south as it stands

[fanuzzir]

---

JesseBC wrote:
I seriously don't want diminish what you're saying here at all.

But I do want to point out that, in the North, hateful and bigoted talk happens all the time in ostensibly sympathetic company (meaning all-white company) -- it just happens in code.

South Chicago and the Sheridan neighborhoods (among many others throughout Northern cities) are referred to as "bad neighborhoods" -- which is encryption for "black neighborhoods." - jd

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---

Here here. I could write a book; in fact I did; on the resistance of northerners to the abolition of slavery. At stake for them in arguments for racial equality was the idea that the social segregation of northern cities would end (though poorer whites and blacks fraternized in notorious neighbhorhoods such as New York City's Five Points) and that their beloved caste system that affiliated whiteness with free labor and blackness with degrading coercive labor would end as well. The Draft Riots of the 1860s showed just how enthusiastic white New Yorkers were to join the Union cause. (Northerners were also more fanatical about maintaining same sex relationships than southeners were--for the latter, a white man keeping a black mistress and a "shadow" family was a only a slight moral smudge, more than made up for by the "aristocratic" prestige it brought the slaveholder).

Chicago, what a story there. I wrote an article along time ago called "Segregation City" for Scholastic publications, the kids magazine--can you believe what medecine I was trying to force down their poor little throats? You are absolutely right about the whole south west side--Richie Daley country. (I spent five years living in Chicago, so I'm down with the geography).

[fanuzzir]

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Choisya wrote:
The slave traders could easily identify a black and easily enough capture a black and transport them to America.


Fanuzzir will correct me if I am wrong but my understanding, from several of the programmes I have seen in the past week, is that it was often the blacks who did the capturing and the whites who did the transporting. Black people in Ghana, it has been reported, sold naughty children and other of their tribesmen they thought undesirable; they sold captives taken in battle to the European 'Slave castles' along the Gold Coast. African research by Dr Akosua Perbi has revealed that African traders 'supplied' as many as 15,000 slaves a year to the Europeans. The whites brought their ships and they were herded onto them by both black and white. We see Africa today as a poor nation and forget that many parts of it were once wealthy and powerful:-

http://www.internetpuppets.org/afrghana.html

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Geez, Choisya, the Anglo-Caribbean black left--what major intellectual trend of the twentieth century do you NOT have personal acquaintance with?

Yes, the African slave trade was maintained and managed by Africans, and then expanded overseas to stock the colonies of the Americas (after the Indians had been worked to death by Spaniards or died of European diseases). For those of you interested in this centuries old trade, you can read an eye opening account of slavery called "Africa and Africans in the Making of the New World," by John Thornton, which argues that the African slave trade was one way that African nations demontrated their equal standing with European nations. In fact, until the mid-19th century, African nations were powerful enough to keep Europeans off the coast, in coastal staging areas, or offshore islands, like Madeira. Ironically, it was England's success with abolishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade that set in motion an imperial African project whose explicit object was to abolish African slavery. If you are interested in reading a first hand account of an African slave who was first held by his fellow Africans before he became the slave of a British sea captain, please discover the delightful "Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano."

For many scholars, the operation of the African slave trade does violence to the dichotomy of white/master and black/slave that drives so much of our response to slavery. It has also brought back the old argument of whether Europeans intervened in the African slave market because they were racist or they were racist because they had learned how to dehumanize and pacify their African slaves once they got them. I come down on the latter camp, particulary because I know in what great esteem African nations were held in the European world for much of the modern era. I also know that the first slaves in North America were white indentured servants, and that the ruling class of Virginia did their best to create a social and cultural bond between the poorest whites and the rich once they started imported African slaves. That bond they called "whiteness." By the way, that's why I love Huck Finn--what else is Huck but a white runaway slave?

Message Edited by fanuzzir on 03-24-200711:29 PM

[fanuzzir]

Everyone, please run, don't walk to your Video store or Netflix home page and rent "CSA"--the Confederate States of America. It is a mock British BBC documentary of an America that still has slaveholding, that expanded southward into a "tropical empire," that has reality shows of white federal agents chasing down black suspects--wait, we have two of those things already! Of course, that's the fun of a "what if" documentary like this--many of the things it imagines if the South had won actually did happen!

[Choisya]

Geez, Choisya, the Anglo-Caribbean black left--what major intellectual trend of the twentieth century do you NOT have personal acquaintance with?


