I cautiously commented: "Regional Southern pride tends to over look things or explain them down to manageable proportions. The Civil War was a Northern invasion. Slavery was mostly humane." A portion of Southerners sincerely believe this. Just as we believe our version.
So here we are with two opposed deeply held "truths".
I always thought some sort of Truth, and Reconciliation process should be used to end our American cultures wars. It's more or less worked in some countries. South Africa the prime example. Yes they still suffer the aftershocks of the former times. However they were on the verge of a genocidal nuclear race war,...but pulled back.
We might consider similar.
Neither side will get all they want. That is what compromise means. However we will tell our stories explain our truths. Begin to admit our mutual errors, and avoid national suicide.
The historian Morris Berman says that the North has a history of using the South as a whipping boy for its own unacknowledged sins. He says that the culture of the antebellum South had features worth preserving, notably a relaxed absence of commercial hustling and hucksterism, even though this did rest upon the economic foundation of slavery, and that it's a pity the former couldn't be preserved without the latter. He even says the North owes the South an apology for its willful destruction of that culture, well beyond what victory in the Civil War required.
ReplyDeleteBerman is Jewish, left leaning, and is certainly no racist; but of course he has been savagely attacked for these ideas, and accused of supporting slavery. He puts this down to Americans' general stupidity and lack of capacity for understanding nuance. He takes a very dim view of us, calling us a collection of degraded buffoons. He thinks we've taken a wrong turn and are headed irrevocably down a bad path. I find this last point in particular hard to argue with.
I've never been to the South, other than Arlington Cemetery, so I don't know first hand what it's like. I try not to form opinions of people I haven't met, or whom I haven't heard speak or express their opinions or characters in a way I can perceive at first hand. I've learned to distrust rumor and hearsay.
Z
I'm Southern by family. Black Southern,...Chinese too. Is this a great country or what. I love the Southern culture it has unique humane elements to it...always has.
ReplyDeleteI often say that the Black migration North was a profound mistake. It led directly to the near destruction of Black culture in the slums of Northern cities.
But how could we know those industrial jobs were temporary.
That, and the Jim Crow of the North was more insidious than the South's.
The jobs vanished, and we were stranded in another country.
One that wanted us less than the South did. The North destroyed our families, and near all of our hopes. There's a reason many of my generation went back South.
We're going home. For example when I was a child NYC Blacks were the children or grandchildren of Southerners.
There has been a massive ethnic shift. Today Blacks here are from the Islands,...and they're racist against American Blacks. Bleep'em they can have these dead cities.
If not for my radio career I would have moved back South with the rest of my family, and the folks I grew up with.
Bottom-line though. The South's great sin is slavery the North's is industrialism.
These are the mutual errors I mentioned in my piece. Honesty about that, and it's legacy would be a beginning of a beginning.
There's that nuance thing again.
Human societies are complex. The is no black nor white no grey either. It's on a higher level than such. Berman was certainly on to something.
We are too often a tribe of buffoons.
However that is not all we are. We come up with folks like Harry Hay, and MLK from time to time. That, and a long term population of humane souls. Which is why we had an early 18th century pre-USA Anti-Slavery Society. I bring them folks up to say there is hope. The bullies, and murderers can seem all powerful at times,...but they are not.
Stand fast my friend.