The history that James Baldwin wanted America to see
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
It’s on Amazon Prime video: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0FJUJ2Z2H5U07TO08RQWCZPIPB...
Official Trailer: https://youtu.be/rNUYdgIyaPM
The topic of the debate is "Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American negro?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ&feature=youtu.be...
Or even just watch the first 10 mins in from the youtube link point. The first 5+ mins slowing build to his point. Just watching their debate styles is fascinating.
If the American pretensions were based on more solid... a more honest assessment of life and of themselves, it would not mean for Negros—when someone says "urban renewal"— that Negros are simply going to be thrown out into the streets which is what it does mean now. This is not an act of God; we are dealing with a society made and ruled by men.
If the American Negro had not been present in America, I am convinced that the history of the American labor movement would be much more edifying than it is.
It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that 1/9th of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes, when we the Americans, we the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept for example, that my ancestors are both white and black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other. And that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. Because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens it's a very grave moment for the West.
[Non-UK: I'm assuming it is geoblocked like a lot of iplayer content, but give it a go with youtube-dl²]
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000kbk6/arena-i-am-no...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip-Hop_Evolution
I found it not just incredibly interesting and entertaining, but I believe it gives one a much higher resolution perspective on the complexity of the culture and experiences of African Americans, as well as the incredible skill and devotion to the craft so many people have.
I have a hunch that the simplistic (and highly speculative) nature of the public discussion on race and a whole bunch of other topics is probably one of the biggest reasons we never make progress on things that seem like they should be easy.
The blunt reality is that the country I've grown up in was facilitated by bloodshed and presumed superiority. Every step of the founding and growth of "America" was paid for by the blood of others.
There's no easy way for a lot of people to accept that their entire existence comes from a horribly tainted history.
What I realized over my formative years is that no one is exempt, and everyone has the choice to try to make life better.
And a lot of people still fall in that category of "It is hard to convince someone of facts when their identity depends on ignoring those facts."
I feel like Native Americans were either disparate or were pretty similar to other groups of humans if the area was populous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabanaki_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_warfare
Human history all over the world is rife with genocides, slavery, torture, forced expulsions, institutionalized discrimination and hateful treatment of minorities, and notions of ethnic supremacy. America isn't the slightest bit special in that regard. Every nation on Earth is built on the blood of somebody, and most of them aren't wallowing in guilt over it, nor should they. It's the normal human condition.
I also don't think it's productive. People are not amenable to the idea that they should share guilt for crimes that happened before they were born - the moral sentiment that crimes pass down through blood is mostly extinct, so that line of argument tends to alienate people. Further, it places the past in an anachronistic lens of modern morality - in today's moral universe, every single person of the past was wicked. So what's the point of harping on it? None of us would be here without them, nor would today's moral universe even exist, so people are necessarily going to feel some gratitude for those that came before, so again, you're alienating people who might otherwise be sympathetic.
If you want change, just make the argument for that change and look forward, not back.
It seems much simpler and more honest to say: black people face systemic racism today and therefore we're going to pay each person identifying as black $x every y or at one time. This way you only have to win two arguments: that systemic racism exists, and that people deserve reparations because of it. You don't have to put people on the defensive about their ancestors and whether or not they should feel guilty and in some way personally responsible for reparations, nor do you have to worry about people proving they had ancestors personally affected by slavery or racism.
This will be pretty divisive by itself - a few people don't believe systemic racism is a meaningful concept, or will argue it applies to other groups as well, including white people, and special treatment of any group of people solely because their race will never be very popular. But your approach is extremely divisive and polarizing: putting people on notice that it's their fault and they benefited from this system (whether they did or not, and most people will be quite convinced they did not, and some of them will be right) is about as polarizing as you can get. I don't see any advantage to it. It will foster extremism on both sides.
That's true of every country. I agree we should not try to hide it; these are indeed historical facts, and historical facts should be recognized, not hidden. But we should also not imply that America is somehow different in this respect from other countries. It isn't.
Also, as has been repeated many times, "There are no statues of Hitler or Nazi generals in Germany. There are memorials to the victims of their ideology of racial supremacy."
I am, however, for keeping all statues. They aren’t the reason for wealth inequality or racism. It’s a diversion than only helps the powerful.
One thing I always wondered what what the "Southern way of life" means to people. Aside from slavery, which most modern people don't defend, what are the distinguishing characteristics? What makes it worthy of admiration? I ask because I hear the idea brought up a lot, but there's never any explanation about what exactly is different. Is it perhaps to do with religion?
