Sunday, July 08, 2012

Back to the past

Sounded a bit silly...

Southern values revived
How a brutal strain of conservative American aristocrats have come to rule America
Until I saw this:

NRA board member Nugent:  America might be better had South won the Civil War 


 My husband always says we lost the Civil War....


Update 7/8:  Marceelina found a link:  Racism Against White People by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

In that environment, the idea of race had to be really important--indeed the future of your country hinged on it. With that said, what I like about this article is it, again, points out the stupidity of using race as a broad classification to reveal abstract, and ill-defined, characteristics. Moreover, it shows that the idea of race in American life has never been a rock, but clay fashioned as the racists of every generation need it to be.

Here's a question for future study--Is there any relation between the mass casualties in the Civil War and this idea of ethnicity and "race" among white people? 

6 comments:

Marceelina said...

About those southern values, have you read this?

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/07/racism-against-white-people/259511/

ellroon said...

Thanks! Good article and now linked.

sage said...

Great article Elroon, Thanks. Passing it along to many.
illBinTch

ellroon said...

Hiya, sage!! Sending hugs!

Steve Bates said...

I have serious doubts about the degree to which intra-white racism influenced the mass infliction of fatalities late in the Civil War. But hey, I only know some of these people; don't let me influence your well-contrived theory...

(Full disclosure: I've had too much to drink tonight, for a variety of reasons. And I don't know a lot of people from the "deep" South (Mississippi, Alabama, etc.); they don't move to Texas for the most part. But generalizations based on present-day racism of the sort Nixon built his "Southern strategy" on are, IMHO, only distantly related to the Civil War. Openly expressed racism in public forums is relatively rare in today's South; the real problem is much deeper... and more broadly geographically distributed. Look at some of the material the Southern Poverty Law Center distributes for a notion of just how broadly distributed.)

ellroon said...

I thought this theme was interesting but definitely over-generalized... The Era of Stupid has its followers in every state, in every governmental office, college, closet, niche....

But it's always fun to point fingers and blame somebody else for our problems.