Not many, thanks to my grandparents and father My late husband's parents were friends of Dr Eric Williams, writer and philosopher, founder of the Trinidadian People's National Movement and later Prime Minister of Trinidad, whose books on slavery you probaby know.

Another book recommendation: Last week I watched a BBC drama-documentary based on 'Rough Crossings' by Simon Scharma about a little known episode of the American Revolutionary War when thousands of black slaves defected to join the British and were later given land in Nova Scotia, which proved barren and worthless. John Clarkson, brother of William Clarkson, the well known British abolitionist and friend of Wilberforce, was sent by a philanthropic organisation called the Sierra Leone Company to Nova Scotia to rescue these former slaves and with the help of a former slave named Thomas Peters he got together several thousand people, chartered 15 well-equipped ships and took them to Sierra Leone, where they were again promised land and freedom. (BTW Women of Freetown were the first to be given the vote when John Clarkson set up the colony on democratic lines in 1792.)

Here are some reviews of the book:-

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20051008/ai_n15671325

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&endeca=1&isbn=006053916X&itm=2

http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=36237


(Later today I am going on a march with Amnesty International to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the ending of the Slave Trade - are Americans having similar commemorations?)

Message Edited by Choisya on 03-25-200704:13 AM

[jd]

C - you are sooo funny, I think all our big cities are booked this weekend and were not available for the march celebrating the end of slavery. That would be much like England celebrating the independence of Ireland. America is only progressive on the surface and the truth is we actually are very provencial in our thinking and customs. Really - jd

[Choisya]

I am not sure I understand you here jd as I was being deadly serious Are Americans not pleased that slavery ended? Or is that the date for the ending of slavery is different? (Quite a lot of Brits would celebrate the independence of Ireland as they are tired of the endless conflicts. The problem has always been that the conflict would then come to the streets of Britain in earnest, this time from the Protestant side.)

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jd wrote:
C - you are sooo funny, I think all our big cities are booked this weekend and were not available for the march celebrating the end of slavery. That would be much like England celebrating the independence of Ireland. America is only progressive on the surface and the truth is we actually are very provencial in our thinking and customs. Really - jd

---

[jd]

---

Choisya wrote:
I am not sure I understand you here jd as I was being deadly serious Are Americans not pleased that slavery ended? Or is that the date for the ending of slavery is different? (Quite a lot of Brits would celebrate the independence of Ireland as they are tired of the endless conflicts. The problem has always been that the conflict would then come to the streets of Britain in earnest, this time from the Protestant side.)

---

jd wrote:
C - you are sooo funny, I think all our big cities are booked this weekend and were not available for the march celebrating the end of slavery. That would be much like England celebrating the independence of Ireland. America is only progressive on the surface and the truth is we actually are very provencial in our thinking and customs. Really - jd

---

---

C- Sorry, I was not clear. I do not feel Americans are celebrating the end of slavery as much as England is, oddly enough. Probably if you asked 10 Americans what they thought of the end of slavery you would get 10 different answers. Our conflict did not go away just because we got rid of slavery. I really do not find the subject light hearted either, but I was just surprised that there is a such a march for such a cause and that I actually can converse with someone who participates in it. Was it rowdy??? or very proper??? thanx for the leash jerk, I needed it, -jd C - have you read up on Juneteenth???? in America??? - jd

[Choisya]

Thanks JD. The march was not at all rowdy - we are Brits after all Just a couple of hundred people but there were similar marches all over the UK, mostly organised by the churches, although I marched with the Amnesty International group. All of our bishops were taking part in their various diocese.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/humber/6406933.stm

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh.html

I have just looked up Juneteenth so now know what it is. Thanks.

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jd wrote:

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Choisya wrote:
I am not sure I understand you here jd as I was being deadly serious Are Americans not pleased that slavery ended? Or is that the date for the ending of slavery is different? (Quite a lot of Brits would celebrate the independence of Ireland as they are tired of the endless conflicts. The problem has always been that the conflict would then come to the streets of Britain in earnest, this time from the Protestant side.)

---

jd wrote:
C - you are sooo funny, I think all our big cities are booked this weekend and were not available for the march celebrating the end of slavery. That would be much like England celebrating the independence of Ireland. America is only progressive on the surface and the truth is we actually are very provencial in our thinking and customs. Really - jd

---

---

C- Sorry, I was not clear. I do not feel Americans are celebrating the end of slavery as much as England is, oddly enough. Probably if you asked 10 Americans what they thought of the end of slavery you would get 10 different answers. Our conflict did not go away just because we got rid of slavery. I really do not find the subject light hearted either, but I was just surprised that there is a such a march for such a cause and that I actually can converse with someone who participates in it. Was it rowdy??? or very proper??? thanx for the leash jerk, I needed it, -jd C - have you read up on Juneteenth???? in America??? - jd

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[JesseBC]

Let's read your book! Tell BNU we want your book on the agenda one of these months!

