The US South through a Colonization Lens - Shower thought about white liberals

[Passing Through Town]

Southern elites have regularly dominated the US government since the 1910s. Oddly enough, it was they who often lead the charge on "southern colonization".

How does that change anything that I said? Those people being from the South (many actually aren't, mind you) and supporting anti-Southern action isn't remotely shocking. This is typical of occupied nations. There is almost always a privileged elite that sell out their people.

The south was integrated and allowed to keep much of the core of it's culture.

Only temporarily. The focus in the early days of "reconstruction" was disenfranchising the Southern White voter by sending carpet baggers south to advocate on the behalf of blacks. Then it became about ruining Southern institutions by forcing them to integrate with the uneducated and unskilled black populace. You certainly can't make the argument that the South today is allowed to keep its culture, considering that many of our symbols are considered "hate symbols" by the federal government and our statues are permitted to be torn down by the black populations that have effectively usurped our sovereignty in many places.

Before 1861 it was dominated by an aristocracy and that has not changed.

This is the dumbest thing you said by far, and you should feel bad for saying it. The idea that a Southern aristocracy exists today is ludicrous. The whole of America is exploited by multinational corporations, not an aristocracy. Any Southerners - Hell, any Americans - that participate in that process are ultimately just traitors to the people who frankly ought to be done away with hypothetically in Minecraft with due process.

 

[Slap47]

How does that change anything that I said? Those people being from the South (many actually aren't, mind you) and supporting anti-Southern action isn't remotely shocking. This is typical of occupied nations. There is almost always a privileged elite that sell out their people.


Only temporarily. The focus in the early days of "reconstruction" was disenfranchising the Southern White voter by sending carpet baggers south to advocate on the behalf of blacks. Then it became about ruining Southern institutions by forcing them to integrate with the uneducated and unskilled black populace. You certainly can't make the argument that the South today is allowed to keep its culture, considering that many of our symbols are considered "hate symbols" by the federal government and our statues are permitted to be torn down by the black populations that have effectively usurped our sovereignty in many places.


This is the dumbest thing you said by far, and you should feel bad for saying it. The idea that a Southern aristocracy exists today is ludicrous. The whole of America is exploited by multinational corporations, not an aristocracy. Any Southerners - Hell, any Americans - that participate in that process are ultimately just traitors to the people who frankly ought to be done away with hypothetically in Minecraft with due process.

The core of Southern culture is its aristocracy. They dominate it's politics and business.

Everybody seems to think that the civil war was some kind of poor white proletarian uprising. No, it was very elitist and poor whites who could (West Virginia) resisted it.

 

[soy_king]

The core of Southern culture is its aristocracy. They dominate it's politics and business.

Everybody seems to think that the civil war was some kind of poor white proletarian uprising. No, it was very elitist and poor whites who could (West Virginia) resisted it.

Youre also foregtting Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama were pro union strongholds that had to have conscription forced on them.

In my one alternate history thought where the South won the Civil War, I always imagined the CSA becoming a weird banana republic held back by its neofeudal aristocracy. Even so, it's ironic how much of an outsized influence the South has had on US culture, even if you're going to exclude black contributions. You gave us Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, had an oversized role in developing rock (which i insist is a fundamentally white invention), NASCAR, and the symbol of US global imperialism, Coca Cola, is a southern invention.

The South is like Victorian Ireland in the American Empire: its an active participant and beneficiary but still treated as second class in status. In a way, it feels like this is subconscious retribution against the South for dominating over the North before the Civil War.

 

[Dyn]

Here you are implying that White Southerners don't have a right to our "Antebellum mindset"

Yes, you do not have the right to enslave other human beings. This is not a controversial take.

 

[Mukhrani]

I grey up in the rural northeast, and had the typical view of southerners which is inculcated in children in the schools up until college. I remember there were two main things which kind of blew open for me how retarded the whole northern conception of the south is. The first was a Toni Morrison interview where she talked about the differences between black and white relations in the north in the south, and said that white people in the north are much more icy and disconnected from black people, while in the south the relationship is both more fraught and more intimate, and that black and white southerners understand one another much better than white and black northerners do, who largely exist in parallel worlds. This struck me as true; when I went to the south the black people there were completely different than the ones in the north, and were much more comfortable socializing with and working with white people. The 'chip on the shoulder' thing that you get in the north is much more rare down there. And people in the north, even the most progressive, definitely don't want to live around black people, they just couch it in euphemisms - 'good schools' or 'a nice neighborhood' means an affluent white neighborhood with maybe a few tokens who act functionally white.

The second was an interview between George Wallace and William F. Buckley. George Wallace is often cast as this demon who just hates black people with every ounce of his soul in the north. Buckley, who is seen as this cerebral, enlightened, non-racist conservative, absolutely berates Wallace. But he doesn't berate him over racism or segregation, he berates him for his pension program. After the collapse of sharecropping in the south, there were two huge waves of migration to the north, mostly of working aged black people. The first wave found okay jobs in the northern cities, but by the time the second wave arrived there was little work left and those people lived in abject poverty. They left their older relatives behind in the south, and most of them were barely surviving themselves and couldn't send anything back home. I learned that George Wallace was elected in part by large swathes of this elderly black population because he created a pension program to basically pay for these people to be able to live and afford food. Buckley absolutely lambasted him for this, saying it was collectivist/socialist, and Wallace just sort of exasperatedly says 'I couldn't just let these people starve to death'. It really kind of rocked my basic assumptions, because the story that northern conservatives tell themselves is that the evil southerners wanted to torture black people for no reason, and William F. Buckley and the National Review reformed the conservative movement and purged all these evil racists. But here was the architect of that political realignment trying to convince one of those 'evil racists' to let a bunch of elderly black people starve to death. Absolutely wild stuff.

