Even, as I read over that post, I keep trying to get into the head of the other side. It's a sick impulse in me. The picture from yesterday's post is cropped from a larger portrait of USCT soldiers. I've made it the wallpaper on my PC here at home.
Anyway, I was looking at the picture wondering what it must have been to be a white supremacists, to truly believe the mythology, and see these guys charging at you with guns. What was that like? Was it like watching a dog talk? Or was it all a self-serving lie? Did they never really believe blacks were inhuman, that they would not fight?
American history, to its credit, instance after instance of watching white supremacy defeated. At those moments, I wonder how it felt. To see Jack Johnson take out White Hope after White Hope, to watch King and bunch of students destroy segregation, to see Obama now...
Nothing in my experience, or my reading, says that black people ever fully bought into the notions of subhumanity. But for people who truly believe, what does it feel like? Or do they never believe at all? Any recovering white supremacists out there who wanna talk?
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I'm rewatching the final season of Deadwood. There's a character named Steve, an unrelenting racist. His fear that his racism is founded on immaterial things is palpable, even as he spouts some string of vile invectives. Well written show that I miss.
On of my favorite shows ever, although, ole Steve does get his come up its at the Livery. I saw Ian McShane interviewed recently, and he was asked about the prospect of a Deadwood movie to be made. He said no way, no how...needless to say, I was quite dissapointed
I think it's a great show, but should be left as is. I've actually come to grips with the fact that it ended with a whimper. What happened to HBO? Three years ago they had the three of the best dramas on television. Now? It has True Blood, and AMC (!?!) has Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
heh, You must have missed In Treatment and Eastbound and Down on HBO, but yeah, AMC has stepped it's game up.
Anyway, I doubt we'll find any former white-supremacists coming to share here, but I think there is a comparison to be made. Look at what Americans thought of the Middle-East pre 9/11, post 9/11, the beginning of the Iraq War, mid-way through the Iraq-War, and finally the Iranian election. I think there was a similar dehumanization, that's now being defeated by a non-violent, pro-democratic struggle against an autocracy. It's not exactly the same, of course, but I think it's worth considering.
I watched Eastbound and Down. I just wasn't into it. I sort of think that brand of comedy has worn out its welcome with me. I mean, I guess it's better that How I Met Your Mother, but it's not, in my opinion, anywhere near as good as The Office and 30 Rock (which are the only weekly half hour comedy shows I make a point of watching anymore).
I've never really given In Treatment a chance as the concept doesn't really interest me. I'm confident that it is well-acted, but from my (admittedly uninformed) point of view, it seems like a bit of a self-indulgent acting exercise. Maybe I should give it a chance, but that's what all my friends said about Dexter, too.
I can appreciate that for EB+D. The Office really fell off this year, but 2,3,4 were great. I'm one of 5 people in the world who hates 30 Rock. I guess we're not seeing eye to eye haha. /threadjack
Did they see Black soldiers fighting as being different from Black slaves rebelling? I mean, apart from the fact that the one tends to be more organized than the other.
My reading on the Saint Domingue/Haitian revolution, and it's effects throughout the slaveholding Western Hemisphere speaks to this. For decades after that, white people from Cuba to Charleston, and everywhere in between, were utterly terrified that another Haiti would happen where they were.
I think there's even a moment in that John Adams biopic that was on HBO last year where, in one of the Continental Congresses, John Adams mentions something about "the negroes rising up against us", or something to that effect. I can't remember teh exact line, but the point was that when they were being really real with themselves, they recognized and "respected" the human fight and desire for freedom inside their slaves.
Or at least the really smart ones like John Adams did.
If you want to find a difference, it might be in terms of organization. Black soldiers were part of a larger army that supplied them with smart uniforms and rifles. Like the discussion earlier this week about appearance, a well organized and uniformed regiment bearing down on you is going to have different implications from a slave uprising. While I'm sure the fear of rebellion was real, it could also be rationalized as an aberration. The soldiers were a potent symbol of a system for freeing slaves rather than slaves freeing themselves purely on their own initiative.
Damn TNC, thanks for the spit take that occured as I read to the end of this post!
Personally I've wondered the same myself. In my history, I've wondered what it was like to have face the end of a Juan Cortina raid in Texas, or to have been Custard, knowing he had just stepped on an ant hill at Little Bighorn. There is a healthy part of my ancestory that were called savages, and but for the remnants of them that remains in my blood, no longer exist.
I can't quite wrap my brain around imagining what Custer was thinking at Little Big Horn. Looking down at a camp full of more hostiles than you could count, and then deciding that a charge would be just the thing to cap off a simply capital campaign... Well, getting inside that particular noggin is beyond me.
Major Reno, on the other hand, I understand completely. "Good luck with that, sir. I'll be waiting for the infantry."