To piggyback your point, blacks were useful as scabs in the North too. They were lured to Milwaukee, for example, when the brewers went on strike. I don't think race relations in Milwaukee has ever recovered from that and, as far as I know, the industry has never been able to unionize effectively since then either.

I used to live in the Sheridan neighborhood in Chicago, which is why I used it as an example. I was cautioned repeatedly that it was a "bad neighborhood." Yet the only place I was ever mugged in Chicago? The Davis el station in that "nice" (read: "white") neighborhood, Evanston!

I never heard of any muggings in Sheridan (perhaps in part because none of us was carrying around anything worth taking). Besides, Sheridan was far enough north that no one peed in your yard after a Cubs game (one feature of a "bad neighborhood" if ever there was one!) Addison might be white and gentrified, but it reeked of urine for the entire baseball season.

Not to drag this too far off-topic, but I'm nearing the final chapters of The Jungle and Sinclair's racial insinuations are making me uncomfortable. I'm not asking to talk about The Jungle on these boards, but it's been an interesting experience to read Huck Finn and the heels of The Jungle. It seems like Sinclair (despite his northerliness and his lefty politics) is much less healthy about race than Twain despite the latter's liberal use of racial slurs and stereotypes.

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fanuzzir wrote:

---

JesseBC wrote:
I seriously don't want diminish what you're saying here at all.

But I do want to point out that, in the North, hateful and bigoted talk happens all the time in ostensibly sympathetic company (meaning all-white company) -- it just happens in code.

South Chicago and the Sheridan neighborhoods (among many others throughout Northern cities) are referred to as "bad neighborhoods" -- which is encryption for "black neighborhoods." - jd

---

---

Here here. I could write a book; in fact I did; on the resistance of northerners to the abolition of slavery. At stake for them in arguments for racial equality was the idea that the social segregation of northern cities would end (though poorer whites and blacks fraternized in notorious neighbhorhoods such as New York City's Five Points) and that their beloved caste system that affiliated whiteness with free labor and blackness with degrading coercive labor would end as well. The Draft Riots of the 1860s showed just how enthusiastic white New Yorkers were to join the Union cause. (Northerners were also more fanatical about maintaining same sex relationships than southeners were--for the latter, a white man keeping a black mistress and a "shadow" family was a only a slight moral smudge, more than made up for by the "aristocratic" prestige it brought the slaveholder).

Chicago, what a story there. I wrote an article along time ago called "Segregation City" for Scholastic publications, the kids magazine--can you believe what medecine I was trying to force down their poor little throats? You are absolutely right about the whole south west side--Richie Daley country. (I spent five years living in Chicago, so I'm down with the geography).

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[fanuzzir]

Jesse, we'll have to meet up in the Community forum to discuss this further. Ever waste your money at the Heartland Cafe, catch second run movies at Theater 400, or hear blues at Biddy Mulligan's? You might have seen me there.

As for the point about racial segregation, it explains why a nostalgic book about the south had appeal for the north even after the Civil War.

Message Edited by fanuzzir on 03-26-200711:00 PM

[fanuzzir]

Choisya, nothing is sadder than that the spectacle of a march celebrating the abolition of slavery eliciting disbelief. No, there are no such public observations planned, although there are plenty of "teach-ins," events, and smaller commemorations. I'm afraid JD is right--that the abolition of slavery merits no celebration because there is no consensus on how or why it was accomplished; the cynicism about motives here runs to deep that many people have taken Lincoln to task for using the slave cause to advance the war cause. The same holds true for any group today that would celebrate abolition--it would be accused of having an "agenda," or of stirring things up at the expense of national harmony. In that reaction is a deep truth about America--there is not only an aversion to politics in any meaningful sense but an even deeper aversion to history, to remembering, to restaging; there is no "coming to terms" with our holocaust. This is what makes counter-celebrations like Juneteenth and August 14th (West Indian Emancipation day, celebrated by African-Americans as THEIR day of independence since the 1830s) so inventive and essential--they act as rituals of memory by going against the grain of an official, opaque history thas little meaning to either whites or blacks.

I should have known that you would know Eric Williams. Did Stuart Hall speak at your wedding?

