Greg B. is a regular commenter on the blog. He lives in Ohio. He is deeply knowledgeable about German history and literature. I enjoy his comments.
He wrote:
As much as many Americans crow about being the land of the free, etc., they don’t like to do the work of being citizens, much less engaged. With citizenship comes responsibility. When one is engaged with the history of this nation, one understands that the enslavement of Africans who were transported here and their descendants literally built this country. While we learn about elites, it was enslaving Americans that created capitalism and wealth for whites around the world. The descendants of those whites have benefitted immeasurably from the status quo and keeping status regardless of quo. Even those who weren’t direct descendants, yes even people who immigrated to the US in the 19th through 21st century have benefitted by virtue of not having immediately identifiable physical traits.
Those who continue to complain that they didn’t benefit from racism, who claim merit got them to where they are, conveniently forget that a large portion of the population never ever gets the chance to prove merit. And if they can, they are not promoted, they are paid less, and they are segregated to live in certain areas. Those who claim merit are scared of real competition; they like the game rigged, one that gives them advantages before they even start playing and excludes everyone else. They may claim equal opportunity, but they see in “woke” a threat to their status. Even poor whites in West Virginia and Utah don’t realize they’re being played as pawns.
For Black History Month, I reread a classic on enslavement and found these two nuggets that help explain it all: “The willingness of many white southerners to unite around the idea of hanging on to racial power made the South a swing region, and white southerners a defined interest group, willing to join whichever national party was willing to cater to its demands.” And, “…the unbending anger of former Confederates against Reconstruction morphed into their grandchildren’s suspicion of the New Deal, and the insistence of the part of white southern Democrats that measures against the Depression could do nothing to alleviate black poverty or lessen white supremacy.” That’s what they want to keep up.
Nostalgia for “The Lost Cause” and deep-seated racism keep white southerners tethered to a political party that keeps them poor.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you to you and GregB for highlighting GregB’s astute comment.
I have often noticed that there are two completely separate and unequal definitions of merit.
For privileged white people, the definition of “merit” is meeting some baseline measure of competency that includes many other people.
For underrepresented groups, especially African Americans, “merit” means being measurably superior (via some supposedly scientific measure) to every other person who might want some position or seat they have been given.
Privileged white people just have to be good enough.
Those without privilege, especially those who can be cited to gain some political advantage, they must meet a standard of perfection not required for anyone else.
This truly absurd “two-definition” concept of merit is accepted without question,even by the so-called liberal media (full of connected and privileged white reporters who are certain they “earned” their positions by being “just as good” as any other applicant).
Just look at the right to vote. Somehow what is deemed “fair” is to make it harder for those who aren’t white to vote, to imprison non-white folks for errors about voting, and tell privileged white people who vote twice or who try to vote when they aren’t eligible that they made an “honest mistake” and should take a class.
Recently we had a debate about the use of the word “field.” At first I thought it was a bit overblown. But as I thought about, dare I say, as I became woke. I realized how the word had origins in something of which I was completely ignorant. I used to use that word all the time, but have made it a point to excise it a noun to describe a vocation or work. I am fairly aware of how Naziisms have infiltrated our language without our awareness; I see this as much the same, something to change because of new awareness.
Klemperer is to me what Wilson is to Duane. When writing about Nazis’ manipulation of language, he noted “the foundation of the Nazi doctrine belongs to a conviction of thoughtlessness and the absolute dumbing down of the masses.” A simplistic language that obscures and justifies is essential for that to happen, much as the example of “field” confirms.
As someone living in the South for a dozen years, I do not believe most Southerners are overt racists. Most, I believe, are following the traditions of the past without questioning the housing patterns and the resultant school attendance pattern of the past, and overt racists live in all parts of the country, perhaps in greater numbers in the South. However, I think it is also a problem in the North as well.
New York schools have been cited for being highly segregated, although that was not my experience working as a teacher in New York State. I taught in a diverse schools that had about one third minority population. When the Board of Ed. drew the attendance lines, they wisely created all integrated schools. In the South school officials most likely would have been less likely to deliberately create integrated schools.
When privatizers use test scores to attacks schools, it makes it easier for them to acquire the minority majority schools where students tend to score lower. All choice systems in schools create a socioeconomic and racial imbalance when largely Black and Brown or, in cases of selective charter schools, white students are removed from the public school enrollment.
