Black White Man

Protesters Say Monument Stands For Racism, Bigotry

I spent a lot of time growing up in the South, and I’ve seen how pride in being a Southerner gets all wrapped up in pride about the Civil War.   I’m sensitive to it, and I can see the other side.   Especially since our country still grapples with the tension between states’ rights versus the power of the federal (or even international) government, the values of the Confederate uprising aren’t entirely something of the past.  Theres a mythos there that persists.

On the other hand…

Near my house here in northern Virginia there’s a plaque on a tree which memorializes that Yankee spies used to be hanged there.   This is directly on my way when I take my family out for our weekly Sunday brunch.    It’s both morbid and disturbing.   As much as I sympathize with the ideals of the Civil War extending past a battle over slavery — it was also about slavery.   As a “mulatto,” if I had lived at the time, I would certainly have been fighting on the side of the North, and I would also certainly have been ‘passing’ as white.   And who’s to say I wouldn’t have been discovered and strung up on that tree?   For that matter, whose to say that any of my white friends wouldn’t have been caught as spies and strung up on that tree.   Regardless of what the real underpinnings of that war were, regardless of what it means for cultural pride, there are appropriate ways to express your culture and commemorate history and there are inappropriate ways.   I’d like to think that the issue of confederate monuments would be a prime example of something that we could compromise on as a culture… but maybe I’m wrong.

An elementary school production of Ten Little Indians is cancelled

Despite yesterday’s post, where I attempt to defend racist historical figures and literature a bit, I do have to say that I think it should be kept from small children until they are old enough to understand.    I know I won’t be reading Dr. Doolittle to my son anytime soon.    I’d hate to see the ignorance of the past revived in the present.   And nowhere is this more true than the way we, as a culture, treat the Native American.     It’s galling that, after one of the worst genocides in the history of the world, that we are insensitive enough to continue infantilizing Indian-play and serving it up to our children.    Good for this school board.

http://the5thc.blogspot.com/2007/11/racism-in-context-of-time-full-story.html

I was reading somewhere else that Lincoln had a plan early on to avoid the Civil War by gradually buying the freedom of every slave at $400 each.     It’s clear that whatever else he believed, his primary concern was in keeping the strength of the republic.    And I think that’s okay.

My grandpa was fancied himself a progressive type of fellow, but at the end of the day he was a generation or two out of date, and what he thought of as very open-minded still ended up often sounding a little off (“That Angela Bassett is certainly a strong little girl!”).   But I loved him for trying.    I can’t say that I would be better, I’m also a product of my generation.

In undergrad I studied comparative literature, and this came up a lot for me.    From George Orwell to Dr. Doolittle, our literary history is filled with people who were progressive for their time, but fall short when judged by modern standards.

In simple fact, we’ve come a very long way in a very short period time.    In the last two hundred years we’ve gone from arguing against the Hamitic myth and abolishing chattel slavery, through apartheid and the civil rights movement, to our current problems and triumphs.    I don’t think it’s entirely fair to judge Lincoln, or even the founding fathers, but the standards of a society where we’ve learned so much.   I think that race relations should be dealt with more-or-less like science.   Newton’s laws are now taught in middle school, and basic concepts like ‘zero’ were very impressive 2000 years ago.    Race relations, like science, is a progressive field.    It goes forward bit by bit, and even though historical figures almost always seem racist to us (just as they seem stupid for the levels of math and science that they understood), I think they feel a lot more impressive when you consider the world in which they lived.