[fanuzzir]

Let me add a point to my preceeding post that I will hope will spur further discussion. If the post-war era featured many attempts to broker "reconciliation" between the victorious North and the defeated South, and if Twain's novel humorously recreated a lost southern lifestyle for northern readers, then did Samuel Clemens actively try to suppress the memory of the recent war?

[JesseBC]

I don't really agree, JD. I think if you asked ostensibly "average" Americans about slavery, they would express at least distaste, if not horror, at the idea of race-based chattel slavery, but that they would also see it as something so far in the past that it has little to no bearing on modern American race relations. And I think you'd get that from both blacks and whites.

Where I think you'd see some racial differences is that I expect whites would say that racism (which they define as individual negative perceptions of ALL people of a given race) is rare in America and that if blacks are really at any disadvantage, it's due to an individual lack of responsibility and not to any systemic prejudice or exclusion.

I think blacks would acknowledge some disadvantage and point to primarily police brutality and disparities in rates of incarceration (the "black pathology due to poverty, family breakdown, and despair" theory seems to be the domain of mostly white liberals and Bill Cosby, to whom middle-class blacks are largely invisible).

This is an overgeneralization, of course, but we're talking in overgeneralizations to begin with. Naturally, if you posed these questions to lots of different Americans, you'd get lots of different answers. But I think the answers would tend to cluster in the way I've outlined.

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jd wrote:

---

Choisya wrote:
I am not sure I understand you here jd as I was being deadly serious Are Americans not pleased that slavery ended? Or is that the date for the ending of slavery is different? (Quite a lot of Brits would celebrate the independence of Ireland as they are tired of the endless conflicts. The problem has always been that the conflict would then come to the streets of Britain in earnest, this time from the Protestant side.)

---

jd wrote:
C - you are sooo funny, I think all our big cities are booked this weekend and were not available for the march celebrating the end of slavery. That would be much like England celebrating the independence of Ireland. America is only progressive on the surface and the truth is we actually are very provencial in our thinking and customs. Really - jd

---

---

C- Sorry, I was not clear. I do not feel Americans are celebrating the end of slavery as much as England is, oddly enough. Probably if you asked 10 Americans what they thought of the end of slavery you would get 10 different answers. Our conflict did not go away just because we got rid of slavery. I really do not find the subject light hearted either, but I was just surprised that there is a such a march for such a cause and that I actually can converse with someone who participates in it. Was it rowdy??? or very proper??? thanx for the leash jerk, I needed it, -jd C - have you read up on Juneteenth???? in America??? - jd

---

[Choisya]

LOL. Unfortunately, I never met Eric Williams Fanuzzir - just the hubby and family did as they were prominent members of the PNM. Williams died a couple of years after I re-married in Trinidad, otherwise I might have been introduced at some PNM gathering or other (hopefully not one where the roof collapsed on the guests, as happened at my hubby's aunt's house). I met Stuart Hall quite a few times though, when I was a researcher for Neil Kinnock, Leader of the Labour Party and now Lord Kinnock (Neil was a great fan of his) and on CND marches.

I am sorry to hear of the US attitude towards abolition etc. I wonder if the differences in national attitudes is anything to do with the US having had slavery on its own soil whereas the UK didn't and confined it to their colonies? It is mainly the Afro-Caribbean population here who are promoting the commemorations, together with the churches and, of course, the BBC who are featuring TV and radio programmes every day throughout March.

The US does have a national day for Martin Luther King though, so that is a positive acknowledgement of US Afro-American involvement in their history.

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fanuzzir wrote:
Choisya, nothing is sadder than that the spectacle of a march celebrating the abolition of slavery eliciting disbelief. No, there are no such public observations planned, although there are plenty of "teach-ins," events, and smaller commemorations. I'm afraid JD is right--that the abolition of slavery merits no celebration because there is no consensus on how or why it was accomplished; the cynicism about motives here runs to deep that many people have taken Lincoln to task for using the slave cause to advance the war cause. The same holds true for any group today that would celebrate abolition--it would be accused of having an "agenda," or of stirring things up at the expense of national harmony. In that reaction is a deep truth about America--there is not only an aversion to politics in any meaningful sense but an even deeper aversion to history, to remembering, to restaging; there is no "coming to terms" with our holocaust. This is what makes counter-celebrations like Juneteenth and August 14th (West Indian Emancipation day, celebrated by African-Americans as THEIR day of independence since the 1830s) so inventive and essential--they act as rituals of memory by going against the grain of an official, opaque history thas little meaning to either whites or blacks.