Regarding NYC schools — the definition of “segregated” when applied to NYC public schools is likely different than how that word is used in the south.
White students are only around 15% of the NYC school system, and some of the more popular schools might be 30% or 40% white, which means others may have almost no white students.
In many places, a white student who attends a school that was less than 40% white and more than 60% non-white would be identified as attending a integrated school. But in NYC, that school would be part of the segregated NYC public school system.
In the South, federal courts forced the creation of integrated schools. Many of those schools have desegregated since the lifting of court oversight or white flight.
resegregated
“I do not believe that most Southerners are overt racists”
But racists they are. I, too, live among these people. Trump gave their racism the official state imprimatur again, and Tucker Carlson became OK.
We are at an inflection point. We’re a pot just before it starts boiling. Things could get really bad, and a LOT of these good Christian Southerners could easily surprise you with how violent and vile they could become, turning in that direction on a dime. They’ve been lapping up the Murdoch poison for too long now. This has twisted and sickened them, has made them monstrous, just below the surface. They aren’t the kindly willing to live beside them folks of the some of the past.
Yikes. They aren’t the kindly “willing to live beside them” folks of the past.
Comment thread is encouraging. If history is any guide, the best way to free white southerners from the politics of racial resentment is to harangue them about how they’re fragile incompetents who are unable to compete on a level playing field with underrepresented minorities. I predict great success!
You got it backward, FLERP!
White southerners (and white northerners) are already being told that they should resent people of other races who have an unfair advantage over them because liberals have conspired to keep white people down. They don’t need you to suggest it be done, FLERP!
They are already being told (by folks like you!) that we “liberals” who are trying to address inequities are calling them “fragile incompetents who are unable to compete on a level playing field with underrepresented minorities”. That is a case study in the typical disingenuous racist trope in which we get a “whitesplaining” interpretation of what we are saying, designed to foment as much hate and resentment in white southerners as possible.
So tired of this disingenuousness that is the hallmark of the people who normalize racism by blaming it on the people who are supposedly making white racists feel bad INSTEAD of the people who are telling them they should be angry because we are out to get them.
Next up, you can Nazisplain how Aryan Germans aren’t going to be swayed by Jews “haranguing them about how they are anti-Semites who just can’t compete on a level playing field with Jews”.
Be a mensch. I know you have it in you.
Well said, NYP
I can’t understand a word of what you wrote. Others seemed to love it, though, so who am I to judge.
Remember that you’re the one who said that white people have to meet a lower standard of competence than non-white people. I simply posited that telling that to southern whites is not going to free them from the politics of racial resentment. This is a very modest and uncontroversial claim. It’s an even harder sell given that there’s an institutionalized system at all American universities that applies lower standards of competence in admissions to black and hispanic applicants than to white and asian applicants. Give it a shot, though, maybe you’ll surprise me!
Your statement is actually true when it comes to the treatment of white applicants versus asian applicants, though. Of no ethnic group do universities demand higher standards of competence than Asians. It’s also true when it comes to the treatment of male applicants versus female applicants–women are held to higher standards as universities engage in “gender balancing” to ensure the class isn’t 60% to 70% female.
FLERP!,
I expected another indirect reply in which you allude to something I never said and then make a snarky reply to something I didn’t say. If that’s your way of communicating, I can understand why you find it hard to follow anyone who tries to make a sincere reply.
I appreciate your confession about your reading comprehension struggles, but it is more polite to just admit the conversation is over your head than to once again invent your own interpretation of what I am saying so you can fight a straw man.
“you’re the one who said that white people have to meet a lower standard of competence than non-white people.”
Wrong. You are the one who just said that white people have to meet a lower standard of competence than Asians and men have to meet lower standards of competence than women, not me. Are you now accusing Asian Americans of calling white people “fragile incompetents who can’t compete on a level playing field” and are you now accusing women of calling men “fragile incompetents who can’t compete on a level playing field”?
FLERP!, if you want to lecture women and Asian Americans to stop telling men and white people they are fragile incompetents who can’t compete on a level playing field, as you apparently do, then I can’t stop you. Lecturing someone to stop doing something they aren’t doing seems like a waste of time, unless your goal is to convince other people of something that isn’t true.