In re: recovering white supremacists ... I was never quite one as such. It's a point of view that doesn't stand up well to contact with reality. It requires -- I'd even go so far as to say it has always required -- both a desire and ability for self-deception. If you're honest with yourself about what you're seeing, both in yourself and in other people, you end up having to admit that it can't be right.
It's when people don't want to admit it's not right, and cling to it with a will, that things get ugly.
Custer to me has always been a prime example of the ignorance of supremacy. The fact that his mind, could convince his eyes that what he was seeing was not, in fact, what he was seeing. Baffling.
I think this is why the Cheyenne Punctured his ear drums after the battle. So he'd listen to them in the afterlife.
At the risk of falling into history lessons again...
I believe it wasn't Custer not realizing what he was looking at. It was more he was just over confident in his abilities.
The army and calvary at the time had a history of fighting the American Indians. They had tactics they knew worked with these battles.
The army had come out of a war where the winning strategy was attrition. They were willing to charge in, take a position, then hold it until reinforcements arrived to relieve pressure. That's how the Civil War was primarily fought.
The Native Americans primary strategies were one of ambush or surprise when the numbers supported them. When it became apparent that the numbers were wrong or that the battle may turn to one of attrition, they would general break off the engagement.
There is reason to believe that Custer being an aggressive commander by nature and the lessons learned from previous battles that 1) an aggressive attack was the proven strategy and 2) this was his last campaign and Custer wanted to go out with a bang, so to speak.
What he didn't know was the Sitting Bull had readied his troops for a show down fight.
A book called "A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the Last Great Battle of the American West" by James Donovan is a fascinating read on this subject.
Yeah, I’ve never really been sure what people mean by the whole sub-human thing. I mean, it obviously comes from the colonial, imperialist view that drew obviously false conclusions about the nature of peoples whose civilizations were far less technologically advanced. But I’ve never understood how far the belief really carried (or carries through) as a belief. It’s one thing to say that a population is naturally less intelligent and quite another to say that they essentially belong to a different class of being. My guess is that colonists genuinely believed the colonized (or slave) populations to be stupid, but that they didn’t view that as sufficient rationalization for widespread oppression and atrocities, so they created the sub-human myth to rationalize their own despicable behavior. I have a hard time accepting that it was ever a genuinely held belief. But that may be because I can’t imagine myself ever being able to believe it.
I gotta say that post yesterday was one of the best I have ever read of anybody bar none.
My guess is that colonists genuinely believed the colonized (or slave) populations to be stupid, but that they didn’t view that as sufficient rationalization for widespread oppression and atrocities, so they created the sub-human myth to rationalize their own despicable behavior.
I bet you heard, "It's for their own good." I think the echoes of that carry all the way to US craziness in Central/South America, and the Cold War fear-mongering.
I think there can be little doubt that it was used then, and that variations of the myth are used to this day.
I don't see any reason to doubt that white supremacists believed black people were unhuman. People believe all sorts of nutty things. Mancow thought waterboarding was no big deal, as just a recent example. I think with white supremacy there's self-interest and rationalization in there (Columbus seems to have thought the Indians were inhuman only after he began to systematically murder and torture them.) But just because the belief is convenient doesn't mean it's not sincerely held.
It's worth pointing out too that the shock of black soldiers was not just the sudden realization that they were able to fight effectively. Southern ideology was built on the notion that *slaves were happy being slaves.* Slavery was supposed to be good for blacks as well as whites. You see this over and over; white slaveholders would go on and on about how ungrateful freed slaves were for not staying home and staying loyal after emancipation. The shock of black soldiers, at least in part, was the realization that these people really did not approve of their predicament.
I don’t get the connection between waterboarding being no big deal and believing that Africans (or any technologically primitive people) were literally not human beings. I’d say that it’s not that difficult to understand the basis of the belief that Europeans were naturally far more intelligent than Africans, Pacific Islanders, or Native Americans. In the same way, it’s not difficult to understand the basis for the belief that having water poured on your face wouldn’t be that bad. Of course, I think all of us here recognize both of those beliefs as ill-informed (to say the least).
Still, there’s a huge difference between calling somebody sub-human because you think they’re stupid and calling them sub-human because you genuinely believe it. I have no doubt that some did allow themselves to believe it. My guess—and I may be wrong—is that most people did not. In the end, I don’t know what’s worse, enslaving a people you genuinely believe are sub-human or enslaving a people you pretend to believe are sub-human.
In the vein of this being "for their own good" I remember reading publications from White Supremacist groups around the fall before the election and their argument was that no nation led by a black person had ever succeeded whether in economics or social stability, as if there was nothing historical or personal that made Mugabe or Aristide unsuccessful leaders, just their blackness.
