Get Whitey!
We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more
We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore
Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;
We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKJ_OOKQVrU
This anti-South/anti-battle flag bullshit is feeding a lot of undeserved Northern (white)self-righteousness. I grew up in Chicago and lived the consequences of decades of racial segregation and discrimination, along with the pure hate. I heard it from parents, friends and neighbors. Work associates and fellow parishioners. Politicians and clergy. It was inescapable. And much of it passed without comment or concern.
No pedestal or high horse: I never had many black friends and I still don’t. To be honest, I simply can’t relate. At least culturally. And that’s pretty important and not so easy to overcome.
Let’s put it this way. By and large, what I enjoy most about black culture ISN’T shared by most blacks I’ve met, or meet. Especially here, but even in Chicago. For example. The jazz you might see/hear featured on the HBO series, “Treme.” The old school stuff. Few blacks like it. I remember a very telling scene in the first season, where a Japanese jazz aficionado knew more about old school jazz history than the natives. And the natives took great offense.
Go to a typical blues club in Chicago. Even on the South Side. Check the black to white ratio. Besides the staff, mostly white. And not poor white folks either.
Ever hear of Harold Cruse? How about other black writers, authors or intellectuals who were critical of the civil rights movement — besides Malcolm? Oh, you didn’t know that Malcolm X was a critic of MLK? Nation of Islam, brothers and sisters, was and is black nationalist, not integrationist. And its leaders weren’t the only black critics of a movement they saw as being led by white communist Jews. Nor were they alone in their lack of appreciation of businesses in black neighborhoods being owned and operated by these same Jewish white men.
Malcolm X believed that integration was bad for black families. He wanted to see a vibrant black culture develop independently from white influence. He wanted blacks to help blacks, and for black leaders to stop asking the federal government for assistance. And this was just as true AFTER he made his pilgrimage to Mecca.
The results of integration speak for themselves. Not all bad, but certainly not all good. And I think this speaks volumes to the persistence and power of cultural determination, regardless of politics and law. Legislation and jurisprudence are perfect camouflage for hate, but they’re also the go-to models for white liberal panaceas. Morality certainly gets legislated, but so do prejudices. How about black parents DEMANDING their kids bused to attend white schools? Why not allot neighborhood black schools the same resources as white ones? How about an examination of black school budgets vs. white? I saw the disparity when I worked for the Chicago Public Schools. It was insidious. At first I thought it was coincidence, but then I recognized a pattern. Call it institutionalized racism. It fit. And it bred a sort of low-level corruption that only hurt the schools more. And I even wondered if that was purposeful.
Racism won’t ever end. Not when all the memories of the Civil War are extirpated from our history books. Nor when every Confederate monument is relegated to a museum. Not even when we who want to feel good about doing such things feel better about having done such things. Overcoming racial prejudice, however, might happen when blacks are accorded the respect they deserve. But that will require the projection of it being earned by blacks themselves.That is the unfortunate and true legacy of slavery, and the racism we’ve linked to it for centuries.
https://zinnedproject.org/materials/draft-riot-mystery/
“When recruiting for the army began in July 1863, a mob in New York wrecked the main recruiting station. Then, for three days, crowds of white workers marched through the city, destroying buildings, factories, streetcar lines, homes. The draft riots were complex — anti-black, anti-rich, anti-Republican. From an assault on draft headquarters, the rioters went on to attacks on wealthy homes, then to the murder of blacks. They marched through the streets, forcing factories to close, recruiting more members of the mob. They set the city’s colored orphan asylum on fire. They shot, burned, and hanged blacks they found in the streets. Many people were thrown into the rivers to drown. On the fourth day, Union troops returning from the Battle of Gettysburg came into the city and stopped the rioting. Perhaps four hundred people were killed. No exact figures have ever been given, but the number of lives lost was greater than in any other incident of domestic violence in American history.”
