Tough times for Scarlett
Critical Race Theory may be a mixed bag that includes some very silly or sinister ideas, but on the other hand there’s this kind of thing.
In other words “history” as presented by Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
Tip Jar
And there are still people who deny there is systemic racism. Yeah, right, nothing in the system promotes the idea of white supremacy, right?
My first reaction was horror.
Then I realized this wasn’t a U.S. history textbook but a Louisiana state history book. So, OK, those are probably representative views of many white people at the time. I’m from a northern state where in the civil war we were the good guys, so there weren’t stories like this to tell. If these stories are just a few mixed in with stories from other perspectives, such as of the enslaved, then they could actually be educational.
But I highly doubt that’s the case, so I’ll revert to being horrified.
Right, because we had gotten rid of slavery a few decades earlier. I certainly wasn’t taught as a child that New York had slavery until 1827.
Slavery was kind of the norm for most of human history, which explains why so much of human history is horrific.
The first one, the one based on one Kate Stone’s diary, could actually be interesting history—if presented in context. Like, an investigation of what southerners thought of the conflict. The excerpt from the next chapter kills that possibility rather decisively. Nope, it’s just gonna be Confederate apologia from beginning to end. A commitment to “segregation between the races”? Who talks like that? Who refers to “the races”? Like, you might say that if you’re portraying a white supremacist with RAHOWA tattooed on your damn shoulder, but you wouldn’t say it in a history textbook supposedly written in (::checks watch::) any time past 1970.
ったく, people tend to forget how recent the Civil Rights movement was.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but…right.
The US started to break away in 1776 and the Constitution was in effect in 1789. So 23 years after the initial split and 11 years after the government was formed NY had set down the path of ending slavery. 28 years after that it was done. In the large historical scheme this was a very rapid change.
And when the war over slavery came, NY wasn’t on the side fighting for it. So, yes, right.
I’m from a state that joined the United States as a free state prior to NY banning slavery. We were not perfect, but we didn’t fight a war to preserve slavery. There was no need in our history books for any stories of how the civil war had disrupted our slave plantations.
The southern states need to contend with this. The “boo hoo we lost our plantation” stories aren’t necessarily bad if they’re put in the context of how horrible it was that people could lament that they could not longer enslave their fellow humans. But that’s probably not the context in which they’re being put, and these history books are probably as execrable as they seem from these excerpts.
Another point: no true American should feel sorry for what were in effect landed aristocrats. Nae King, Nae Queen, Nae Lord!
The key, Skeletor, is that most Northerners weren’t fighting ‘against slavery’ at all (though it is undeniable and unspeakably vile that the South was fighting in the Unique Institution’s defense). Rather, they were pissed off about the Confederate states’ decision to secede. Hell, even that was only enough to garner tepid support among non-Abolitionist Northerners, until Lincoln cannily goaded the Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter. *
There weren’t many white hats in that war; just one side had a solid shade of gray, vs. the other’s ‘black, and dipped in blood’. And Northern states, while quite willing to discuss the evils of slavery in their classrooms, are often quite lousy about addressing their own institutional racism. I remember vividly the elementary school textbook that showed me opposing editorial cartoons that portrayed how the North and South viewed slavery, with the ‘genteel Southern plantation’ version being solidly refuted by the text. But I don’t recall any high school classes, even, classes telling me about how Chicago’s entire expressway system was deliberately laid out to displace and isolate black communities.
(^ This, BTW, laid down the rule of thumb for virtually every future US President: If you want to go to war, find a way to sucker the other side into shooting first. You can trace this through virtually every conflict from the Civil War through to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, many Presidents just opt to fabricate an attack, or blame the wrong people for one that does occur with convenient timing, but the principle still stands.)
Still — all we were taught is that New York as the good guys, slavery had nothing to do with us, moving right along. Maybe something was mentioned in highschool about a slave cemetery in NY or something, maybe not even that. But still, a lot of “We were the good guys.”
I grew up in NYC, and GW’s description of the educational experience is consistent with mine. New York was the Good Guys.
I had a friend in elementary school who had moved from Georgia. When MLK was assassinated, we were told to write an essay about him, lamenting his death. My friend was excused because she could not write positively about him.
The film Gangs of New York did an excellent job of depicting the racism and ambivalence of people going off to fight for the Union. It’s not the main plot line, but it’s an important part of the setting, and it is very well done.
It’s true that it’s highly useful to read primary sources on what southerners thought about slavery and the war and all of it. Just the other day I had the excellent luck to find a (pristine) copy of Mary Chesnut’s Civil War in a Little Free Library. I read some of it last night and was only a couple of minutes in when I read a bit where she chats about how disobliging the slaves are and calls them fat and lazy. She talks as if they were her unruly children and she were their kindly benefactor. I knew that was their pov but it’s still startling to see it on the page.
I went to high school in a state that wasn’t a state in the Civil War; it was still Native American land. So while the teachers taught about the evils of slavery without offending anyone, and the problems that arose after the Civil War, they positioned Oklahoma with the “good guys”. Of course, the area was not settled by white people at that time, and the Native American tribes had different views on slavery, not being monolithic in spite of the practice of treating them as a single, homogenous group of people.
Many of the settlers in Oklahoma arrived from free states, but many arrived from slave states; some were undoubtedly slave holders until emancipation. It’s a crazy mixed up state that has struggled to make its identity clear…strongly socialist in the 1930s, veering all the way to the other side into Trump territory over the course of less than 100 years.