They would if the winning side actually wanted the losing side to participate in the greater country as a whole, as the Union wanted after the war. You could completely crush the losing side and destroy all of their history, symbols, heroes, and values and anything that connects them together (which we have been seeing in today's times) but Lincoln and the Union leaders did not want resentment and spite from either side lead to the complete dissolution of the country. A state cannot be successful if half it's population is forced against it's will to participate. That's why the Union declared that Confederate veterans would be treated the same as Union veterans and given proper honor and burial. It did work out quite well, because there was not another civil war US is still standing so far. Most civil wars ended with either another conflict not too long after, or a complete rewriting of the previous system.
As for the question of Southern Characteristics, have you asked people who are really from the South that? I think people too often rely on what others say of Southern characteristics. I cannot speak for them, but I have been told they value Jesus, freedom of speech and firearms, being friendly and giving, enjoying nature and the land they live on, and honest work. I think it's not often put into words because these values are so inherent that they don't often realize those values are unique until they go outside the south. Even as an outsider it can be difficult to quantify, but visiting there I can certainly sense subtle but very distinct differences in how people interact with each other and live their day-to-day lives.
Southerner here. In my opinion the reason that "it worked out quite well" is that the Union caved and ended Reconstruction in 1877. This was followed by the "Redemption" period in which Jim Crow was set into place and white supremacy was entrenched. For Southerners, both white and black, things were in many ways similar to pre-1861. White people had relatively little to complain about, and black people who shook up the status quo were subject to reprisals up to and including murder.
Meanwhile, my impression is that one thing valued in the contemporary South is "pleasantness". This showed up, for example, in the myth that slaves were happy. Today, conversation tends to be more indirect. For example, if you want to tell somebody that they're an idiot, "Bless your heart" will do the trick.
That said, despite having grown up here I never really identified with the culture, so I can't really answer the question all that reliably.
Looking for mid-nineteenth century civil wars, I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848 and maybe I'm just too ignorant of domestic politics in these countries, but it doesn't seem that any of them still have divisions rooted in those conflicts, or even still had in the mid-twentieth century.
It's unclear how much geographic sectarian division there is in the current US. I would hope most yankees would agree that Sherman was an arsonist, and most southerners would agree that lynching is despicable (and most memes I run across on the internet to the contrary of either originate in a relatively small community of trolls?).
As to the original question, try a web search on "you know you're a southerner when". There are definitely cultural differences which can be, and usually are, celebrated without any reference to the Lost Cause.
(In some ways, southern culture may be more familiar to europeans. A german[2] colleague of mine once asked me "how do you confuse an american?". "How?", I replied. "Answer them, when they ask you how you're doing.")
[1] there is hope for 2066: compare George Wallace with his grandson https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23574675
[2] Wessi oder Ossi? mox nix.
The distinction is quite significant. Every country is full of cultural and ritual symbols of the past, but few are actually celebrate for the original values that they once mark. To take an example of ritual, are people dancing around a may pole because they enjoy dancing or are they spinning around an erect phallus in order to impregnate mother earth? If a person go into an old church is it because the person is religious or are they a tourist looking at architecture?
If you live in the southern part of the US, maybe they want objects that show that the southern has a history that stretches back further than what living people remember.
Here in Sweden we have a designation called historical memory. Any object can be designated such status and once it has there is a bunch of law that exist to preserve them. The law does not care about the values behind the object. The purpose of the law is explicitly so that further generations may have access to memories of the past. Anything from a old house, a tree, a wreck, a whole in the ground, a stone, to whole living forests. Anything older than 1850 is automatically given this status, with younger objects being designated per case based on a large number of properties like historical/cultural significance and uniqueness. No one talks about revering those symbols, even if they come from past wars where people died.
After the war, there was a need to bring together a divided nation. The divisions were not all territorial. The need to show the courage of the men who died and remember the fallen needed to be done before that generation passed away.
Today the symbols of the south (the confederate flag, monuments, street names) are all reminders of many Americans that their parents struggled though slavery, abuse and poverty. Other Americans that don't have that legacy don't necessarily see the same things and I think the challenge that this article presents, is how to get some Americans to see these problems today.
The sterotypes are not real. Not all southerners owned slaves, most were conscripted, many didn't want to be there, many were kind, many were courageous. I visited a statue of a southern solider that ran out into a hail of bullets to the rescue northern wounded in the "no mans land" and bring them to the northern lines.
George Washington was a slave owner and so was Thomas Jefferson, both unarguably 2 of the most influential men in American history. But, as with so many things in life, the backstory is more complicated than the picture hanging on the wall.
The civil war was and is a divisive issue.
In my personal opinion, like in our own lives, we should recognize and acknowledge were we are wrong and strive to be better. We should also seek to make the future better place to live and leave the skeletons were they're buried. Digging them up will do few people any good.
There is another reason, insidious and evil, and people wish those statues to go not because of your reason, but because of this other evil one.
Is a statue of a losing racist general erected long after the war was over as a counter against the fight for civil rights really a good way to honour soldiers?
If your statue doesn’t unequivocally reflect only one good message to all people, you’ve got a problem.