I take it they decide to ignore South Africa? The country is far from perfect (and I don't have much hope for Zuma being an effective leader), but it certainly improved under Nelson Mandela.
I dont remember if they did include South Africa, but, if you want any indication of how life is in South Africa just look at a recent poll that showed 1 in 4 men there admitted to having committed rape.
Hence why I qualified the leader. The government under Mbeki was nearly a joke, especially in terms of his handling of AIDS, the growth of crime and the increase in emigration of skilled workers. His complete lack of spine when it came to dealing with the crisis in Zimbabwe last year cemented his slide into irrelevance.
The Mandela government WAS the Mbeki government. Mandela was already a semi-retired figurehead during his presidency, and left the running of the country to Mbeki.
And yes crime started to rise during the Mandela administration.
I met an honest-to-god white supremacist my freshman year at college. She was from some backwater part of Michigan, had either been homeschooled or attended some tiny "christian" high school, I can't remember which, and was working on an alternative history novel where the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Apparently, in her mind, this was a utopic vision. I got the impression that this girl had not, in fact, interacted with many actual black people. She was not terribly well-adjusted, socially. She reminded me in a lot of ways of girls I've met who are heavy into fantasy novels and such, but her fantasies were more malignant (she once said she thought the Holocaust had not been "an ENTIRELY terrible idea"... I didn't get into it with her about what, exactly, she thought the redeeming features were). I get the impression she went out of her way to avoid confronting any reality that would disrupt her beliefs. Apparently this wasn't too hard for her, even now. I'm guessing reality was MUCH easier to avoid, for the bulk of the white population, back before integration. They didn't even have to think about it.
It's interesting that she was from Michigan, reminds me of the history of the Michigan Militia. Armed radicals who thought the government was conspiring to take away their weapons and the UN was watching us all from black helicopters, also totally out of touch with reality.
I'm no psychologist, but this strikes me as key. When your beliefs are literally part of your identity, confronting reality that contradicts is uncomfortable and frightening. This is like "seeing a dog talk," as TNC says. Then there is also the self-serving rationalization aspect, but they aren't mutually exclusive. I think the latter can become the former.
The Battle of New Market Heights, Virginia (Chaffin's Farm) became one of the most heroic engagements involving African-Americans. On September 29, 1864, the African-American division of the Eighteenth Corps, after being pinned down by Confederate artillery fire for about 30 minutes, charged the earthworks and rushed up the slopes of the heights. During the hour-long engagement the division suffered tremendous casualties. Of the sixteen African-Americans who were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Civil War, fourteen received the honor as a result of their actions at New Market Heights.
In January, 1864, General Patrick Cleburne and several other Confederate officers in the Army of the Tennessee proposed using slaves as soldiers since the Union was using black troops. Cleburne recommended offering slaves their freedom if they fought and survived. Confederate President Jefferson Davis refused to consider Cleburne's proposal and forbade further discussion of the idea. The concept, however, did not die. By the fall of 1864, the South was losing more and more ground, and some believed that only by arming the slaves could defeat be averted. On March 13, the Confederate Congress passed General Order 14, and President Davis signed the order into law. The order was issued March 23, 1865, but only a few African-American companies were raised, and the war ended before they could be used in battle.
In actual numbers, African American soldiers comprised 10% of the entire Union Army. losses among African-Americans were high, and from all reported casualties, approximately one-third of all African-Americans enrolled in the military lost their lives during the Civil War.
http://americancivilwar.com/pictures/Colored_Troops_Rifles.jpg
Was it like watching a dog talk? Or was it all a self-serving lie?
I think the answer was in between those two reactions.
I think we know from Reconstruction and, much later, the Southern Strategy that the response many whites have upon being forced to confront black humanity through defeat is melodramatic, apocalyptic self-pity. Once you no longer have the familiar weapons available to you to impose your ego-boosting world view, one option is to turtle into operatic woe. You can hear it today, of course. Before Obama even nominated Sotomayor you had that Politico headline "Supreme Court: White Males Need Not Apply." O, the humanity-- when will white males get a chance for a change?!
The feeling of powerlessness leads people into all kinds of new directions. One of those is to snatch the language of victimization from your victims and turn it up to 11. Another is to threaten a lack of support if you aren't allowed to maintain your privilege. Yet another is to protest a revision in the definition of "humanity" by trying to extend it even further ("If blacks are people, then by God so are fetuses"). It would be an enteraining spectacle if it weren't also so terrifying.
In the Confederacy, the Proclamation was universally condemned. The idea of blacks resisting the authority of whites had been a nightmare of Southerners for more than 200 years. The Emancipation Proclamation endorsed the concept of arming and training slaves stolen from Southern farms and sending them into the Confederacy to wage war against their masters.
