How Alabama taught its children to be racists

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What is there to even say, really?

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History written by the winners?

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I don’t know, it looks like that history was written by a bunch of losers.

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but were they carefully taught? because “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”…

TIL (from Wikipedia)
.“Rodgers and Hammerstein risked the entire South Pacific venture in light of legislative challenges to its decency or supposed Communist agenda. While the show was on a tour of the Southern United States, lawmakers in Georgia introduced a bill outlawing entertainment containing “an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow.”[2] One legislator said that “a song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life.”[2] Rodgers and Hammerstein defended their work strongly. James Michener, upon whose stories South Pacific was based, recalled, “The authors replied stubbornly that this number represented why they had wanted to do this play, and that even if it meant the failure of the production, it was going to stay in.”[2]”

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(about the author) “Christ, what an asshole”?

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Well that was 1957. Good thing we live in this post-racial wonderland.

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This book exemplifies a more general 20th century white supremacist Southern culture, a milieu that lingers on to this day. This book exemplifies how entrenched that culture is, especially because it’s a textbook, and because it was such a widely accepted textbook.

White USians in general distrust (at best) black people, but in the deep South, it’s more like a sort of benevolent, at times even paternal, disdain. Oh sure, they’ll have individual black friends and coworkers and such, but the general, usually unstated beliefs are still that “the North” has always exaggerated the horrors of slavery for its own agenda, and that black people are generally on the lowest rung because they’re just not as good at things as white people are.

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Hmm, where does President Obama fit into that paradigm?

Um, I see your point. :frowning:

How about “Alabama, 1957; Texas, 2010?”

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Did you miss the word “generally”?

Did someone say “General Lee?”

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"Even though they had lately been freed from slavery, even though they had no education, they knew who their friends were."

Christ, I just noticed that it’s the third edition, too.

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Good work.

“Alabama Goddam” would’ve worked too.

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Nope, just snarkin’.

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I see, got it. Yes, the existence of Obama and fam on the very top rung doesn’t seem to put much of a dent in the kind of white thinking that I was describing.

Cognitive dissonance is everywhere.

The bad guys are always simultaneously evil masterminds and genetically inferior…

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Also the Confederacy was bravely fighting against oppression and tyranny, whereas slaves who didn’t want to do what their masters commanded were “lazy, disobedient, and sometimes vicious.”

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I wonder if any schools in Alabama are teaching Kyle Baker’s “Nat Turner.” I’d teach it.

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