By this logic, we should tear down all statues, since it is impossible for a statue to "unequivocally reflect only one good message to all people".
I'm not sure that even a statue of Gandhi could meet your standard.
Our Aldritch Ames statue and the statue of the unknown KGB mole can join world icons like the British Cambridge Five statue, Philby evasive even in statue form.
No. Somehow that logic only "works" with the US Civil War, after which the United Daughters of the Confederacy waged a multi-generation propaganda campaign to convince us all that the war was not about slavery and that the south would rise again.
Reconciliation was necessary if you didn't want the United States to go the way of, say, Mexico. The "Lost Cause" business just went too far, freezing the process for a hundred years.
>....Today the symbols of the south (the confederate flag, monuments, street names) are all reminders of many Americans that their parents struggled though slavery, abuse and poverty.
No, that is not at all what those symbols mean, of why they were put into public society. Do you really think the whites that put up these confederate flags had parents that "suffered through slavery"?
This isn't to say we should or should not do these things, but being mindful of what is actually occurring might be worthwhile.
These monuments were built mostly from the 1890-1930 during the worst period of extrajudicial killings of black people. White mobs freely enforced violent racial apartheid with the approval and backing of state and local governments. One example, in 1898 the elected government of the majority black city of Wilmington, North Carolina was overthrown in a coup by a white mob and several dozen black people and members of the local government were executed[1].
These statues are prominently displayed in front of court houses and government buildings in towns and cities all over the south. The governments that built these monuments were extraordinarily reprehensible in their explicit and violent racism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
As a rough comparison for people not familiar with the timelines involved: this would be like Germany building Nazi statue(s) in 1970-2010. (The US Civil War ended in 1865, so +25 to +65y.)
If people in year 2100 would then start and go and destroy historical objects from the second world war I would suspect people to get a bit annoyed. People born after 2100 might want to actually see the physical objects from that time period and the people in 2100 would then irreversibly making that impossible. Once destroyed an historical memory can't be remade by anyone in the future. The unrevokable nature of such acts is is why Sweden has such strict laws against it.
Naturally, if every object built between 1970 and 2010 would be defined as a historical memory today in 2020 it would not make much sense. It make more sense in year 2100 to define such objects that has survived as a historical memories. A statue that is 10 years old has much less historical values than one built 150 years ago.
I would hope that that the people in living in 2100 would still recognize the Nazis as Bad People. People recognized in 1970, and still recognize, that the Nazis were bad.
The fact that 1890-1930 people thought the Confederates who fought to support slavery were fighting for a worthy cause is that is strange IMHO.
Destroying the Colosseum today in 2020 in order to demonstrate against bad people would still remove the Colosseum as an historical memory of the roman empire, even if the roman empire had Bad People.
To make it simpler, is it acceptable to destroy a tacky statue of a slave owning roman, with the only saving grace being that its a century old?
The Colosseum is not a monument built in someone's honour.
"The construction had a much larger part to play in the Flavian political governance of Rome than just a place for entertainment. In Vespasian’s mind, it would help consolidate the Flavian dynasty. He began construction of the Flavian Amphitheatre as part of a widespread propaganda campaign."
"... The most notable construction of course being the completion of the Colosseum. It instantly became a triumphal monument that promoted the Flavian reign by commemorating the family’s military achievements during the Jewish War."
"The Flavian success in the Jewish War was important as many historians believe that Titus brought over Jewish prisoners of war to contribute to the workforce needed for the construction of the amphitheatre. This very much kept with the Roman practice of humiliating their defeated enemies further, and as a way of demonstrating their power. In addition, the placement of the amphitheatre is often assumed a deliberate move by Vespasian who built the Colosseum on the land which previously held Nero, his predecessor’s, palace."
A lot of fantastic historical feats of engineering were built from the blood of the conquered. Even the street of the city where I am is built by captured prisoners of war that were put to work as slaves.
If you haven't read this - I highly recommend you should.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so...
I've been meaning to make a serious post about it on HN for a bit, have just been quite heavily procrastinating.
In short tho - the underlying implications of this article really baffle me whenever (which is just about all the time) I think about our ideas of what consciousness/sentience means amongst all of humanity. Like, yeah, this fucked up the South a little bit - but WHO has estimated that ~1 Billion suffer worldwide. Absolutely insane
I'm not particularly interested in history, but from the little I paid attention, the part I grew up in was too steep, rocky, and poor to have (any?) slaves. What we did have was a large number of Scotch-Irish who have a strong tradition of:
- insularity
- contrarianism
- hardscrabble self-sufficiency
- anti-authority
- love nothing more than maintaining a good feud
- religion (protestant roots)
- loving "the land" (hunting, your farm, etc.)