From then on I just did more reading, and the story that the north tells itself is really just completely self-flattering revisionism. They went to war with the south to unify the country first and foremost, and didn't give a shit about slaves. They made this abundantly clear after emancipation, where zero effort was made to help the slaves and literally over 25% of them died of privation in these horribly squalid camps that sprung up. We're told that the war was based on the north caring about slavery so much that they fought a crusade to free them - this also lets us expunge slavery from our national conscience by saying that the north 'fought to end it'. While the south clearly seceding in a large part over slavery, the idea that the primary motivating factor behind the north going to war was altruism towards black people is just insane.

Then during reconstruction you had the 19th century version of shitlibs going down and acting like an occupation government. They used the black vote to politically back their projects, then once they got bored and fucked off back to New England they let the black people catch all the shit, because the white southerners treated them as any occupied people treats those who collaborate with an occupying regime. This was completely predictable, the messiah-complex Yankees just didn't care. Reminds me of a T. S. Eliot quote: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

 

[Wormy]

Any Southerners - Hell, any Americans - that participate in that process are ultimately just traitors to the people who frankly ought to be done away with hypothetically in Minecraft with due process.

So you gonna come get me yourself, or are you waiting for your buddies in the White Hats to hang me at Gitmo, which is probably within the next couple of months?

 

[Slap47]

People seem to miss that reconstruction failed and those "black invaders" were successfully relegated to being a second class.

 

[ShapelyMutton]

People seem to miss that reconstruction failed and those "black invaders" were successfully relegated to being a second class.

"Reconstruction" in the U.S. has continued to fail for the past 150 years. If I'm being generous I'll say the past 50 years

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Youre also foregtting Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama were pro union strongholds that had to have conscription forced on them.

In my one alternate history thought where the South won the Civil War, I always imagined the CSA becoming a weird banana republic held back by its neofeudal aristocracy. Even so, it's ironic how much of an outsized influence the South has had on US culture, even if you're going to exclude black contributions. You gave us Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, had an oversized role in developing rock (which i insist is a fundamentally white invention), NASCAR, and the symbol of US global imperialism, Coca Cola, is a southern invention.

The South is like Victorian Ireland in the American Empire: its an active participant and beneficiary but still treated as second class in status. In a way, it feels like this is subconscious retribution against the South for dominating over the North before the Civil War.

Far more than just Coca-Cola, soda in general is.

Mountain Dew is from Knoxville, Pepsi from North Carolina, Dr. Pepper is from Texas. Between those three plus Coca-Cola from Atlanta (and a literal Confederate veteran) that's a huge chunk of soda, the only big flavor I can't think of as having a connection is orange soda since that's mostly Fanta which is a product of Nazi Germany. Viewed in that light, Southerners are sort of to soda what coffee is to Brazilians, say, or tea to Chinese. And there's a sensible reason for it, too, in the Old South lemonades and fruit juices and such were very common, large demand for cold beverages rather than hot beverages, so sweet cold beverages were dominant. Sweet tea - which in the South is more like a simple syrup that just hasn't been boiled/thickened - and mint juleps (which I've heard called a sort of Victorian Martini in prominence, and is itself simple syrup and bourbon) are both very sweet beverages. I don't know enough soda history to say this as anything other than conjecture, but since the British were playing with soda fountains long before the Americans, I think the habit of drinking very sweet cold beverages was what made the difference between soda as a DIY pharmaceutical drug and soda as a treat. (And it was, for Americans of the time, a treat in the same way ice cream was; I don't think anybody back then expected that people would be drinking soda every single day.)

This is also one reason I'll defend soda to the death against soda-haters, I consider it a very important cultural product.



More generally, the US South is I think the true cultural heartland of the United States because of it being diverse (I know, gay). It's foodways (which are the only foodways I really see as being particular unique in the US) are Indian food with African and European influences (not to mention America's native alcohol being bourbon), and its music is the result of African sensibilities interacting with European technology and organization. The religious pulse of America finds its truest expression in Southern Evangelicalism (whereas I feel other areas are beholden to un-American, European-based thinking, like Catholicism). It is also the closest thing left, outside of Utah and rural New England towns, to an ethnically American people largely descended from colonial stock, actual heirs to the Revolution.

I'm not sure where most literature and visual arts in the US came from, but in general the soul/spirit of the country has always flowed out of the South, the mechanical genius of it out of the Midwestern Amerikaner, and its dreams out of the West. I have not been able to find anything that comes out of New England (I know you didn't say anything about New England, but I can't help it) but academics and novelists. It's a place that exports nothing of real value and little but arrogance.

I grey up in the rural northeast, and had the typical view of southerners which is inculcated in children in the schools up until college. I remember there were two main things which kind of blew open for me how retarded the whole northern conception of the south is. The first was a Toni Morrison interview where she talked about the differences between black and white relations in the north in the south, and said that white people in the north are much more icy and disconnected from black people, while in the south the relationship is both more fraught and more intimate, and that black and white southerners understand one another much better than white and black northerners do, who largely exist in parallel worlds. This struck me as true; when I went to the south the black people there were completely different than the ones in the north, and were much more comfortable socializing with and working with white people. The 'chip on the shoulder' thing that you get in the north is much more rare down there. And people in the north, even the most progressive, definitely don't want to live around black people, they just couch it in euphemisms - 'good schools' or 'a nice neighborhood' means an affluent white neighborhood with maybe a few tokens who act functionally white.