The Southern reaction was not only vehement, but ferocious. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had warned the South that the Union intended "to incite servile insurrection and light the fires of incendiarism." The North, said Davis, would "debauch the inferior race by promising indulgence of the vilest passions," and he hinted at "atrocities from which death itself is a welcome escape."
Eleven days after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Davis told the Southern Congress that the document was "the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man." He said Union officers captured at the head of black troops would be turned over to state governments to be punished as "criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection"; the penalty for this crime would, of course, be execution. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard recommended the summary execution of Union officers of black units, and "let the execution be with the garrote."
Though the South never officially carried out its policy of punishment for officers of black troops, there is considerable evidence that captured black troops and their officers were sometimes "dealt with red-handed on the field or immediately thereafter." In a letter to his mother, a North Carolina soldier reported skirmishing with a black unit and that "several [were] taken prisoner & afterwards either bayoneted or burnt. The men were perfectly exasperated at the idea of negroes opposed to them & rushed at them like so many devils."
MJ,
We appreciate the history. We really do. But I'd ask that you stay on topic. We've had (and will have) plenty of threads on black soldiers and the Civil War. This really isn't one.
hey T, can't help you in your search for a reformed supremicist but when I worked for a while in a prison town I had had some profoundly racist people, both ex-cons and guards, in therapy who wrongly assumed that I shared their views/heritage and as you can imagine it gets pretty convoluted as they also tend not to believe in evolution so the racial slurs about apes/monkeys aren't literal but "sub-human" is more about the belief in them not having a soul (one hears echoes of this logic in the idea that atheists cannot be moral beings) and so I can only imagine that for twisted folks like this, and I'm sure that there was a really wide spectrum of beliefs in the Confederacy, they would not see gentlemen/soldiers with guns fighting for a worthy cause but their worst fears come to life and the end of civilization, Hell on earth if you will.
Yeah, I think I recall the white supremacist chick I knew in college saying something about the non-whites not having a soul thing. Very, very weird, and conveniently undisprovable.
Yes they don't have souls, thats why they started an entire genre of music called soul.
Checkmate! Ha ha ha ha
the idea is very old, some of my ancestors had to flee Portugal for Holland during the Inquisition in the face of similar racialized theology, for a moving but Hollywood-ized example of this kind of perverse world-view I would recommend the Bobby D. flick The Mission.
I'm not a recovering white supremacist, but I am a recovering believer in the Lost Cause. Of course, maybe recovering from the Lost Cause means that, on some level, I'm also recovering from white supremacy. (I won't say it does mean that. I don't know myself well enough to know, and claiming something I feel is untrue feels more like those Fundamentalist testimonies that try to exaggerate former sins than like a honest confession.) At the very least, I could not get outside my own head enough to see how inconsistent my love of Robert E. Lee and the boys in Gray was with everything else I claimed to hold dear. I could not get outside my head enough to know that that damn belt buckle and what else were doing to people.
I suppose I was cured by history; it's easy to make the claim that the Civil War was about state's rights and economics--and it was--but the state's rights and the economics were only important to the South in that they were necessary to protect an inhuman monstrosity. It's easy to disconnect from Jeff Davis talking about the truth of white supremacy and focus on the conservative idealism inherent in Lee's refusal to fight against "his country", but that's sentimental nonsense, a way to avoid reality.
I never got taught the Lost Cause, growing up in the South. My family had been staunch Republicans for generations, and in the South that means something that a lot of folks here probably don't understand. I mean, I grew up in an integrated church. My family didn't fight on any side during the war, they were members of a peace church back then.
But then we moved to the Midwest. The schools got whiter. And I stuck out. Suddenly, I was a social outcast for a whole new reason. It wasn't because of what my family meant, it was because of what my voice meant to my peers. My drawl. My vocabulary. I think I adopted the Lost Cause as some sort of bullheaded high school rebellion. When you're experiencing the pain of being different, there's this natural tendency to want to associate with some sort of romanticized martyr people. You can brush over worlds of inconsistency with a bit of teenage angst. And it took me years to recover from.
I don't even know how to talk about this. How do you defend yourself from charges that are, on some level, indefensible? I feel like I'm couching, like I'm trying to dodge with some sort of "sorry me" explanation. During all that time, though, I would never let myself descend to racism. I said I hated it. But, I realized that the longer that I held onto the Cause, the longer I associated with people who did, the longer I was letting myself become numb to hearing things I would never say--never teach the children I hope to have someday to say. If you know a man by the company he keeps, I was keeping some ugly company most days.
Here's the thing, though. I still love Gen. Lee. But, I am not that Faulkneresque boy anymore, dreaming of being there at Pickett's Charge, before the hopes of the Confederacy were dashed. Whatever my political philosophy may still be, once that war began, only one side should have won.