Ignoring the morals of the situation, from an economic perspective the North could afford to give up slavery. They were richer and their more industrialized economy wasn't based on slavery. The Southern economy was (completely?) reliant on slavery, and when the Northerners legislated their economy away the rebellion was somewhat predictable. Painting anyone involved as a racist is easier and true to a large extent, but there were strong components of "don't tell me what to do" and just not having any viable economic alternatives that also contributed.
In my mind at least, a lot of modern day Southerners of a certain type (the poor white trash type, not the Gone With The Wind aristocratic plantation owner type that doesn't really exist any more) just love telling outsiders they can fuck off, and waving the rebel flag/preserving statues are pretty handy avenues for that.
Meanwhile, among those Scotch-Irish, quite a lot of them from Appalachia actually went north to fight for the Union. This is because as poor tenant farmers, they often owned no slaves themselves and were not invested in the big plantation economy based on slavery that the Confederacy’s elites sought to protect. This fact sadly gets overlooked today in, say, northern Alabama where many whites are enamored of Confederate symbolism and Lost Cause mythology, but if they actually dabbled in genealogy and looked at where their forefathers were during the Civil War, those forebears may well have been fighting for the Union.
It's amazing to me that someone can type something like this and no one bats an eye. Imagine stereotyping any other class of a people as "trash" and it being wholly acceptable.
Edit: removed the way to distinguish between them. You all were correct, I should be more charitable.
Thanks for enlarging my country horizons. What do you think of Hank3? (Hank Jr's "cold cold ground" I like, but otherwise I prefer the other two Hanks)
I count myself in that group. I have no interest in turning this into any sort of argument about which group gets to be the martyrs because other people can or can't call them names they don't like at certain points in history. Monkeys gang up on other monkeys all the time, it's part of what they do, but it's not really interesting to play on either side of that game.
People call them/us that. It was meant to identify that group of people. That was the least interesting part of the whole comment. Let's talk about any of the other parts.
He never said that all southerners are like that.
More generally, those that are poor and/or unemployed can be stirred up using a scapegoat. Speaking from personal experience, working class Brits have blindly followed the claim that EU immigration was the cause of all employment problems when the recession was really to blame. This was of course the result of what the government of the day claimed and partly why Brexit is a thing. These attitudes were present long before Brexit was a thing, Brexit just so happens to be the result (so far).
Moving back in time further, there was great animosity between native inhabitants of Bristol (the same place that threw a statue in a harbour) and Welsh migrants to moved there for work post-WW2. Again, the perception was that the Bristol jobs were being taken by those that had no right to them. Now, no one looks twice if you drive an hour across the border.
Rascism in America has deep roots, so obviously the issue is much more complex and can't be explained this simply. Nonetheless, it's not hard to manipulate people against others that have look different, have different values, a different background or a different religion. It's just playing on ignorance. These days, American politicians focus anger on Mexicans and Muslims, but it's the same story playing out as before.
And other politicians focus anger on people who have concerns about, for example, the effect of immigration on the economy at the micro level.
All of this is as you say: playing on ignorance. But I disagree that it's just that (although I doubt you intended strong emphasis on that word)...what's actually going on is a whole bunch of things, some of which humanity and science has knowledge of (but largely ignores, depending on the topic of conversation, for complicated reasons), and a whole bunch of other stuff that we do not have knowledge of.
In an abstract conversation, most everyone can agree that we have very little understanding of how humans work, but when the discussion is of a specific, object level idea, we seem to lose access to that abstract knowledge.
Calling people trash depersonalizes and insults them. Next thing you know someone will be talking about "taking out the trash" or "burning the trash", something Nazis are well know for. Calling people trash is a step in a wrong direction.
You can't communicate with someone if you won't accept them as equal on some plane, be it political, legal, social, intellectual or other. You cannot convince them to change unless you can engage them. If you do not believe they are worthy of engagement then I think you have serious problems or are living in the wrong place.
But, of course, it's easier to hate.
I refer to my own background as "poor white trash". It is accurate and descriptive, not offensive. This doesn't stop people, invariably not from that sociocultural milieu, from getting offended on my behalf when I use that term to describe myself.
The pejorative use is assertion of class determinism i.e. "you can take the boy out of the trailer park but you can't take the trailer park out of the boy". That's actually offensive, but I didn't see that here.
With that in mind, please allow me to also be descriptive, of how things were in the Tidewater South, 40-60 years ago. I am going to write about class, and race, which the south of my time admitted[1] existed as social constructs. I hope you all appreciate that I am attempting to keep in mind EWD's "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" as well as Dr. Mike's "Regret, by definition, comes too late / Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate."