The second was an interview between George Wallace and William F. Buckley. George Wallace is often cast as this demon who just hates black people with every ounce of his soul in the north. Buckley, who is seen as this cerebral, enlightened, non-racist conservative, absolutely berates Wallace. But he doesn't berate him over racism or segregation, he berates him for his pension program. After the collapse of sharecropping in the south, there were two huge waves of migration to the north, mostly of working aged black people. The first wave found okay jobs in the northern cities, but by the time the second wave arrived there was little work left and those people lived in abject poverty. They left their older relatives behind in the south, and most of them were barely surviving themselves and couldn't send anything back home. I learned that George Wallace was elected in part by large swathes of this elderly black population because he created a pension program to basically pay for these people to be able to live and afford food. Buckley absolutely lambasted him for this, saying it was collectivist/socialist, and Wallace just sort of exasperatedly says 'I couldn't just let these people starve to death'. It really kind of rocked my basic assumptions, because the story that northern conservatives tell themselves is that the evil southerners wanted to torture black people for no reason, and William F. Buckley and the National Review reformed the conservative movement and purged all these evil racists. But here was the architect of that political realignment trying to convince one of those 'evil racists' to let a bunch of elderly black people starve to death. Absolutely wild stuff.

From then on I just did more reading, and the story that the north tells itself is really just completely self-flattering revisionism. They went to war with the south to unify the country first and foremost, and didn't give a shit about slaves. They made this abundantly clear after emancipation, where zero effort was made to help the slaves and literally over 25% of them died of privation in these horribly squalid camps that sprung up. We're told that the war was based on the north caring about slavery so much that they fought a crusade to free them - this also lets us expunge slavery from our national conscience by saying that the north 'fought to end it'. While the south clearly seceding in a large part over slavery, the idea that the primary motivating factor behind the north going to war was altruism towards black people is just insane.

Then during reconstruction you had the 19th century version of shitlibs going down and acting like an occupation government. They used the black vote to politically back their projects, then once they got bored and fucked off back to New England they let the black people catch all the shit, because the white southerners treated them as any occupied people treats those who collaborate with an occupying regime. This was completely predictable, the messiah-complex Yankees just didn't care. Reminds me of a T. S. Eliot quote: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

It seems you've worked out a lot of the same thoughts I have, from a different side of it.

A lot of what I have to say I've probably already ranted about and/or you've heard, but being a forum, always potentially relevant to other readers.

The first two spoilers are shit I sperg about constantly, probably in this thread, so probably not of interest.

Spoiler: Observations about modern race relations

I myself came from a very White part of Appalachia, so initially living in the Deep South felt like living in a different country. Around here the Blacks and locals eat the same country foods at the same restaurants, and often (though not always, of course) worship in the same congregations with similar styles of service. An AME church and a Southern Baptist church will be de facto segregated, of course, but anything not historically one race will likely be very mixed. Mulattos have become very common anymore, to the point of not even being notable. The Blacks fish and hunt and ride ATVs like crackers. Whites often speak Midwestern Faggot Reporter English instead of Southern, and where I live specifically many people speak a harsher gnattering English like Appalachians, but it is not uncommon to hear Whites and Blacks who both speak soft Deep Southern speech that sounds Black. Plantation English is basically dead in the South, if you did hear it it'd be from a Black (ironically) in the vicinity of Plains, GA, but it's otherwise dead, so Black and White speech are pretty much the same. I do not see the carpetbaggers eating in these restaurants or going to those churches.

Whites and Blacks pay little attention to each other, casual racism and sometimes perhaps sincere racism are common among the Whites - they'll say words like nigger frequently - but they interact easily with Blacks. Niggerhate seems to be more of a habit than an ideology, and online I feel like I've seen it expressed more viciously by Northern Alt-Righters (one reason I dislike Northern Rightists appropriating Confederate imagery). The White Heritage Not Hate shit is super common and they swallow it hook line and sinker, a lot of the Blacks do too. If talked to long enough the Whites I've known will often admit that the Confederacy was probably not that good, but it seems like more of a giant performance than anything else, a middle finger to the rest of the country. I think that's where a lot of the Black support for it comes from too. People care little about actual history except as an identity to wrap themselves in. Compared to outsiders I've known, they'll often be the kinds who would quail at the gamer word and speak softly but you can perceive, if you pay attention, more genuine hatred, or at least discomfort and dislike, in them. I have believed for a long time, which you mentioned in your post, that Blacks in the North had a worse experience due to being culturally distinct.

White Southerners get along well with Blacks because they do not allow them to pull shit, outside of places like cities, where (no coincidence) they act more barbaric. Blacks respect raw force more than anything else.

Spoiler: Life on plantations

Historically, I think one of the biggest lies ever foisted on Americans - in general - was that supremacism is equivalent to hatred. Most people consider themselves superior (intellectually, at least) to their pets, but don't "hate" them. Southerners were more racist in that particular sense, thinking they were better. But they also lived with these people. In fact, the planters, the owners of slaves, were less "hateful" than the non-owners. A plantation child would be wet-nursed by a mammy and then effectively raised by the mammy, depending on the time period they may spend more or less time with their biological mother, but that mammy is basically their real mother in terms of who takes care of them. Until their teenage years they would play with slave children.