And that was the side that did.
This makes sense to me. I also grew up in the South. I was never into the Lost Cause - the teachings of my parents, the reading that I did as a child, and the impact of my interactions with actual black people, all more than countered some of the sentiment that I heard from others. And most of the people I met who were into the Lost Cause repulsed me.
But moving to New England at age 18, six years ago, gave me a new sort of defensiveness, a sort of protectiveness toward the region in which I grew up, that I had never had when I actually lived there. I love it up here, I love my friends and being part of the political majority, but the fact is, there's a lot of nasty anti-Southern prejudice. People I consider friends have said to me with no apparent shame that they assume that anyone with a Southern accent is uneducated and unintelligent. During last year's election campaign, people were saying semi-seriously that the South should be thrown out of the US or wiped off the map. People make hateful jokes about uneducated Southern rednecks, and a few have bizarre, caricatured visions of what it is actually like.
Because I'm condensing six years of noticing this into one paragraph, I'm making it sound worse than it is, but it's still enough to notice, and to be an irritant, and the effect was that I felt more acutely Southern. Had my social and political views been different or less defined, had I been younger and less mature, had I had less exposure to history, I could certainly have swung toward a bit of Lost Cause-ism myself.
Yep, JL, I have seen that same prejudice here in my hometown of Pittsburgh. I am not from the South, but my husband is, so I know a bit more about it than my work colleagues, for ex. I was appalled by the number of them that said after the 2004 election that we should just kick those red states out of the US, or that southerners were wingnut, religious maniacs.
i don;t agree with my husband's family on many issues, but they are far from stupid.
to me, one of the most confounding things about the persistence of white supremacy after the civil war is how the landed aristocracy of the south (the self-titled "Redeemers") kept pumping it up, despite the yawning class differences that remained among whites. During Reconstruction, freed people and the bulk of poor whites had more in common--economically, politically, socially--with each other than the aristocrats had with the rest of white people in the south.
Their "whiteness" was the only thing they had in common, in fact. How they (the slavers) kept that curdle of racial solidarity below the surface for the last 30 years of slavery as the wealth gap was increasing in the south had on bitch of a nasty legacy for the following century. That the former slavers saw the real potential for political coalitions between white yeomen and freedmen (after the 15th Amendment) under the Republican party scared the shit out of them, and evidence of this fear comes to light when those "redeemers" do get back in power, when the Klan specifically targets, among other people, political operatives in this regard, and when the Freedmen's Bureau reports on its problems throughout the south.
One example of a biracial political coalition that managed to last longer despite white supremacy was in Wilmington NC...it was NC's biggest city at the time and its government existed biracially under the Republican party, outside of the hands of aristocrat rule, for 30 years after the failure of reconstruction. Then, a coup violently overthrew it (with the implicit encouragement of the state government) around the turn of the century...for more:
http://www.newsobserver.com/1370/
What's all this got to do with white supremacy? I'm not sure, except that the seeds sewn of racial solidarity sewn in the south during slavery -- especially after Nat Turner -- among those who never owned slaves seemed to have a more detrimental impact for a longer time than even the slavers themselves could have hatefully imagined.
and speaking of lectures, Eric Foner at Columbia (who wrote the book-literally-on Reconstruction) has some short ones on the meaning of Reconstruction here:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/teachers/seminar_videos/foner.html
This post conjures a number of associations for me, the largest of which is the commentary about the Battle of the Little Big Horn in which it is clear that some of the cavalry killed themselves rather than falling into the hands of "the savages." Then there's the case of Gregorio Cortez, the stuff of legends, or at least corridos, in how he all by himself led the Texas Rangers on a chase from San Angelo to the Rio Grande, and Americo Paredies' study, With His Pistol in his Hand, of the early 20th century incident, ballad (led to film The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez with Edward Olmos), and background history in which Mexican Americans were demonized to the extreme in the press and academia. Racism of this sort is a kind of brainwashing. I do believe there is very little of this kind of thinking with regard to blacks before the Portuguese came to the Congo, but for pure divide and conquer, has there ever been anything handier than racist or ethnophobic bigotry to control the masses. We're talking Richard Nixon elsewhere--the man was elected by the "silent majority" who were subliminally convinced that he could bring an end to the lawlessness of our black and brown streets.
Kipling:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
... which suggests one unrepentant supremacist who was happy to document his thoughts.
Though, nb, his imperialism was at a step removed from the south's plantation white supremacy.