"Poor white" was ethnic, but not a slur. It was in fact a positive term. Poor whites were good people, who happened to not be part of one's social group because they lacked the means. Poor whites were no longer poor whites if they came into money. (I suspect JAR's family would have been poor whites under this system, not "poor white trash")
"White trash" was ethnic, and a slur, but not an ethnic slur. White trash was no better than they should have been. They were not part of one's social group because even if they had means, they lacked manners and education. Trash could easily be richer[2] than the people in one's own circle. White trash was not an ethnic slur because although they couldn't change the 'white' part, they could always change the 'trash': not everyone could afford an education, but anyone can have manners[3]. Trash who got their shit together[4] could eventually become unmarked, but because of the positive nature of "poor white" were unlikely to become the latter, even if they lacked money.
In the time and place I experienced, "poor white trash" would have been an oxymoron[5].
Now I move from factual description (not prescription) to hypothetical, attempting to apply this construct to events of our times.
What was important to white trash of the time is that even though they were on the lowest rung of the social scale, they were still "free, white, and 21" meaning that a separate social scale existed below them. If one removes 'white' from the equation, then white trash would be just trash[6]. I note that Minneapolis is well north of the Mason-Dixon line. Cops are not well paid in the US, meaning they are unlikely to be drawn from educated social classes[7]. However, even though they are in a society where respect is deeply tied to salary, they do still have people beneath them: "thugs".
[1] Marivanna asks class to name word starting with letter 'A'. Vovochka quickly raises hand, calling out "ass!" Marivanna sternly tells him "for shame, there's no such word!" Vovochka feels back pockets, thinking how odd it is that everyone has one, yet it does not have name.
[2] compare Dolphus Raymond, who uses this to his advantage. His town would not accept a rich n%%%%%-l%%%% (in modern terms, a w%%%%%?), but they would accept a trash alcoholic whose failure to segregate could be expected. If you haven't read "To Kill a Mockingbird", Calpurnia's advice on code-switching is an interesting excerpt.
[3] "my mama always said stupid is as stupid does" Not everyone sacrifices as much for their childrens' education as Mrs. Gump.
[4] and put it in a backpack.
[5] note that Dolly doesn't refer to herself as "poor white trash". She is proud to be "white trash" because she is not now, nor ever has been, a sorority bow head.
[6] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23592167 on "sin eaters." My wife watches talent shows from the States, and asks me "why do americans always have to be proud? they're always saying 'I'm proud of you'", for which I have no good answer beyond culture. Taking away someone's pride and expecting them to listen reflectively to what one has to say is unlikely to be effective.
[7] as to manners: cops here are respectful, and view their primary focus as education, not enforcement. I see that traffic cops in the RF (as they did in the USSR) even salute the people they pull over, which (if it means anything beyond hoping for cabbage) is a nice gesture. One of my favourite russian memes is a traffic cop in a Santa outfit, with the caption being "Not only do you have to pay the ticket, but you'll have to recite a poem as well."
https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/hundley/hundley.html#hund2...
The author was more erudite than the current 140-character expounders of his beliefs, but these beliefs haven't altered much over the generations: poor people come from poor stock, our poor are better off than europe's poor, cities are the root of unrest, if you let people go after slavers they will go after capitalists next (massachusetts being the home of socialists and communists), etc.
If Hundley was distasteful, Isenberg has more modern sensibilities: https://bookclubbabble.com/white-trash-vs-the-american-dream...
(To tie back to more usual HN'ish fare: the textile mills mentioned in the comment on that page were outcompeting the textile mills in Boston due to nonunion labour. Eventually the loss of the textile industry to the south would provide cheap office space for DEC.)
Plantation owners in the south at the peak of slavery had Bezos-esque wealth. Although the proles in the confederacy were poor compared to their counterparts in the north (especially slaves; that's obvious!), the south was wealthier in absolute terms.
Racism was culturally endogenous, but it was also used as a tool purposefully and with surgical precision to protect and preserve the wealth.
The south was a plutocracy, which made a few individuals very rich, but it was not richer than the north in the aggregate. The claim is trivial to assess: slavery was ended in a dramatic fashion, so you can compare the country's wealth before and after emancipation. It did not change: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html.
The notion that the antebellum south was "rich" depends on a slight-of-hand. It counts enslaved people in the south as "wealth" but free people in the north as "labor." But that is non-sensical: a society wouldn't become vastly richer if you enslaved half the population overnight. Likewise, you can't compare the "wealth" of the north and south by treating labor in the south as "wealth" but not in the north. As you can see in the chart, even treating enslaved people as capital stock, the civil war did not reduce America's wealth. And if you correctly classify enslaved people as labor, you'll see that ending slavery led to a rapid increase in the south's capital stock. That's because, as basic economics predicts, an unfree labor market is actually bad for the economy.
Some of the recent articles floating around about the "economics of slavery" are not by economists and are rife with conceptual errors. I'll make on basic observation. In condemning colonialism, people assert that Britain made India poor by limiting it to supplying cotton (a commodity) while British factories performed the lucrative textile manufacturing. That left Indians low on the supply chain, and forced Indian consumers to buy finished goods from Britain. But for the exact same reason, exporting cotton could not have made the south rich. The opposite is true: the slave-based cotton economy kept the south from moving up the supply chain, and kept it poorer than it would have been otherwise.
