Marian Domansky Fisher- EXCELLENT READ: Yes, the South lost the Civil War but many white Southerners still see themselves as the real victims of what they call the War of Northern Aggression. It was the innocent Southern whites who were somehow put upon by the North simply because of their principled commitment to states rights, strict construction and nullificationism, fancy-sounding concepts that conveniently had been invented by slave-owning Southern politicians. The failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the extension of white supremacy via Jim Crow laws over the next century contributed to this whitewashing of the history of slavery, as the focus shifted to the supposed violation of white rights during Reconstruction when blacks were allowed to vote and hold office and Northern carpetbaggers interfered with Southern ways. Though I grew up in Massachusetts, I was not immune from getting a heavy dose of the romanticized version of the antebellum South and a long list of Southern grievances from the Civil War and Reconstruction, both from Hollywood movies and my grade-school history books of the 1960s. I recall how revelatory the multipart series, Roots, was for me and many other Americans when it aired in 1977. For the first time, many white Americans got a taste of slaverys reality -- from kidnapping people in West Africa, through the brutal ocean crossing, to the dehumanizing process of selling human beings into slavery, to the rapes and whippings, to the systematic crushing of the human will to be free. However, many American whites, especially in the South but also in parts of the North, continue to internalize the old myths about white supremacy and the justice of the Confederate cause. They resent the demographic shifts in the United States, away from a white-dominated society to one that is more racially and ethnically diverse. To protect their privileges, they are comfortable with Republican machinations to suppress the votes of black and brown Americans, in order to exaggerate the value of white votes. In the South, many whites still nurse those grievances from the federal governments ending of slavery through the Civil War in the 1860s and the federal outlawing of segregation in the 1960s. Rather than feel shame over the cruel history of slavery and segregation, many Southern whites feel resentment at what they see as their own persecution. Especially through the rise of the Tea Party -- a largely Southern-based movement although with significant support in pockets of the North and West -- the old excuses for racist repression are back in vogue: states rights, nullificationism, strict construction, even threats of secession as right-wing governors refer to their states as the sovereign state of ... Distorting the History To justify these theories pulled out of the dark history of slavery, the Tea Party and their strategists have relied on a historically revisionist version of the Constitution, distorting what the Framers were doing with the founding document.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 18:14:26 +0000
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