I imagine it must have been something similar to Germany after Stalingrad. Depending on how much you bought into the myth, the explanations either stopped working altogether, or started getting sillier. "Well of course they're winning, they're throwing millions of soldiers at us without regards to their own lives. No strategy at all, no grasp of tactics. Just mindlessly out-breeding and overwhelming us. Such animals, this is why we must defeat them!"
Insane rationalization follows insane rationalization, because you have to prove yourself right. If you're in deep enough, and you've committed enough atrocities in service of your cause, admitting you were wrong becomes ever more painful. The responsibility of confession becomes ever greater. Because no matter how much you believed you were acting rightly, not only were you acting wrongly, you were believing wrongly. Everything you did wasn't just for nothing, it was setting humanity backwards. That's a hard thing for anyone to take, whether he's a klansman or an abolitionist.
Sorry about the history, I tend to get carried away trying to provide context.
A book that may be more pertinent to this conversation,
Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath: No Quarter in the Civil War
by George S Burkhardt
From a review...
One of the more fascinating aspects of this book is Burkhardt's examination of the Southern mentality: why the use of black soldiers by the North and the audacity of blacks to become soldiers not only offended Southern honor and manhood but also terrified them; how they could condone such cold-blooded murder; and how they even criticized the overwhelmingly racist white Union soldiers for mistreating black soldiers.
This latter view--hypocritical as it may seem--stemmed from the Southern view that blacks were not people, but chattel, like pets; that a good black should be treated well, and rebellious blacks should be exterminated, much like a sick cow or a mad dog.
This view also explains why Southern soldiers, at first, would ruthlessly murder black wounded and captured soldiers, but would treat the white soldiers well. It was not until the Southern cause was visibly lost that Rebel rage bubbled over into a mad desire to exterminate all Federal troops, black or white.
I think that semantics matter here - I don't know whether they genuinely believed that black people were not human, but certainly it was a widespread believe that they were a lower, more primitive, more animalistic kind of human. I'm trying to remember back to my Afro-Am Intellectual History course I took years ago - the one book that I remember clearly on this subject is more than 20 years old - George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind. It talks extensively about this issue, from the science of the time to the use of the Bible to argue that blacks were descended from a different, inferior line than whites.
I think that beliefs like this can be both truly held and totally self-serving. Those aren't necessarily contradictions. As to whether white supremacists had moments of doubt - I'm sure some did. I guess the question is how many, how often, and what that doubt led to.
I think some of the recent analyses of German World War II psychology is pertinent -- at some point the ideology justifies atrocities that themselves become self-justifying.
I think that, these days, those who are involved in racial-superiority-type organizations or activities - such as the Aryan Nation, KKK, Five Percenters, ultra-right-wing settlement-in-the-middle-of-Gaza Israelis, Hamas, Tutsi-slaughtering Hutus, the "Arab" Sudanese militiamen who perpetrated the Darfur genocide, Al Qaeda (with respect to Jews), etc. etc. - are motivated primarily by rage, a reaction to feeling wronged or affronted or threatened by a whole race of Others, often with a heavy dose of reactionary thinking. It will almost always fall completely apart upon calm, rational reflection if done in the context of enough actual facts and experience around different types of people. These committed racists, in other words, are not really thinking much - they're feeling, they're running on fear and anger fueled by ignorance, which is of course the best deep-well high-octane fuel for that. That degree of tribal- or race-based hatred is not simply some alternative philosophy of life - it's a particular expression of anger reacting to fear. The people I've seen who have gone down the road of overt racism even a little bit have always been under the influence of fear fueled by ignorance.
I also think the point above, about having to rationalize what you've already done, and the degree to which you buy in further into some ideology you've already committed to even after you begin to have inklings that it's bankrupt and wrong and doomed, is a good one.
Even, as I read over that post, I keep trying to get into the head of the other side. It's a sick impulse in me.
Far from a sick impulse! It's exactly what makes you and your writings so compelling.
(I am afraid of your last paragraph in there -- of how far a people might truly buy into the constant barrage of bullshit. Beg pardon, having a bad day.)
As for those old-time supremacists, I'd be surprised if they didn't view the blacks like... I dunno, trained police dogs or something. How deeply would they even think about it?
Mandela reading Boer poetry in prison.
There's American History X on this very topic. I'm not entirely sure if racism is a complete denial of another person's humanity or a backhanded acknowledgement of it. Even Kipling had his moments:
They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,
On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.
The Colonel's son he rides the mare and Kamal's boy the dun,
And two have come back to Fort Bukloh where there went forth but one.
I think that we shouldn't underestimate the incredible power of self-deception, including a failure to logically engage a priori. No one who reads the words of Langston Hughes or who hears Barack Obama speak can think of blacks as being inherently inferior -- if they're being honest with themselves about what they're experiencing. That's been true for a very long time, with countless examples along the way in science, the arts and every other human endeavor.
