A sadness will descend on Oxford, Mississippi this weekend, when the Ole Miss football team, the Rebels, will play the first home game of the season. It's a historic moment: beginning Saturday, the school's marching band -- aka "The Pride of the South" -- will drop "Dixie" from its repertoire.
The "Dixie" diehards are apoplectic, of course. To hear them talk, they, and their Southern heritage, are being shoved into a closet. And it's so unfair. That closet is supposed to be for gay people in this state.
If it's any consolation, the famous tailgating on the emerald expanse at the center of campus, known as "The Grove" will continue. As in years past, hundreds of white tents will appear overnight, making Ole Miss look like the site of a Unification Church wedding.
The tents typically overflow with lavish fixings, including flatscreen TVs; stocked wet bars (concealed in coolers); heart-clogging food spreads, and the occasional Confederate flag, or its knockoff, the Mississippi State flag. I've even seen a tent lit by a chandelier.
This is the epicenter center of the universe for hundreds of white people, the scion and wannabe scion of old Southern aristocracy, the descendants of the planters who built the University of Mississippi in 1848 to educate their sons.
These folks are not merely white -- they're professionally white. They dress in White People outfits, red and blue bow ties with matching pants and blazers for the gentlemen, coordinating outfits for the ladies, red and blue bows in the hair of the girls. They drink White People cocktails. They talk white people talk. They really work at it. (Maybe they have to. A quick cheek swab might reveal an altogether different story about their heritage.) It's a regular White People's party.
More than 15 percent of the undergrads at Ole Miss are African American, but you'd never know it by eyeballing the crowd. Most of the black people I've seen on the Grove on football Saturdays make a cameo to haul tubs of ice off the catering trucks and then vanish offstage. Of course black football players, the majority of the bench, are welcomed, briefly, as the team makes its traditional pre-game sprint down the Grove's Walk of Champions.
In fact, it was the football coach who drove Ole Miss into the post-"Dixie" era. The edict came, quite specifically, from the Athletics Office not the office of the newly appointed president. In a nimble maneuver, he issued a statement saying that he "supported" the coach while simultaneously proclaiming his fondness for "Dixie."
Of course, the University, which relies both on donations from alumni and grants to fund research, has to play both sides of the fence. It knows that applying to federal agencies and private foundations for funding might not be consistent with playing an anthem to the Atlantic slave trade at football games.
Whatever the reason, the outcome is a small victory. Even if it puts a damper on the White People's party.