If you want to talk about an invented definition of “merit” where you set the bar at exactly the point that allows you to include as meritorious the person you want to favor (where all people above that point are equally meritorious, but all people below that point are inferior), then I am happy to discuss how absurd that is with you.
I truly can’t ever follow exactly what you’re trying to say. It’s like a big bag of mush.
Well said. Race is a social construct. Why are some people afraid to interact with others that are different? My whole teaching career was about interacting with different cultures. As much as I taught, I also learned. My experience with diverse young people enriched my life and outlook, and I am grateful for having had the experience.
Actually, Flerp, as I am sure you know, both positive and negative social sanction are effective in changing people’s behavior, so while funny, the satire is not as spot on as one might imagine.
I strongly disagree that telling white southerners that they are privileged people who have been held to a lower standard of competence and are afraid of having to compete on a level playing field will make white southerners less focused on their racial identity.
Look, Flerp, when I was a kid, everyone I knew, and everyone in the media, seemed to think that it was just fine to tell racist jokes. THEN PEOPLE STARTED CALLING THIS CRAP OUT–SHAMING PEOPLE FOR DOING THAT. There started to be consequences. Social sanction works.
This is how we go from Disney making cartoons like “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” in with its BREATHTAKINGLY RACIST depictions of Africans dancing to jazz music while engaging in cannibalism to, say, the new Little Mermaid movie. Negative social sanction.
After Trump, we need again to start making it very clear that when a person who engage in this racist crap is showing himself or herself to be a knuckle-dragging, backward cretin.
I recently taught high-school in Southern Florida. My students’ parents were, many of them, good ole boy and girl white racists. But their kids weren’t. Why? Because when the kids got onto their social media and said racist crap, people piled onto them, and they learned better. This is not acceptable behavior. We are social animals. We respond to social sanction.
Can we expect to change the Donald Trumps and the Greg Abbotts and the Ted Cruzes and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes? No. Of course not. but we can reach the kids. They need to see and hear us calling out the racist morons as clearly as possible.
And I don’t think that Greg’s audience here was white Southerners. He’s simply reporting the facts. White Southerners complain all the time about blacks supposedly taking government services that they don’t get and immigrants taking their jobs. So, it’s simply the case that they react forcefully to even a tiny amount of perceived competition.
I think you are focusing solely on the positive effects (as in success in changing minds) of social sanctions and completely ignoring the real, unintended negative effects (as in creating resentment and reinforcing reactionary politics).
And imagine, somehow, after decades upon decades of social sanctions, “the Confederacy lives on!”
I understand, Flerp, but I no longer think that Trumpanzees are redeemable. It’s a cult. One isn’t going to win them over. They will come over when the world shifts around them.
yup
Bob, AP news article 5-21 says NAACP issued a travel warning advisory for FL “Civil rights groups warn tourists about Florida in wake of ‘hostile’ laws”
Yes. One of the leading Repuglican presidential contenders was just found by a jury to have committed sexual assault. Another has turned his state into a place for which the NAACP has to issue a travel advisory.
But Republicans seem to like such people as their leaders.
I posted this the other day. I guess it will not hurt to explain my thoughts on my region.
First, the war did not come because thousands of people loved African-heritage people and thought that all people should be free. It came because planters in the south feared the usurpation of their privilege and power, which they maintained with a military vigilance and a political method which pitted poor whites against the “other,” poor whites. It came because the free soil people in the new Republican Party feared the power slaves gave the southern planters. The war endured because Lincoln made it into a fight over slavery. A noble cause for a little bit.
But after the war, there was only a bit of support for the massive revolution needed to move the nation from repression to redemption. This effort required that all people who did not suffer the massive consequences of the war suffer a generation or two of economic privatization to cure the massive inequities of the economic system. This bit of support evaporated in 1876, and the story of the war was given to the people who lost it. The age of White Supremacy set in, supported by southern whites eager to maintain privilege and northern business interests eager to exploit the south’s natural Celtic tribalism that tended to create hostility toward unionization. Black folks moved north, only to be red-lined and meet with the same hostility they had known in slavery times. White folks loved the music down in Harlem, but they did not want neighbors like “those people.” Republicans continued waving the bloody shirt, reminding voters that those Democrats had killed their ancestors, but those same Republican pols sanctioned hires thugs attacking strikers, coming down hard against those whose wages were suppressed by monopoly and manipulation. A century later, John Prine wrote of his grandfather, who “voted for Eisenhower, cause Lincoln won the war”.
