I understand that to people in Southern Utah, the term Dixie has pleasant connotations. They think of climbing Dixie Rock and of hardworking pioneer ancestors. I have pioneer ancestors, have lived in St. George and have taught at DSU. I get it.
But I have also lived in the South. Unfortunately, the original Dixie and the original South represent something very different to the rest of the country, and DSU cannot distinguish herself from her namesake. The “connotations” we delicately refer to are of the Confederacy, slavery, racism and the dark history of the South where humans bought and sold other humans, treated them worse than animals, separated families and became filthy rich because of it. They fought a civil war to defend Dixie and this way of life and denied basic human rights for decades after slavery ended. In the South you can still see the ports where ships full of slaves as cargo arrived to the U.S. There are identifiable trees where lynchings were common. The KKK was real. Segregation was perpetrated. Slavery and racism are not distant history.
There is no “them” or “cancel culture” in this discussion. It does not matter whether or not these things happened in Southern Utah. This is what the name Dixie represents for most people. To them it is evil and dark. We are choosing to align ourselves with that if the university keeps the name Dixie. That is our namesake.
Because of this, it is time to accept that Dixie is not an appropriate name for a public university. We can keep our history without keeping the association with that part of our country’s history. We know it does harm to the students and the university’s reputation. It is time for a positive change.
Deborah Lin
South Jordan