Now, by teenage years, the White child is going to start to be socially distanced - probably forcedly, too - but is still in the company of Blacks frequently. They have their personal servants. For White girls, a pickaninny girl is like a living doll/servant. Anybody who's seen bigger girls play with children younger than them would know exactly what I mean, big kid girls love little kids. For the White boys, their male servant isn't quite as much of a plaything but he is still sort of a playmate. That said, at this point the relationship starts to turn more toxic, as the incredibly spoiled upbringing, the social distance, makes it impossible for the White child/preteen to have a true friendship in the absence of any sort of equality. The companion would often be devoted to the boy/girl for life, but it's not a good relationship like we would think of it.

Going into puberty, White boys may or may not be interested in Black girls. I suspect the interest would have been much higher since they would have grown up around Black folks, probably Black folks being more common to them than White folks are. In mainstream treatment of this, you only ever hear them rant about rape, or really sanitized depictions of things like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. The truth would have been a lot more complicated, common sense says that there must have been times Black women would have been interested in their masters, and in a world where women use sex to advance themselves in the workplace, of course they would have done so in that setting too. But women would have also felt much more pressured to submit even if they didn't refuse. Either way, I would guess that a very high number of plantation-raised boys would have first kissed and, if not caring about fornicating, lost their virginities to slave girls. Like aristocrats with affairs in other cultures, everybody knew it went on and was fine with it as long as nobody publicly acknowledged it, or fucked somebody else's mistress.

Then, that White boy or girl would have become a White man or woman, probably been given their servant as their personal property as an adulthood or marriage gift, and continued the cycle, going through the rest of life surrounded by Blacks, Blacks who even sleep in little rooms adjacent to theirs or at the foot of their bed (sometimes on a special bed) so they can attend to them if they need at night.

How much would that person "hate" Black people?
Not in the slightest. The slaveowner would live their days always with a feeling of paranoia, a deep unhappiness dug down at the fakeness of the world they built and the suspicion that "their people" would slit their throats given the chance, but they built for themselves a fantasy world where they were kindly knights and ladies - gods, really - ruling over a grateful population that, like a pet owner thinks of their pets, needs them, would fall into chaos without them. The slaveowners knew in their hearts that what they did was evil, but they did it anyways, not because they "hated" these people so much that they imported them by millions against their will so they could live around them 24/7 and "take care of" them.

The poor Southern yeoman tended to hate Blacks (because he was jealous he didn't have one, and jealous that he had to fight for his subsistence), and the Northerner - the Free Soiler kind who just didn't want them anywhere around him - hated Blacks mindlessly because they were different.

Spoiler: The start of hatred

Now, Alexis de Tocqueville in particular said, of Antebellum America, that Southerners hated Blacks less, for pretty much the reasons I gave (Southerners were used to living around them, Northerners had a higher opinion of Blacks' abilities but less tolerance for them, NIMBY attitude). What changed, if anything?

Emancipation changed. The Blacks went from being the cash cows and playthings of the White elite to being a political threat, a people that now extorted them instead of being extorted by them, who served as a permanent humiliating reminder of their defeats and of the world they lost. They weren't good for anything anymore and they were like a hostile people plopped down, all of a sudden, in their midst. Of course they fucking hated them.

There's a comparison here to Brazil and Cuba, because while those places definitely have racism, they never had it the way the American South did. Those places had violent struggles for the end of slavery, but they didn't have the retarded binary view of race Anglos did or the conquest by outsiders imposing emancipation on them. So, in those places, race relations improved pretty easily. I suspect that if the US had managed gradual emancipation (and post cotton gin, that's pretty much impossible, but suppose they did), the Deep South would be a pardo nation like Brazil is.


Edit: I forgot to mention, MLK Jr said he ran into the toughest hate in Chicago, and George Wallace got his biggest applause in Polish Milwaukee. Civil Rights also basically ended when it shifted from political objectives in the South to social objectives in the North, Northerners suddenly stopped caring about sad little Black girls going to school and started shooting and rioting the Hell out of Blacks and integrationist politicians.

Spoiler: Suffering and emancipation

There's a book, "Sick from Freedom," I read about those camps you were talking about. It's kind of shitty and dry and academic, I didn't like it much, but yeah, the two common responses of Yankees to slaves were to either tell them to stay put and do what they'd been doing, or to drag them off - sometimes forcedly - and make them work for jackshit while dying of famine and plague in shantytowns.

I've read a lot of slave interviews, and one of the most common experiences slaves mention about emancipation was resentment at Yankees for stealing their food. Apparently most of these people truly were ignorant, a lot of them didn't know anything at all about world or events and their masters would lie to their faces telling them things like how the Yankees were going to take them away and sell them to Cuba. A lot of them also simply didn't want to be freed, because they genuinely didn't mind their lives (they'd be doing pretty much the same thing either way, especially if their master didn't whip/torture them much) or didn't know what they'd do with themselves or what freedom would even be like. But, consistently, Yankees would steal all the provisions. I don't blame them, that's really a rather fair exchange for freeing them, but many of the stories really linger resentfully on how they didn't have any hams to eat that year, and sometimes the Yankees would just brutalize them too, imagine pissed off resentful Irish conscripts stealing your meager belongings and raping your women because they don't want to be there. They don't put that in movies.

Then, the South gets hit with crop failures for a few years after that, so it's just fucked. Then they get the terrorism, and the Yankees are more worried about using them as political pawns than doing anything tangible to improve their lives, they do get schools but big whoop. Then the crackers take over again and start passing laws making it illegal to sit on your own front porch and they throw men in jail for these laws, and sell them off to big mining companies and lumbering companies that put them to work, like slaves, and unlike in the past where a slave was property and so had value - slaves had rather long lifespans and high fertilities - there's no reason to not just chew these people up as fast as possible, fed into the coal mines to die of accidents and overwork. You go from a world where planters actually pay Irish to do the dangerous jobs and take out life insurance policies on their slaves, because they don't want their precious negros getting hurt, and paying for expensive medicines and doctors for them, to using them recklessly. And the country just says that's fine because nobody cares. And if they go North, the Northerners race riot against them for stealing their jerbs, and harass them, and it's made confusing because they won't do it overtly, you don't know what the boundaries are.

