Five-fifths ... but separate

Lincoln's assassination was the literal and metaphorical shot that was clear signal that while slavery was illegal in the US, white supremacy cannot be eradicated through law.

Congress passed four Reconstruction acts, which "divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, each ruled by a military general." 

One doesn't need a great imagination to understand that white supremacists in the South were not happy with this. 

And, the southern states were required to draft new constitutions, and "Congress made readmission to the Union contingent on the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment."

So far, so good.

But then came the elections of 1876.  Electoral politics took the United States on another path altogether. 

The Party of Lincoln lost, but "disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina."  I suppose even back then Florida was the eye of the presidential election hurricane!

Another compromise, a bargain, resulted.  In order to retain the Oval Office, the Party of Lincoln "abandoned a century long fight for civil rights."

The military withdrew.  The southern white supremacists regained power.  The KKK's terror campaigns stepped up.  Jim Crow laws came into effect. "Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars."  Separate streetcars. Separate bibles in courthouses. Separate windows at post offices.  Separate dining areas. 

The law extended even to children: "In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime."

As Jill Lepore notes, "slavery had ended, segregation had only begun."

Is this when America was great for the current president and his racist voters to make it great again?

The biased and bigoted self

The Confederate Flag came down in South Carolina.  But, it is a mere symbol.  A symbol that stood for various things to various people.  Reflecting on his own life, a Caucasian Southerner who has lived there all his life, writes:

Among people who see this rag of stars and bars as an odious reminder of our Southern delusion, this is a moment of hope.
But taking down the Confederate flag won’t change the landscape, of course, by more than a gesture. We need to look inside ourselves and see that the roots of this racial antipathy lie in all of us, and that it can rise to hatred in any of us. This is a hatred we promote without being aware of it, and share without admitting it, and we must learn to see that. 

In that piece, the author reminds us:

so many Southern whites wrapped themselves even more tightly in the myths of past glories and tattered traditions.
In the process, the reality of what slavery meant, the way it warped that old society, became obscured. Southerners could tell one another chapter and verse about Yankee armies, troop movements, the personalities of generals, the facts of battle. But the facts of slavery, the truth about our white brutality, about the system of terror that permeated the South for centuries, that sustained the idea of human property, became obscured, then romanticized, then lost.

Which is why sending the Confederate Flag to the museum is a mere first step.  There is a lot more that has to be done.  To think that a Barack Obama presidency means we live in a post-racial society is to be in complete denial of the racially charged and segregated lives that we continue to live.

Source

I come from a land where power and privilege have been played out in atrocious ways for centuries.  Brahmin supremacy was/is as bad as--or even worse than--White supremacy.  I had hoped to think through and analyze the bigotry that Brahmins systematically practiced, and do so in an autoethnographic manner.  I started with this post from a while ago.  But, I chickened out; that topic is a world of landmines for me to walk.

I can only hope that I am doing my best to look at the world and the people in far less biased and bigoted ways than how my people did, and how I too did, in the past.  Unlearning the childhood indoctrination that happened when growing up in that stratified and segregated society of the old country has not been easy and has been a long struggle.  But, we shall overcome ... one day!

We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back

Am following up on yesterday's post, with this Washington Post opinion piece that highlights the troubling facts about the GOP:

[Today's GOP] is almost entirely white — 92 percent, compared with just 58 percent of Democrats. It is disproportionately Southern — 49 percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39 percent of Democrats.

It is a big tent all right--a big white tent in the South!

[How] is it that the South has come North in today’s GOP? The fact that Barack Obama is our first black president coincides with the United States’ transformation from a majority-white nation to a multiracial country no longer destined to remain the world’s hegemon. Augmented by an intractable recession rooted in a crisis of capitalism, this epochal shift has summoned the shades of racial resentment. To the extent that Republicans can depict government as the servant of this rising non-white America (precisely the purpose of Romney’s ads), the South’s antipathy toward government can find a receptive audience in other regions.
This transformation of the GOP has also been spurred by the Southernization of the economy. The U.S. economy’s dominant sector is no longer the unionized manufacturing of the Northeast and Midwest, whose leaders included such Republican moderates as George Romney, and whose white working-class employees were persuaded by their unions to back Democratic candidates. Instead, the economy is dominated by a mix of the low-wage, nonunion retail and service sectors, and by high finance, which has shown itself fiercely opposed to regulation and taxation, happy to reap and shield its profits abroad at the expense of U.S. workers, and willing to invest plenty in a party that does its bidding.
That party is meeting in Tampa this week. Cut through its self-justifying rhetoric and we’re left with a GOP whose existential credo is, “We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back.” The rest, as the sages say, is commentary.

As if to provide real and tangible evidence to all this, Andrew Sullivan draws attention to this utterance from Senator Lindsey Graham:

The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term

WTF!

Looks like the right wing extremists have now become the GOP. 

Why going south seems easier than going north

Quite a few months ago, I wrote that "south" has taken on a lot more meanings that the simple directional one. I got one response that I was playing with words.  I was convinced about what I had written, and that conviction is reinforced after reading this piece; here is an excerpt:

subjects were supplanting map-based metaphors for the actual experience of travel. "A lifetime of exposure to the metaphoric link between cardinal direction and vertical position," they write, "may cause people to associate northbound travel with uphill travel." 

Yes, that was exactly my point as well--that "south" and "north" have become metaphors for a number of different aspects of life.