The distinction is relevant to the political debate around why all this matters. Labor was expropriated from slaves, and that enriched plantation owners, there is no doubt about that. But some people want to go a step further, and say that America owes its overall prosperity to slavery. Except insofar as you can trace wealth to certain slaveholder plantation fortunes, that assertion probably isn't true.
It is not proper to classify slaves as labor.
Lincoln didn't want slavery to extend into the new territories. That alone was enough for the slave holders in the south to plan to assassinate Lincoln on his way to Washington and when that failed, for them to try and leave the union. To placate them Lincoln even was willing to go so far as to support the Corwin amendment, but that wasn't enough for them - they wanted slavery to expand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment
>...the poor white trash type
You probably didn't intend it, but this really feels like an ethnic slur.
Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that he thought it was morally wrong, he just didn't see any way of ending it that was constitutional.
At the time, there was a balance of power between free and slave states. Ending that balance meant effectively the game was over, it was just going to take a while to play out. The people of the time understood the implications and acted based on their understanding.
I think that is the general consensus of Lincoln's thoughts at the beginning of his administration.
>...Ending that balance meant effectively the game was over,
Well it is debatable that the "balance of power between free and slave states" had shifted because Lincoln had been elected.
>...The people of the time understood the implications and acted based on their understanding.
Slavery had existed in many other countries. As other countries have shown, just because slavery is prohibited, that doesn't mean you need to rebel against your country and cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military)
Visualisation of the transatlantic slave trade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582777
That attitude as an argument against abolishing slavery is hard to beat hypocrisy wise.
There was a saying in the antebellum period: The wife of a slave owner knows the heritage of all the 'mixed-race' children on every plantation but her own.
The southern 'good ol boys', not just the owners, had done many unspeakable things to enslaved people.
Note that the South was not poor. (I'm not sure how exactly they compared with the industrial northeast.) The South was responsible for 70% of US exports, with cotton being 75% of that.
Now, most Southerners were poor...
But you're right that this is unusual. Ghengis Kahn didn't do this, the Roman and Byzantine empires didn't, the many different empires associated with China generally didn't. Hell, even the British empire, as cruel and rapacious an empire as any (and the largest), didn't. Only in what would come to be known as America ...
(1) roughly 20% of the planet's total human population was killed by smallpox within 30-50 years of its arrival in N & S America.
So the US may have ultimately chosen an extraordinary reconciliation with the South because it feared wealth flight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_colonies
Here’s a picture of Jimmy Carter with Confederados in Brazil:
"By the end of the eighteenth century, the sugar plantations of the West Indies (like Sir Thomas’s plantation in Antigua) were pumping four million pounds into Britain as compared with only one million pounds from Britain’s interests in the rest of the world (The Abolition Project)."
https://consideringausten.wordpress.com/austen-and-antigua-s...
Besides, military action is kinda special. You need soldiers to have confidence that even if the orders are terrible they will get respect for obeying them - that is part of the deal they get for risking their lives in the army. It isn't wise to put that aside and ignore it.
No. That is a feature of a specific form of democracy, first part the post voting, which apart from anglophone countries most Western democracies do not share. They almost seem to be missing many of the type of problems that anglophone countries have nowadays, which have been linked in literature to the style specifically.
Absolutely not, that is how you get wat crimes. Modern German conscripts are explicitly taught that they have a constitutional duty not to follow immoral orders. For obvious historical reasons.
There is a pretty good argument that armies shouldn't be used offensively full stop, but looking at what America did after the civil war it is pretty clear that isn't the dominant philosophy. I've got no data, but by their nature invading foreign forces will tend to commit war crimes.
As to war crimes, these days there's the ICC.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/icc-executive-order/...
Focusing on the South in a discussion of what's wrong with white people in this country is a mistake. It's a ubiquitous mistake and a deliberate one, because making it all about someone else is an easy way to let yourself off the hook. But it's still a mistake.
Partly it's a mistake because of the resentment it elicits from the people you place in the role of your sin eaters. That's the sort of thing that would make anyone unwilling even for a moment to consider abandoning their heroes, no matter how ill served they may be to preserve them.
But mainly it's a mistake because it gives you an excuse not to think about, or even notice, the part of the problem that you yourself are being, that the white people around you are being.
White people in the South have had a hundred and fifty years of hearing from everybody else white in the country how terrible they are. I know; I grew up there. Imagine my surprise when, on leaving home to make a life for myself somewhere with better prospects, I discovered that no one anywhere else is any better. Imagine my surprise when I discovered there were people who'd assume from my origins and my way of speaking that, in me, they had at last found someone with whom they could air their real feelings. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I'd been wrong all those years to think, as so many were so anxious to convince us all, that there was something uniquely wrong with the South.