The reason they were so healthy also had to do with them not being able to afford more than a small amount of alcohol under slavery. Bottle of liquor at Christmastime (gift from master) and whatever they could afford from their side hustle/stealing. (Fun fact: a lot of slaves blew every spare penny they earned on liquor instead of saving for freedom, which breaks my heart.) Compared to the White population (especially the master class) drinking insane amounts (like, drunk all day long), they had much longer lives. After emancipation, they get much easier access to liquor with no real cultural experience of handling it, so it turns out like a less extreme version of Indians with firewater.

They deserve to hate us.

 

[Certified_Autist]

@Ughubughughughughughghlug Tagging you since I can't reply directly to your comment above my reply for some reason

I have nothing really to add but I appreciate this comment because it actually explores the issue and doesn't just default to generic drivel about the north or south being evil. You clearly put some time and thought into it, and it shows.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

@Ughubughughughughughghlug Tagging you since I can't reply directly to your comment above my reply for some reason

I have nothing really to add but I appreciate this comment because it actually explores the issue and doesn't just default to generic drivel about the north or south being evil. You clearly put some time and thought into it, and it shows.

Thank you. There's several topics I fixate autistically on, but Antebellum society is the big one.

The reply problem is just a glitch, I've had it happen to.

 

[Mukhrani]

And the country just says that's fine because nobody cares. And if they go North, the Northerners race riot against them for stealing their jerbs, and harass them, and it's made confusing because they won't do it overtly, you don't know what the boundaries are.

The reason they were so healthy also had to do with them not being able to afford more than a small amount of alcohol under slavery. Bottle of liquor at Christmastime (gift from master) and whatever they could afford from their side hustle/stealing. (Fun fact: a lot of slaves blew every spare penny they earned on liquor instead of saving for freedom, which breaks my heart.) Compared to the White population (especially the master class) drinking insane amounts, they had much longer lives. After emancipation, they get much easier access to liquor with no real cultural experience of handling it, so it turns out like a less extreme version of Indians with firewater.

Yeah, Jean Toomer wrote a book called Cane that really touched on this transition and the Great Migration. It has a lot of complex themes, but focuses on the fact that in the south black people had somewhat deep roots, a sense of cultural connection to the land and their own history, and even vestigial cultural elements from Africa. Moving north, they were just completely bereft of this.

I also think that northern race relations had their own complexities. Northern cities at the time of the Great Migration had distinct neighborhoods, where different sorts of people lived together and shared common areas together, and built up a sort of complex cultural understanding to preserve these different little ecosystems. The Great Migration didn't cause terrible race issues at first - the first wave of migrants more or less found an economic niche and formed their own neighborhood among the others. It's when the next wave came in that the shit hit the fan; there just weren't enough good jobs to go around, and resentment jumped sky high.

I think this is also where the lost history of busing in northern cities comes in. There's a really good explanation of it here that explains the hidden elements. Schools were little loci of these neighborhoods, and people more or less existed side by side with little issue in their ethnic enclaves. The people who lived in each one shared a similar culture, had an understanding about how public spaces would be used and a unique sense of decorum that was enforced socially. Busing basically tore that whole model up, and created huge amounts of racial animus between all people that just didn't exist before. It's been retconned as a great moral triumph, but was really one of the most colossal administrative failures in history. It really didn't help black kids at all (and the studies done before implementing it showed that it wouldn't help them). It just caused intense racial hatred, race riots, white flight, and the complete collapse of the inner cities as the boundaries between local communities just completely dissolved and civic institutions withered on the vine. Some choice bits:

Spoiler: Racial Conflict after Busing

We think of South Boston High as being full of dark-hearted racists. We see the videos of students throwing rocks and bananas at buses. But before forced busing, that kind of racism was not evident:

South Bostonians often pointed to the fact that blacks before busing had come often into Southie without incident. Adrienne Weston, an independent, tough woman originally from the West Indies, was one of two black teachers at Southie High in 1973. As Phase 1 began, she feared for her life, but during 1973-74 she said “it was good to teach here. The students did their work and no one called me ‘nigger.’” Of the mobs outside the school, she commented, “Those people out there are crazy, because they don’t like this being shoved down their throats.” (Boston Against Busing, p.11

In Boston generally, before the forced busing, there was a voluntary program for integration that up to 600 black students participated in. A survey of parents reported:“their children have more white friends, that there is not a lot of prejudice or discrimination encountered at the new schools. With respect to this last distribution, only seven (or 10%) of the respondents felt that their children encountered a lot of prejudice, fifteen percent thought their children encountered some, while 70 percent thought their children encountered litttle or no prejudice or discrimination.”

Thus the entire liberal cure for racism, at least in Boston, was actually the cause of the most virulent racism. By forcing these groups together, and putting people in conflict over girls, basketball courts, spots on varsity, etc, the busing created friction and animosity.

Spoiler: The Causes of Racial Hatred

People – and most viciously men – fight over resources, turf, status, and women. In a fight, the larger more organized group trounces a disorganized group. Thus, people form into tribes for both protection and predation.