Mentally, racism toward blacks requires either a blindness to black achievement, an extensive series of rationalizations to cover each individual "exception" to the rule of black inferiority, or a complete failure to connect the dots -- the unthinking, blinkered ignorance that allows for faith in the paradox that blacks are both inherently inferior to whites yet still a danger when allowed to compete with them in any way.
I grew up in an Irish-Catholic house in New Jersey. Not the South, I know, but my older relatives weren't big fans of black people, so to speak. In fact, they said they moved out of the Bronx because of all the African-Americans moving into their neighborhood (except my family called them other things, of course). That said, I never got the impression that my family members saw black people as less than human. They were either lazy clowns or scary savages. Human, but a less-than-credible form of human.
Also, I know we've been probing Southern white attitudes since the war and reconstruction, so I figured I'd thrown in an example of my experience with Northern white attitudes. Around the time of the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, I was at my soon-to-be stepfather's sister's house for some kind of family function, and eventually the conversation turned to the violence in L.A. It was mostly just harumphing and racial jokes, but then my stepfather's dad said something along the lines of: "You would think these coloreds would be a lot more grateful after we gave them their freedom in the Civil War." That puzzled me then, when I was about 11 or 12, and now I see that what he's said is basically what Southern racists say about how blacks should be grateful for being slaves, for being brought to America. Any thoughts?
Col. Mike.
Statements like that seem almost bound to happen whenever one person starts generalizing about an entire group of people without taking the time to put themselves in the other person's shoes. I don't know if anyone actually said it but there was probably an Englishman somewhere who said something like
"The Irish should be grateful after we gave them their independence in 1921."
It seems that people on the top seldom understand what it's like to be on the bottom, even when those people were once on the bottom themselves.
I think we need to also to keep in mind the white attitudes toward other races of people as well.
Immediately after the war it was the native Americans.
At the same time the north was congratulating itself on the freedom of the slaves, the US took the victorious Union army and pointed it at the "savages". The American Indian tribes of the west.
How they needed to be pushed onto reserves and made to learn how to live like us. We called it being "civilized". It's as if their way of life wasn't. If they didn't agree with this arrangement they should be "exterminated". I believe William T. Sherman backed this idea. The same Sherman who was a hero of the North.
There was some of these same ideas and attitudes with the Japanese in WWII. Remember the herding of Japanese-Americans into camps.
And now the people of Islam.
Is it just that whites consider themselves to be above any other race of people?
Where does that come from? From the Bible? That "we" were created in the image of God.
Then maybe whites connected that thought and associated it with most all paintings of Jesus showing him as a white man.
It it just centuries of associations? Man = God like = Jesus = white = superior?
It's not just the whites. It's the humans. Find any conquering power, anywhere, at any time. The group with the power always thinks it's the best, most enlightened, most civilized, most advanced place in the world. They think that because they have to. Soldiers are human. If a person doesn't believe, in some way, their cause is right, how could you ever get that person to kill the people necessary in order to conquer the new lands? You can force them to fight, or recruit only sadists, or rely on bribes to keep the army together, but that kind of army usually doesn't last very long.
The whites are just the bunch that happen to have the most power at the moment. It wasn't always that way - Islam and China had their heydays, too. Both of those civilizations gobbled up everything they could, remaking them in their own image, either for their god or for their culture. Rome thought it was the pinnacle of civilization, even before Christianity. (Constantine was relatively late in Roman history). So did Greece. So did Egypt. The Mongols conquered and reorganized without any particular reference to Christianity. So did the Iroquois and the Aztec and the Maya.
Tel - this seems to the point. See "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond for atopical reference...
We, humans, have lived in cocoons of selfishness and isularity for most of history...now, as Twitter shows, the PEOPLE are wired in together - how can we now, as a species, continue to foster the idea of de-humanity?
Not through Ignorance, but don't underestimate Hunger.
What is Progress?
HH - thanks for the Foner lecture!
But how does your explanation fit with this?
"...Southern soldiers, at first, would ruthlessly murder black wounded and captured soldiers, but would treat the white soldiers well. It was not until the Southern cause was visibly lost that Rebel rage bubbled over into a mad desire to exterminate all Federal troops, black or white."
They weren't destroying all the soldiers. Just the ones that didn't look like them.
That's more a function of the particular ideology of the South at the time. The ideas on which that independence was predicated were a mixture of states' rights and white supremacy. Since the North was making a more or less explicitly abolitionist argument, Southerners would have also had an easy scapegoat. Why were the Yanks invading? Well, when you really get down to it, "uppity" (from a slave-owner's perspective) slaves. If a slaveholder captures a column of Union troops, white Union troops would somehow fit into his idea of how the world ought to work. (And the slaveholder believes his ideas are superior to that of his captives, of course). Black Union troops wouldn't fit into that worldview. The fact that they're actively involved in the war would only further infuriate them. It would be like the Germans capturing a platoon of blond-haired British soldiers, along with one Jewish soldier; or the Hutus capturing a bunch of UN Peacekeepers that had a Tutsi among the blue helmets.