Well, I was oblivious to a lot of things, growing up. But, as my back and my knees let me know every morning, that was a long time ago. To remain oblivious now, despite the historical moment unfolding all around us - I don't know what that would take.
A lot of effort, I imagine. I have family who to this day won't speak the name of William Sherman without a curse - not that I blame them; my family is one of many who still bear the scars of his attempt to make a point - and even some of them are starting to think thoughts new to them. It bewilders me to imagine how anyone, in the current moment, could avoid new ways of thinking.
If we're going to try to figure out anything here, why don't we make it that?
As far as figuring anything out, the best I've figured so far (my back and knees being in better shape than yours) is a line from a movie I saw in the States:
Be excellent to each other and party on, dudes
“ On any night, in that other part of town, a policeman may beat up one Negro too many...And the island on which these Negroes have built their handsome houses will simply disappear“.
An anecdote that may complexify things a bit. My grandfather’s grandfather was a Black Civil War veteran who settled in Alabama near Opelika after the war. We believe one of son was lynched by the Klan. The founders of the Black Panther party grew up in the surrounding area. The South has many stories and perspectives.
As the word catechism suggests, the Lost Cause view of history [1] is basically a folk religion. The modern version of it quite often includes a denial that the Civil War was about slavery at all. "States rights!" they will cry. When you ask them what right exactly was worth going to war over, the answers quickly get hazy. But contemporary documents like the Cornerstone Speech [2] and many of the declarations of secession make clear that it's slavery and violently enforced white supremacy that are the core.
And it's not like those views went away. The building of confederate statues was popular [3] during a period known as the Nadir [4], an extended period after Reconstruction when white anti-black sentiment took a turn for the worse. That peaked of course with the Tulsa Massacre [5], which white people covered up for decades. But it includes widespread violence and ethnic cleansing across the US, and even includes the only successful coup against an American government. [6] Historians are still finding smoking guns that the statues are monuments to white supremacy. [7]
So when the inheritors of the Lost Cause talk about heritage, it's necessarily fuzzy, because they can no longer just come right out and say it's about protecting white dominance. But you'll note that they aren't celebrating certain major cultural heritage elements rooted in the South, like the blues, jazz, and soul music.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
[3] https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/com_whose_heri...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
[7] e.g.: https://twitter.com/ProfessorTwitty/status/12722193227656724...
(And to the extent that the problem of cultural appropration is emotional harm caused to members of the affected culture, if you take the idea seriously, you can't actually write someone's criticism off just because it seems trivial to you and your friends; it's THEIR pain, not yours, you can't understand because you haven't had their lived experience.)
If 1% of the population would agree with the idea that you're committing a social sin, and the direction of their rage matches the current social trends, then that's enough tinder for a twitter-firestorm that could end your livelihood.
You can never have enough mea culpas to entirely remove social risk to yourself.
1. https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confede...
Japan received that treatment after WW2. They could keep their emperor who led them to war, and most of their culture intact. The US had no will to destroy it, as it needed Japan for the battles to come.
I wonder if anything similar happened with regard to Reconstruction? There are various indian wars, but they shouldn't have been big enough to roll back Reconstruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sioux_War_of_1876 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nez_Perce_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cheyenne_Exodus
On topic: Custer lost decisively at Greasy Grass, but he still has statues.
What ended Reconstruction was the "corrupt bargain" that put Hayes in the White House in 1877. There were disputes about the electoral votes of several states in the election of 1876, which meant the outcome of the Presidential election was unresolved; what resolved it was a deal between the Democrats and the Republicans, in which the Democrats agreed to give Hayes the disputed electoral votes in exchange for the Republicans ending Reconstruction. This is basically what started the Jim Crow era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidentia...
That's how the US Presidential election system works according to the Constitution. If you think it should work differently, then propose a Constitutional amendment.
(I happen to know a fair amount about the Lakota because germans are really serious about playing "Cowboy und Indianer". And it's just as well I don't have to propose an Amendment, because I'm sure legislators are like high-end real estate: if one has to ask how much they cost, one can't afford them.
It is somewhat amusing that Hundley in 1860 was predicting that if people were ever allowed to get rid of slavery, the next thing you know they'd be attacking the Constitution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23599419
Slippery slopes were probably already old even back in greek times.)