Peace occurs when tribes exist in a stable equilibrium. Peace exists when boundaries are clear, ownership of turf is clear, and when violating boundaries will result in swift and sure tit-for-tat, thus making conflict unprofitable.

War exists when there is conflict over turf and resources. Vitriol and tribal hatred exist as part of the war-making process. It is not hatred that causes war, it is disputed boundaries that cause conflict, and conflict causes hatred.

When the white, Irish Southie tribe thought of their school, they thought of it as more than just a place to learn reading and writing. It was a cornerstone of their tribal community:

"As woeful as many Boston schools may have been by middle-class standards, the fact is that their localist, working-class clientele cherished them, especially the neighborhood high schools. These old, often dilapidated but beloved buildings served less as educational institutions providing upward mobility and more as community socializing agents. For the working-class kids of Southie, Charlestown, or East Boston, high school days were often the best times of their lives, after which many moved on to unexciting, dreary jobs or became mothers and fathers soon after bringing their youth to a close well before middle-class youths who attended college. One Southie young woman told me that while growing up she was “just dying to go to Southie High,” and “thought it would be the greatest thing in the world to go to the senior prom.” The sports teams of these schools commanded deep affection and passionate loyalty. Young men grew into middle age wearing their high school letter sweaters or team jackets."

Now imagine growing up and looking forward to playing on the same football team as your elders in front a cheering hometown crowd. And then that dream is taken away from you by some unelected judge. At his order, another tribe invades, takes your spot on the football team and dates the girl you were wooing. You are not going to like that very much. You might want to join with your tribal brothers and brawl with this opposing tribe in the lunch room. And of course the other tribe is going to fight back.

And thus we have the myth and reality of racism and segregation.

The myth, that we learn in school, is that “racism” is some malady of the heart, caused by ignorance of the other, and that it can be overcome by mixing and integrating people together, and showing people that we really have more in common on the inside.

The reality, is that tribes coexist peacefully when they have clear boundaries and don’t interfere with each other’s lives. The competition for resources comes first, the demonization of the other comes second, as part of mobilizing to fight a war.

Spoiler: Blacks and Whites were BOTH Opposed to Busing

There was one particular episode that put the lie to the notion that racially unbalanced neighborhood schools were inherently worse. In the case of Lee and Marshall schools, the black community received beautiful, brand new schools – but integrationists at the state board wanted the lines redrawn so that the black students would go to further away, white schools.

"But the committee’s key concessions involved the redistricting of four elementary schools in Dorchester. Two of them, the Joseph Lee and John Marshall schools, were spanking new schools built with 25 percent state aid on the promise that they would open balanced, and thus had been built in mixed neighborhoods. But the racial composition of the area had changed to virtually all black during construction, and the gleaming new Lee School would open imbalanced unless district lines were redrawn.

At first the school committee gave white parents at the nearby Fifield and O’Hearn schools the option of having their children attend the Lee, but under intense pressure from the state board, a shaky three to two majority of the committee agreed to redraw district lines. In May, at a committee meeting to discuss traffic and safety, parents packed the meeting and expressed fears that busing would be required and spoke out against it.

In July Deputy Superintendent Herbert Hambleton warned that any redrawing of district lines would fail because white and black parents “have told the school committee in unmistakable language on numerous occasions that they want to send their children to the local school.”"

The white parents protested:

"That same night nearly two hundred white parents met in Dorchester and vowed not to send their kids out of the Fifield and O’Hearn schools into the Lee School. Their state legislator, Paul Murphy, Democratic whip in the House, offered to be their legal adviser, while Mrs. Hicks lashed the crowd into a frenzy by exclaiming that “our children are the innocent victims” and that parents should not send them to the “far-distant Lee school where we know the hazards that are presented to them … . Should we be forced to send our children into an area where we know what harm can come to them?— I say no, a thousand times no.” And the audience agreed with stomping, thunderous, visceral applause. (Boston Against Busing, p. 50)"

And the black parents were equally irate:

"But many black parents had also defied the reassignments because they were bitterly opposed to sending their children to the Fifield and O’Hearn, where they were not welcome. Besides, the Lee contained a modern gym, a pool, a theater, carpeted classrooms, and a curriculum described as “one of the finest in any elementary school.”

The black protesters lived across from the school in the run-down Franklin Field housing project, so close to the Lee that, as one black mother said, “Your mouth waters when you look at it.” Thus many black parents showed up at the Lee and gave false addresses. One black group demonstrated and threatened to “hold a class” in the lobby of the Lee until their demands were met, and some black parents joined Father Burke and white parents meeting at St. Matthews the night of September 9 to plan strategy. (Boston Against Busing p. 51)"

At a meeting attended by hundreds of angry parents, the school committee caved to pressure, reversed ways, and redrew the school catchments to align with racial boundaries.

Spoiler: Busing Doesn't Work, and this was Known Before Mass Implementation

Armor also reported that the METCO program did not improve long-term college achievement. More METCO students did start college (84 percent to 56 percent, in a small sample size). But the drop out rate was higher. Altogether, by sophomore year, the average METCO student was no more likely to be enrolled in full-time college than a student in the control group.

Armor was even more surprised to find that the METCO program made race relations worse:

"One of the central sociological hypotheses in the integration policy model is that integration should reduce racial stereotypes, increase tolerance, and generally improve race relations. Needless to say, we were quite surprised when our data failed to verify this axiom. Our surprise was increased substantially when we discovered that, in fact, the converse appears to be true. The data suggest that, under the circumstances obtaining in these studies, integration heightens racial identity and consciousness, enhances ideologies that promote racial segregation, and reduces opportunities for actual contact between the races."