I should have known that you would know Eric Williams. Did Stuart Hall speak at your wedding?

---

[Choisya]

JesseBC wrote:

I don't really agree, JD. I think if you asked ostensibly "average" Americans about slavery, they would express at least distaste, if not horror, at the idea of race-based chattel slavery, but that they would also see it as something so far in the past that it has little to no bearing on modern American race relations. And I think you'd get that from both blacks and whites.


'So far in the past'?? By UK standards it is recent and when you consider that it is in the family histories and memories of black folks' great-grandparents, it is really very recent. And applying Jung's theory of the collective-unconscious to it, it is probably still part of all our psyches and possibly accounts for a lot of what is wrong with 'race relations' throughout the Western world.

http://www.answers.com/topic/collective-unconscious

IMO we forget such things at our peril. Just as Jews, quite rightly, try to keep the Holocaust in the forefront of our memories lest it happen again, so we should try to keep the horrors of the slave trade alive in our minds. And part of the commemorations here have been to remind people that there is still a flourishing slave trade in the world today that perhaps needs a modern Wilberforce.

http://www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/slavetrade.htm

[ziki]

Hmmm Chicago; I stayed in Oak Park some time and then I lived in Lincoln Park for a while so that was pretty safe neighbourhood. But on the el from oak p. to town you pass through some hirises and I was always told not to look at anybody who boarded there and once going to the south side the car was locked when passing the boundary of a certain street. I mean the division was so obvious in the thinking of the people there and the message transmited by the whites was so clear.

ziki

[jd]

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JesseBC wrote:
I don't really agree, JD. I think if you asked ostensibly "average" Americans about slavery, they would express at least distaste, if not horror, at the idea of race-based chattel slavery, but that they would also see it as something so far in the past that it has little to no bearing on modern American race relations. And I think you'd get that from both blacks and whites.

Where I think you'd see some racial differences is that I expect whites would say that racism (which they define as individual negative perceptions of ALL people of a given race) is rare in America and that if blacks are really at any disadvantage, it's due to an individual lack of responsibility and not to any systemic prejudice or exclusion.

I think blacks would acknowledge some disadvantage and point to primarily police brutality and disparities in rates of incarceration (the "black pathology due to poverty, family breakdown, and despair" theory seems to be the domain of mostly white liberals and Bill Cosby, to whom middle-class blacks are largely invisible).

This is an overgeneralization, of course, but we're talking in overgeneralizations to begin with. Naturally, if you posed these questions to lots of different Americans, you'd get lots of different answers. But I think the answers would tend to cluster in the way I've outlined.

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jd wrote:

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Choisya wrote:
I am not sure I understand you here jd as I was being deadly serious Are Americans not pleased that slavery ended? Or is that the date for the ending of slavery is different? (Quite a lot of Brits would celebrate the independence of Ireland as they are tired of the endless conflicts. The problem has always been that the conflict would then come to the streets of Britain in earnest, this time from the Protestant side.)

---

jd wrote:
C - you are sooo funny, I think all our big cities are booked this weekend and were not available for the march celebrating the end of slavery. That would be much like England celebrating the independence of Ireland. America is only progressive on the surface and the truth is we actually are very provencial in our thinking and customs. Really - jd

---

---

C- Sorry, I was not clear. I do not feel Americans are celebrating the end of slavery as much as England is, oddly enough. Probably if you asked 10 Americans what they thought of the end of slavery you would get 10 different answers. Our conflict did not go away just because we got rid of slavery. I really do not find the subject light hearted either, but I was just surprised that there is a such a march for such a cause and that I actually can converse with someone who participates in it. Was it rowdy??? or very proper??? thanx for the leash jerk, I needed it, -jd C - have you read up on Juneteenth???? in America??? - jd

---

---

JBC - While the event of the end of slavery is not one specific date, as testified by Juneteenth, and it was a long time ago, my personal experience as expressed in numerous places throughout this particular book club is that the south is not "over" slavery and the civil war and the rest of us are fair to middlin' on the fence as to racism and its cause and the slow recovery of the south and blacks to gain a lasting foothold of economic standing. I know you believe the south has progressed but really, where did you see it in the south???? One of the reasons that I joined this club was to discuss such issues and would love to hear what you have to say and where you experienced such progress, thanx - jd Bill Cosby took a lot of flack for his comments on blacks, because he was black and educated and was able to take a forum because of his celebrity. The black middle classes perhaps cannot see through the masses to his example. Or maybe,they are just trying to get by with what they were given. -jd