It is pretty clear that the war crimes trials in Japan were orchestrated to protect the emperor from being charged:
>...According to historian Herbert Bix, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers "immediately on landing in Japan went to work to protect Hirohito from the role he had played during and at the end of the war" and "allowed the major criminal suspects to coordinate their stories so that the emperor would be spared from indictment."[32] Bix also argues that "MacArthur's truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war" and "months before the Tokyo tribunal commenced, MacArthur's highest subordinates were working to attribute ultimate responsibility for Pearl Harbor to Hideki Tōjō."[33] According to a written report by Shūichi Mizota, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai's interpreter, Fellers met the two men at his office on March 6, 1946, and told Yonai, "It would be most convenient if the Japanese side could prove to us that the emperor is completely blameless. I think the forthcoming trials offer the best opportunity to do that. Tōjō, in particular, should be made to bear all responsibility at this trial."[34][35]
>...Justice Henri Bernard of France argued that the tribunal's course of action was flawed due to Hirohito's absence and the lack of sufficient deliberation by the judges. He concluded that Japan's declaration of war "had a principal author who escaped all prosecution and of whom in any case the present Defendants could only be considered as accomplices"[15] and that a "verdict reached by a Tribunal after a defective procedure cannot be a valid one."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Military_Tribuna...
Obviously the slippery slope doesn't change the propriety of any given thing: I still think tearing down statues of confederates is warranted. But politics is tactical. Each side is always thinking about the next battlefield. There are many people who are calling for a "fundamental" restructuring of America. They attack everything from the Constitution to capitalism--the very bones of our Republic--and demand relitigation of our very founding principles. (And it's hard to blame them! There is no denying that, however marvelous our Constitution may be, not a single one of the millions of enslaved Americans ratified it.) They aren't just radicals, either--their books are being included on everything from school to corporate reading lists, and are routinely quoted in the New York Times, etc. I don't know if southerners who cling to the "southern way of life" think about it expressly in those terms, but I do think that they have the feeling that it does not end with the confederate flag and the statues of Jefferson Davis, but there is a reckoning ahead that's much larger.
Religion was just one way they spread that message.
And, aside from that unfortunate part of southern culture, the south is a multi-cultural, complicated place.
But what is a narrative US governments can write now that everyone, across all the many demographics that make up our nation, will consent to? In the case of public monuments, I cannot imagine any subjects that could unite the US today or in the near future. Just yesterday, protesters tore down the bust of Ulysses S Grant in Golden Gate Park; statues of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt offend racial sensitivities; name a President from Washington to Trump, and someone will rage at their manifold evils.
You can argue that that's all for the best, as every leader of US government has a lot of blood on their hands. But I find that troubling: you can simultaneously recognize that people have a mixed legacy while also celebrating their accomplishments. And there's a fair bit of hypocrisy in the style of critique as well: many progressive heroes themselves have mixed legacies, but for some reason I doubt many of the statue-topplers today would applaud someone vandalizing statues of white supremacist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (though who knows; today's hero is tomorrow's unperson), to say nothing of other more polarizing cases like Angela Davis.
Perhaps relinquishing the use of history to build a sense of an American nation is the only way to go. But I guarantee that giving up our imagined community of "America" will be deadly to progressive goals and racial harmony.
tldr; Human beings are flawed. All our heroes have some amount of blood on their hands. If we start toppling statues we won't have any more statues. Maybe it's good that we stop putting people on pedestals, but without those pedestals what makes our creates Americans' shared identity / how do we work as a team?
--
I guess I simply disagree. Some leaders have blood on their hands as a side-effect, and some have it intentionally. I'm a southerner. Southern revisionist history tries to attach pride to the crimes of our forefathers. Knock those boys down.
For some heroes, I agree we need to be open to nuance instead of canceling the world. "This person helped with X, but we can't forget she also hurt Y".
Maybe we should put our heroes ideologies ahead of their identities. Maybe the heroes should be the workers who built the systems, who we can more easily forgive for their flaws. Maybe our shared history and stories can be more about activities than the people that did them. Maybe our heroes are the identities rather than the individual, e.g. "The Pirate Roberts".
But definitely, when a hero isn't supported by a significant part of its local populace, time to find better heroes.
Two american songs that resonate most with my head-canon of the "American Dream" are:
"Coat of Many Colors" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYAdKXzGtcY
"This Land" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRnHx3yVuf4
neither of which are particularly statue-wise heroic. But it's been a long time since I've been in the States. What are some current national mythos songs there?
You could describe the same process as 'late-stage capitalism'. Cynical detachment not unlike the death of god. The problem is, the flawed lie was at the base of what people had in common, and quickly-constructed replacements don't have staying memetic power.
I'd look for older national myth songs, but I'd rather hear from someone who is committed to, not merely interested in, the future of the US.
Anyone? Bueller?
The Government/State sanctioned version of this is not a history, but a "founding myth", ie propaganda. There was a great exhibit at the German Historical Museum of how countries had to invent a whitewashed version of their countries past after WWII: https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/mythen/english/ The book is well worth reading as well.
Acknowledging the complexity of American history does not mean giving up on an imagined community of America. In fact, doing so is the only way to heal the nation and enlarge that imagined community to include those who've been erased out of that history.