The Civil Rights era changed all that, spawning the great political shift from both Republicans and Democrats supporting policy hostile to the descendants of slavery to mainly Republicans supporting this hostility. The divide is still maintained in the usual way: make sure people fear their loss of economic status, offer them safety within ersatz individualism and fake work ethic.
Roy, did you mean, “they maintained with military vigilance a political system that pitted poor whites against the ‘other,’ poor blacks”?.
And I think you meant to write, “a generation or two of economic PRIVATION,” not “privatization. Right?
When I was a little boy in Southern Kentucky, I was taught to call this the War of Northern Aggression. It was explained to me that the Southern states tried to exercise, by seceding, their right to free political association and self-determination and that the North responding by murdering an entire generation of the South’s sons.
I’m not making this up, folks. That was what I was taught as a kid.
When I visited Charleston about 20 years ago, I toured a very old house, and the docent—an older woman—used the phrase “War of Northern Aggression.” I wonder if that has survived.
I heard it before the age of five, growing up in southern Kentucky.
Throughout the Civil War, Lincoln kept up a “romantic friendship,” via written correspondence, with a slave-owning male “friend” in Kentucky, but this was not his only such male romantic interest.
Bob: sorry for the editorial changes you had to make. I guess I lose my high wage journalism job.
Concerning the other matter, standard history when I was growing up was that southerners saw the war from the perspective you describe. Southerners just saw the war as a defense of their territory.
This is, no doubt, true. Few southerners saw this as a war over slavery or way of life. Leadership did, however, as is demonstrated by their writing. These leaders preyed upon the fears of poor whites, threatening domination by hoards of immoral Africans.
Oddly enough, historians accepted the southern view that slavery was a side issue. Oddly enough, the side that lost got to write the history. Perhaps not so oddly, the country as a whole was numb to the depredations of white supremacists in the century after the war. People always want to remember things that are pleasing.
Lord knows, Roy, that my comments here are FULL of lapses and typos. It’s best to try to fix them, I think. I’m not being high and mighty. EVERYONE needs editors. Me, too.
Read this entry in Wikipedia.
The Dunning School was a historiographical school of thought regarding the Reconstruction period of American history (1865–1877), supporting conservative elements against the Radical Republicans who introduced civil rights in the South. It was named for Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning, who taught many of its followers.
The Dunning School sided with the Confederacy, demeaned Blacks. Was the basis of many of the US History textbooks used in Southern states. Maybe in some Northern states as well.
Diane: it has survived, but Mary Chestnut, diarist near Charleston during the war, coined a much more euphemistic phrase. She wrote of “This present unpleasantness.”
The “War of Northern Aggression “ phrase is most prominent where either someone is joking darkly or where a pocket of political leaders looking to divide the electorate know they can get instant credibility with this preposterous claim. It’s persistence in the language attests to the difficulty one political group has in moving troops into a territory where these troops are readily identifiable and essentially foreign.
I’m just reporting what older people around me told me when I was a kid. We were doing just fine, and blacks and whites got along, and then Yankees came and started telling us what we had to do cause they wanted what we had. And then they would go off on carpetbaggers. This was the war as oral history.
The typical apologia for segregation: “That’s how white folks AND black folks here want it. You think them black people over on Chicken Ridge want you all up in their business?”
That’s pretty close to a direct quotation, from memory, ofc, of a time long gone.
An aunt of mine from southern Kentucky passed away last week. Here is that aunt talking to me when I was about four or five years old:
“Well, let me tell you about them black people. The God-fear’nest people you’d ever want to meet. All Hallelujahs and Praise the Lord and Thank you, Jesus. Stick together, too. If they had one turnip, they’d give you half of it if you was decent and needed it. Sure, they got some no-account ones among ’em, but they don’t put up with them long. Run ’em out. Everybody over there knows who’s who an’ what’s what. Thick as fleas.”
There is much to unpack there, in that statement by a mostly uneducated Southern white woman circa 1960. First, the two cultures come into contact, but they are distinct, parallel, separate. Second, the black culture that she describes is extremely religious and operates according to those religious values. Third, that culture is has strong bonds of family and community that include concern for mutual social welfare. Fourth, that culture deals harshly with criminal or asocial elements within it. Fascinating, huh?
