputation, and we’ve spent the last one hundred and fifty years dealing with the social shock of war, reconstruction, distrust and violence. The future of Mississippi will take massive effort to make right, to keep all that is good and excise the demons of the past. But change is gonna come, and one Mississippian, Ceara Sturgis, is taking that change all the way to the bank.

Ceara is a 17 year old “straight-A student, goalie on the soccer team, a trumpet player in the band and active in Students Against Drunk Driving.” A model kid, until she chose to submit a Senior yearbook photo in which she’s wearing a tuxedo (check the left).

Ceara is gay, and she decided that after 12 years of education she would pose in the clothes she was comfortable in. But that decision caused her School Board to forbid the photo’s publication and has  ignited a discussion of Mississippi and sexual equality, the kind of discussion that is a long time coming.

Ceara Sturgis possess an unusual bravery, because any Mississippian (including this one) can tell you that our shared cultural identity represses the weird, the outside, in favor of quiet dignity and superficial social harmony.

But then the extraordinary happens: Ceara Sturgis, unknown to the world, dons a suit because she “feels more comfortable in boy’s clothes.”  That makes administrators uncomfortable, so they try to stifle that stray ember–but it’s caught on. Hundreds of comments on the Clarion Ledger’s (MS’s biggest newspaper) online article reveal the complexities of equality in a state with a history of inequality.  Some Mississippians invoke the biblical identities of Man and Woman. Some return with the concept of respect for each individual, of common courtesy and freedom.

Across more than 40 pages of comments, the discussion rages, and a recent announcement that the District’s Superintendent plans to support the school board’s decision is more fuel for debate.  All that matters to me is that this discussion stays open.

After years of thinking about Mississippi, of wincing at the image of The Day when all our cultural legacy, phantom bigotry, quiet tension explodes out into the world … it’s not that bad.  The Ceara Sturgis incident unwittingly threw open the curtains but, as far as I’m concerned, the shadows were scarier than the facts.

There are haters, of course there are haters. But all that matters is the love, the support of her friends, her family, and other open minded Southerners.  A while ago I realized that Southern change has to come from within, propelled by the values of our culture and carried on the backs of our people. We are too proud to have it any other way. But people like Ceara Sturgis give me the strength to believe we will get there, and be able to sit down together as brothers and sisters, celebrating all that unites us. Celebrating all that is to come.

It’s fitting that Southern Change shows up in a tuxedo.  Thank you, Ceara.

Posted by:

Sam Patton