And keep in mind, that race relations worsened even though this was a voluntary program. According to surveys, students and families at the white suburban schools were initially very favorable toward the program. This was not a busing program that was forced upon them.

Overall, David Armor concludes:

"The available evidence on busing, then, seems to lead to two clear policy conclusions. One is that massive mandatory busing for purposes of improving student achievement and interracial harmony is not effective and should not be adopted at this time. The other is that voluntary integration programs such as METCO, ABC, or Project Concern should be continued and positively encouraged by substantial federal and state grants. Such voluntary programs should be encouraged so that those parents and communities who believe in the symbolic and potential (but so far unconfirmed) long-run benefits of induced integration will have ample opportunity to send their children to integrated schools. Equally important, these voluntary programs will permit social scientists and others to improve and broaden our understanding of the longer-run and other consequences of induced school integration. With a more complete knowledge than we now possess of this complicated matter, we shall hopefully be in a better position to design effective public education policies that are known in advance to work to the benefit of all Americans, both black and white."

Thus, by 1972, the idea that integration was the fix for education had already been contradicted by the available evidence. If there was anything to the idea of integration, it would require more study to determine the circumstances where it might be a helpful policy.3

In a sane world, if you have a radical social policy idea, you try a small experiment first, and only enlarge it once you prove the experiment works.

In Boston, the experiment was tried and it did not work. Yet, two years later, a federal Judge would force the policy upon a half-million people.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

I grey up in the rural northeast, and had the typical view of southerners which is inculcated in children in the schools up until college. I remember there were two main things which kind of blew open for me how retarded the whole northern conception of the south is. The first was a Toni Morrison interview where she talked about the differences between black and white relations in the north in the south, and said that white people in the north are much more icy and disconnected from black people, while in the south the relationship is both more fraught and more intimate, and that black and white southerners understand one another much better than white and black northerners do, who largely exist in parallel worlds. This struck me as true; when I went to the south the black people there were completely different than the ones in the north, and were much more comfortable socializing with and working with white people. The 'chip on the shoulder' thing that you get in the north is much more rare down there. And people in the north, even the most progressive, definitely don't want to live around black people, they just couch it in euphemisms - 'good schools' or 'a nice neighborhood' means an affluent white neighborhood with maybe a few tokens who act functionally white.

The second was an interview between George Wallace and William F. Buckley. George Wallace is often cast as this demon who just hates black people with every ounce of his soul in the north. Buckley, who is seen as this cerebral, enlightened, non-racist conservative, absolutely berates Wallace. But he doesn't berate him over racism or segregation, he berates him for his pension program. After the collapse of sharecropping in the south, there were two huge waves of migration to the north, mostly of working aged black people. The first wave found okay jobs in the northern cities, but by the time the second wave arrived there was little work left and those people lived in abject poverty. They left their older relatives behind in the south, and most of them were barely surviving themselves and couldn't send anything back home. I learned that George Wallace was elected in part by large swathes of this elderly black population because he created a pension program to basically pay for these people to be able to live and afford food. Buckley absolutely lambasted him for this, saying it was collectivist/socialist, and Wallace just sort of exasperatedly says 'I couldn't just let these people starve to death'. It really kind of rocked my basic assumptions, because the story that northern conservatives tell themselves is that the evil southerners wanted to torture black people for no reason, and William F. Buckley and the National Review reformed the conservative movement and purged all these evil racists. But here was the architect of that political realignment trying to convince one of those 'evil racists' to let a bunch of elderly black people starve to death. Absolutely wild stuff.

From then on I just did more reading, and the story that the north tells itself is really just completely self-flattering revisionism. They went to war with the south to unify the country first and foremost, and didn't give a shit about slaves. They made this abundantly clear after emancipation, where zero effort was made to help the slaves and literally over 25% of them died of privation in these horribly squalid camps that sprung up. We're told that the war was based on the north caring about slavery so much that they fought a crusade to free them - this also lets us expunge slavery from our national conscience by saying that the north 'fought to end it'. While the south clearly seceding in a large part over slavery, the idea that the primary motivating factor behind the north going to war was altruism towards black people is just insane.

Then during reconstruction you had the 19th century version of shitlibs going down and acting like an occupation government. They used the black vote to politically back their projects, then once they got bored and fucked off back to New England they let the black people catch all the shit, because the white southerners treated them as any occupied people treats those who collaborate with an occupying regime. This was completely predictable, the messiah-complex Yankees just didn't care. Reminds me of a T. S. Eliot quote: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

I’m in a similar position of where I grew up in the west, was told a lot about why the south sucked, but as I got to know more Southerners I realized that my hate was unfounded.

What I like about Southerners compared to Northerners or Californians is their honesty. A Southerner is easier to negotiate with because his feelings are worn in his sleeves.

There's a comparison here to Brazil and Cuba, because while those places definitely have racism, they never had it the way the American South did. Those places had violent struggles for the end of slavery, but they didn't have the retarded binary view of race Anglos did or the conquest by outsiders imposing emancipation on them. So, in those places, race relations improved pretty easily. I suspect that if the US had managed gradual emancipation (and post cotton gin, that's pretty much impossible, but suppose they did), the Deep South would be a pardo nation like Brazil is.

I agree. Brazil is basically what the South would be like if it weren’t for the Civil War and Reconstruction.

 

[Colonel Gaddafi]

Arguably the reason the South is less ‘cultured’ than the North is because the North burned Southern culture to the ground and crippled the Southern people by Reconstruction.