But at least they taught me correctly in terms of slavery. They were so eager to distance our state from it that they were more than willing to depict it as the “bad others”.
City-level history is not widely taught in US history classes, in general, so it’s not particularly surprising that anyone wasn’t taught particular instances of metropolitan or municipal racism. This is especially true if you’re taking AP history classes, because those are national tests, and while mine didn’t, most teachers just teach to the test. I don’t recall anything like an AP [State|City] History class on offer. Regardless, my own history classes were rather merciless when it came to the atrocities of colonization, slavery, and post-Civil War racism—at least with respect to blacks and native peoples. What we weren’t taught was what other people were taught. That people have been and are taught racist, Rebel-biased history was a serious surprise when I eventually learned of it.
That’s probably why my reactions are mixed when I hear “people aren’t taught X.” Because I know that people are, in fact, taught X—I’m one who was—and it often seems that the phrase is intended as “all people aren’t taught X” rather than “[quantifier] people aren’t taught X”. But I also know that we all, including me, have a tendency to assume our own experience to be representative. (I mean, look at White Fragility. It’s like a confessional diary of DiAngelo’s own racism, from which she infers that every white person is, like her, a frothing racist.) So I do my best to remember that informal English doesn’t generally distinguish between distributed and undistributed propositions.
Ophelia:
Right? It’s such an alien mode of thought that a normal, well adjusted mind has a hard time conceiving of it. You actually have to lay it bare in order to see it and say, “Oh. Wow. That’s fucked up.”
In connexion with Iknklast’s remark at #1 about ‘systemic racism’, I wrote the following e-mail to Andrew Sullivan, who in one of his blog-posts had, while invoking Orwell, presented a case for plain writing, quoted a horrid example of bad writing (which was genuinely horrid) and listed a number of terms that he considered pretentious, ambiguous & obfuscating, amongst which was ‘systemic racism’:
Dear Mr Sullivan,
It did not, alas, altogether surprise me when you listed ‘systemic racism’ in your collection of ‘horrid examples’ of obfuscating terms. I honestly feel it is disingenuous of you to do so. The term really is not difficult to understand. It derives from the term ‘institutional racism’ used in the Macpherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Here is the definition the Report provided:
“The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”
That seems very clear to me, and, I should have thought, to anyone of any intelligence and good-will. You need only change one word of this definition so that the opening phrase reads ‘The collective failure of a society….’ to have a clear and cogent definition of ‘systemic racism’, that would apply as much to, say, the Chinese treatment of minorities as to American treatment of minorities. (ADDED: one might say ‘social and political institutions’ instead of ‘society’ to make things even clearer.)
I note also that you immediately plump for ‘socio-economic factors’ as explaining things where ‘poor outcomes’ for non-whites’ are concerned. I am not going to wade into the question of whether an apology, abject, or otherwise, was warranted, or whether the ‘defenestration’ was justified (probably not, I suspect, just as the ‘defenestration’ of Liz Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans was not warranted – and where ‘defenestrations’ are concerned, I think you should pay rather more attention to those on the right if you wish to be, and to be seen as, fair-minded).
I have not read the original article, and do not intend to, but I note that it is not merely economic factors that are spoken of, but ‘socio-economic’ factors. I wonder what factors that ‘socio-‘ referred to? The kind of factors that the Macpherson Report draws attention to should surely be among them. Were they included? Or did the podcast confine itself to tired complaints about black family life and simply pretend that ‘systemic racism’ as defined above does not really exist? If the latter, then the podcaster was at fault (which is not to say that he therefore deserved ‘defenestration’).
Examples of ‘systemic racism’ – can you not simply look about you? Here are a few to be going on with: Gerrymandering so as to decrease the importance of the black vote; the various ‘election laws’ that are being passed in Republican states in order to discourage black voters; the incarceration over the years, often for long terms, of huge numbers of African-Americans for often trivial offences; the unwarranted violence too often visited by the police on African-Americans, of which a recent example was the murder of George Floyd.
I find curious the insistence by people on the right that systemic racism does not exist, and the pretence that the term ‘systemic racism’ is vacuous, while dishonestly rendering it suspect by supplying for it a false provenance. Sir William Macpherson was hardly a radical lefty, imbued with Foucauldian ideas and post-modernist ‘theory’.
I might add that I am just as sick of the proliferation of vacuous terms on the left as you are, as well as of the mealy-mouthed rubbish that you quote. But I dislike just as much an appearance of bluff straight-talking that in fact serves the purpose of not honestly addressing genuine issues. Shakespeare certainly disliked it, as the examples of Edmund & Iago show. I wonder if Orwell had anything to say about this tactic – for tactic it is.
Yours Faithfully,
Tim Harris
***
I might add that I find rather curious the nature of the interest Sullivan takes in racial matters, and why it exercises him so much.
I love that. Is it ok to guest post it? I don’t usually ask but do this time in case you want Sullivan to have the exclusive.
Indeed. I’ve seen the kind of thing before, but it always takes my breath away. You can see it in Jefferson, even.
Dear Ophelia,
By all means print it as a guest post. I feel flattered! I don’t think of this as being ‘exclusive’, since Sullivan’s position is so common among those whom the internet has allowed to become ‘public intellectuals’. The egregious Ben Shapiro is an obvious example.
I know, boy do I know.
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