The history of racism/prejudice based on a sense of superiority, originated in Europe during the age of colonial empires and every country with colonies was guilty.
Columbus arrived in the Americas and set out enslaving/raping/murdering the originals that had been here for about 15,000 years. The Spanish destroyed the Inca and Aztec empires. The Portuguese colonized Brazil, where two to three times the number of kidnapped Africans ended up as slaves than those that ended up in North America.
The English, French, Russians and Spanish waged wars against the originals in North America causing millions of deaths.
When the US was building its railroads they hired the Irish in the East and imported Chinese peasants in the West. Since the Chinese worked for lower wages, the Irish eventually slaughtered most of them throughout the west and the US Government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Most if not all European immigrants with their white faces arriving in the East had little or no problem being accepted.
The Chinese ende dup on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay that was a prison where many immigrant Chinese languished for months, years. There is a state park on Angel Island that’s there to remind Americans of that crime.
When the Portuguese, Americans, British, French, Germans and Russians reached China, they declared war on China because the Chinese Emperor made it illegal to sell opium to the Chinese, opium that the British and French empires were growing in southeast Asia and India. There were two Opium Wars. Many of Americans blue blood families with long histories made their original fortunes in the opium trade in China.
When the Europeans started arriving in China during the Opium War era, the Chinese had never been treated as an inferior race before. Up until about the 15th century, China had been the wealthiest, most technologically advanced civilization on earth for 1,500 years.
The Germans did some horrible crimes against Africans in Africa.
I do not think it is enough to own up to the crimes of slavery in the United States. The U.S. has to own it all, as do all the European countries that did the same or worse, and publicly admit it was wrong of our ancestors to do that, making sure that history is taught K-12, instead of erased and forgotten as the MAGA zombies and their fascist leaders want to do.
“The history of racism/prejudice based on a sense of superiority, originated in Europe during the age of colonial empires and every country with colonies was guilty.”
Certainly true o f the history of the history of colonialism and imperialism, this is a more complex general truth about humanity. Hardly a group exists that does not have at least roots in xenophobia. There was such animosity between ethnic groups in Africa that the Europeans found it easy to pit one against the other. Drawing arbitrary political boundaries around the various rival groups (something to which Europeans were a party) has proven to be poisonous in recent African politics.
Charles Montesquieu recognized that the basic nature of man was to engage in group competition. This led him to the idea of the dispersal of power as a means to prevent despotism. I think he was onto something.
“… the Chinese had never been treated as an inferior race before. Up until about the 15th century, China had been the wealthiest, most technologically advanced civilization on earth…”
Very true. Moreover, the Europeans had been working overtime trying to sell the huge China market something for the entire colonial period. The Opium trade was the bar they used to pry open the market.
“Most if not all … no problem being accepted.” Irish and Italian and people faced discrimination in the East, as did Eastern Europeans.
It didn’t originate there, but it certainly was intensified. European Christians let rivers of blood throughout the non-European War. They engaged in global extermination, extirpation, extraction of resources, subjugation, genocide, and ecocide.
So, thank you, Lloyd, for drawing attention to this legacy of colonialism.
cx: the non-European world
David Blight, professor of American history at Yale, had this to say about Republicans and the Confederacy:
“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.”
“This new Confederacy is regional and rural. It knows what it hates: the two coasts, diverse cities, marriage equality, certain kinds of feminism, political correctness, university ‘elites,’ and ‘liberals’ generally. It is racial and undemocratic. It twists American history to its own ends, substituting ‘patriotism’ for scholarship and science. It has weaponized ‘truth’ and rendered it oddly irrelevant. It has brought us almost to a new 1860, an election in which Americans voted for fundamentally different visions of a proslavery or an antislavery future.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/05/republicans-the-new-confederacy/
The difference I see now is that the divisiveness is rural vs urban, with both places being changed by in-migration. So you get state legislators attempting to restrict city government in its attempts to make local policy. So you get intrusions into curriculum. To sap urban power, you see cities like Nashville split into political districts that dilute urban population with reliable suburban Republican voters.
Wow, thanks for sharing that, Democracy!
Brilliant and frightening.