Though I do find the idea of slow emancipation leading to a mixed people similar to Brazil unlikely. Anglos and Germanics in general have historically been pretty race conscious with strong in group preference, probably because of their religion. For the Spanish and Portuguese as long as your partner was Catholic it didn’t matter, the Anglos set themselves apart by having an ethnocentric church. This is why you still see groups of unmixed Anglos in Brazil, there will be some ‘bleed out’, but it’s largely not a part of their inherit nature.

 

[Wormy]

Thank you. There's several topics I fixate autistically on, but Antebellum society is the big one.

The reply problem is just a glitch, I've had it happen to.

So what is the takeaway; we should re-institute slavery since everything you posted said people were better enslaved?

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

So what is the takeaway; we should re-institute slavery since everything you posted said people were better enslaved?

I don't know how the fuck you got "were better enslaved" out of that. My huge post's main theses were:
1) Southerners have better race relations than Blacks nowadays
2) Slaveowners did not hate their slaves
3) Blacks suffered a lot after emancipation and often had very mixed or negative feelings about those events

In it I referred to it slavery as evil, slaves as playthings of the master class, and the relationship as extortion.

Blacks suffered more under slavery than they did after it, long term (after the initial wartime/postwar chaos was over). They were forced to put in extremely long hours (their workhours fell by something like a third after emancipation) under threat of torture/family separation for meager living standards, and also had no control over their family/social relationships or freedom to control their lives in general. It was a terrible existence.

I did say that a lot of Blacks were ambivalent about or preferred slavery, because their living standards weren't a ton lower than they would have had as free laborers, so if they had a reasonable master and didn't want anything out of life other than to farm where they were, then that wasn't a bad situation to be in. In a lot of ways it had more security since they were not responsible for finding work or earning enough to live (rations were provided, usually, but supplemented with food grown in their garden plots). But for the ones who did want other things out of life, or had bad masters, it was. That life was a gamble at all was a pain.

For the ones who were fed into the prison-industrial system, slavery was better (since slavery had incentives to maintain their health and normal family life), but those were only a portion of the Black population, most post-emancipation Blacks were sharecroppers. The alternative to that, and to Jim Crow in general, was treating them as equals, not reenslavement.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

Arguably the reason the South is less ‘cultured’ than the North is because the North burned Southern culture to the ground and crippled the Southern people by Reconstruction.

Though I do find the idea of slow emancipation leading to a mixed people similar to Brazil unlikely. Anglos and Germanics in general have historically been pretty race conscious with strong in group preference, probably because of their religion. For the Spanish and Portuguese as long as your partner was Catholic it didn’t matter, the Anglos set themselves apart by having an ethnocentric church. This is why you still see groups of unmixed Anglos in Brazil, there will be some ‘bleed out’, but it’s largely not a part of their inherit nature.

You see that in certain indoeuropean countries too. Persians tend to stick with other Persians and Armenians stick with other Armenians. The Caucus region doesn't mix much, even those in diaspora.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

LOL, I was reading my old wall of text, and Wormy's response to it, and noticed my very last sentence:
"They deserve to hate us."

@Mukhrani

I never did get around to answering your post - if it needed answering, posts don't always - but if I hadn't mentioned it before, my mother - Irish-German stock of the Ohio River Valley - was one of those that was going to be bussed, but her parents made sure she got put in a different school. It would have been HOURS of extra ride to go to a majority Black and much worse school.

In that area, they actually had some bigwig, I think the mayor, get shot over bussing by an outraged parent.

I do think that the very existence of the Confederate States of America was absolutely catastrophic, maybe fatally so, to the causes both of states' rights and Southern nationalism. It forever linked those concepts in the public memory to the War and hence to slavery, this chain weighing them down ever since.

This is the dumbest thing you said by far, and you should feel bad for saying it. The idea that a Southern aristocracy exists today is ludicrous.

Completely agree as far as an actually powerful agrarian elite (lol), but socially there does still exist some semblance of an old plantation aristocracy in the Lowcountry (coastal South Carolina and Georgia, which has always been more like the West Indies than anything in America, and which is centered on Charleston and Savannah) that thinks they're hot shit for being descended from some general a million years ago, even if the family fortune long disappeared. I was shocked when I found out its still a thing. I learned this from interacting with some.

Charleston is, always has been, and always will be this fucked up bizzaro-world compared to the rest of the country.

 

[Climaxing Sunset]

What happened to Southerners post 1865 reminds me of what happened to Germans post 1945.

Demonized, stereotyped, vilified as evil by the Jewish-Anglo establishment of the US.

When you hear the German language spoken, what does your programmed mind think? “Nazi!”

When you hear the southern dialect being spoken what does your programmed mind think?
“Racist!”

I’m not a ethnic Southerner by any means (I do reside in the general southern US region), but I actually empathize with many southerners who have to suffer from propaganda demonizing them. Same with Germans as well. Always demonized and brow beaten by Jewish supremacists or Anglo-Amerimutt Masons

 

[Slap47]

What happened to Southerners post 1865 reminds me of what happened to Germans post 1945.

Demonized, stereotyped, vilified as evil by the Jewish-Anglo establishment of the US.

When you hear the German language spoken, what does your programmed mind think? “Nazi!”

When you hear the southern dialect being spoken what does your programmed mind think?
“Racist!”

I’m not a ethnic Southerner by any means (I do reside in the general southern US region), but I actually empathize with many southerners who have to suffer from propaganda demonizing them. Same with Germans as well. Always demonized and brow beaten by Jewish supremacists or Anglo-Amerimutt Masons

But Southern culture was quickly rehabilitated. Reconstruction efforts were halted and the country united behind racism.