I'm not a recovering white supremacist, but I have a friend who is...
True story - during the election, a white man I work with - early to mid '60's, southerner, said (knowing that I was an active Obama supporter) that if Obama won, there would be a huge spike in violence, esp. in the south, esp. black on white crime. I stared at him with my mouth open (he is very conservative, but not, in my previous experience talking with him, generally stupid) and said "You are kidding, right? Do you know any black people?" to which he said "Um, no, not really". He was not kidding on either count.
Tribalism, and the ability to demonize the other - esp. the "other" you have no real personal experience or connection with, even in these media saturated times, trumps everything, apparently. I also thought his comment portrayed some kind of weird inverted projection that comes out in these stories of civil war era whites - that you know in your heart that injustices have been committed and that once Negroes have guns, as TNC says - there's gonna be hell to pay.
He has since admitted to me that he is very impressed with Obama, so evolution does happen, even in the south...
I know this is probably going to incite quite a response, but in answer to the question TNC posted, the southern troops were probably thinking that if they only killed the RIGHT leader of the black troops, the others would turn and run. They would never believe that an entire group of black troops would do this on their own without a few "strong" blacks pushing them forward.
[q]Anyway, I was looking at the picture wondering what it must have been to be a white supremacists, to truly believe the mythology, and see these guys charging at you with guns. What was that like? Was it like watching a dog talk? Or was it all a self-serving lie? Did they never really believe blacks were inhuman, that they would not fight?[/q]
It would be like seeing a wave of savages come to rape your loved ones to death in front of your eyes. Then, after that fun diversion, they'd laughingly castrate and disembowel you while playing with you the way a cat does with a cricket. Your eventual demise would be a mercy. You would do anything imaginable to butcher them first (in self-defense, clearly), or die trying.
When someone earnestly and repeatedly says that they don't think blacks (or Jews or gays or Commies or Hindus or Boomers or Poles or Republicans or aborigines or Muslims or backwoods folk or Evangelicals or "libruls" or kids these days or any such) are fundamentally Equals, with a capital E and some inherent dignity/soul/whatever, I'd encourage that they be taken at their word. Yes, it's based on ignorance and driven by fear. Yes, it's arrogantly self-serving (while ultimately self-destructive) and incapable of surviving prolonged contact with reality (thus requiring constant Orwellian effort to forbid the expression of contrary realities). It's the sin of willful blindness at its worst.
But it is [i]easily[/i], intuitively, and genuinely, held. And the consequences and ultimate conclusions of such a belief are obvious with an application of empathy and logic.
Any non-sociopath with any self-reflection is aware that they've got a mix of base impulses and "higher", restraining, civilizing impulses (reason, integrity, truthfulness, a sense of justice, etc.). Everyone is aware of their capacity to be horrible, monstrous people if they don't behave in the upright, decent fashion of their higher impulses.
So, if one truly believes that people in one the Lesser Categories are "like me, but less civilized/ refined/ disciplined/ moral/ intelligent/ godly/ just/ superfly" ... well, it's obvious then that most of those Lessers will act more often on the all the horrible urges one knows to reside within oneself, and will suffer more misery and inflict suffering on all around Them unless restrained by Their Betters. The only way to be safe from an endless, rising tsunami of barbaric Lessers is to either civilize Them (if they are Lesser due to circumstance of ignorance), subjugate Them (if they are Lesser due to inherent nature but able to be put to tasks suitable to Their abilities), or eradicate Them (if They are so inherently Lesser that They cannot possibly be disciplined in Their basest urges).
Insert Imperial-Burden mythology here, and prepare to breezily blame the Lessers for all of Their problems. They just can't help being over-sexualized, greedy, rapacious, hateful, cowardly, lying, horrible wastes of human skin (though one of my best friends is One of the Good Ones, and all of us are sinners) ... it's just the way They are, not being as disciplined as We. But maybe, just maybe, if They humbly and gratefully accept Our superior guidance and greater civilization (and Deity or Lack Thereof), then We will be able to redeem Them and eventually make the best of Them (like my friend) as good as We are (with Deity's Grace or Lack Thereof).
Until such a person lets their willful blindness die, or has reality shoved in their face so much that they just can't deny it any more, your proud band of steely-eyed warriors must forever be their squad of jackbooted thugs, their barbarian horde, their ravenous rape gang.
Interesting use of capital letters.
Just putting the "O" in Other :)