AmeriKKKa

[L'Emmerdeur]

Florida restricts how US history is taught, seen as a way to get critical race theory out of classroom

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A new rule in Florida that will place tougher guidelines on how teachers deliver U.S. history lessons was approved Thursday, which public officials have touted as a way to get critical race theory — a movement that examines the intersections of race, law and equity — out of the classroom.

The Florida Board of Education met Thursday in Jacksonville to discuss the topic that's been strong-arming education news and Gov. Ron DeSantis' talking points for weeks . The monthly meeting lasted four hours and featured a contentious debate with about 30 public speakers that was derailed when people began chanting "allow teachers to teach the truth."

The new guidelines seek to change how teachers approach U.S. history, civics and government lessons with an added emphasis on patriotism and the U.S. Constitution.

It's a selling point DeSantis has used since first running for governor in 2018 and is now wheeling out again ahead of his re-election campaign. DeSantis has notably called critical race theory the practice of "teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other."

Supporters of the concept say it's more about teaching through a lens of systemic racism and equity.

His push mirrors other conservative leaders across the country. About a dozen states — including Louisiana, Iowa, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Oklahoma — have introduced bills that would prevent teachers from teaching "divisive," "racist," or "sexist" concepts.

Ben Frazier, the founder of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville chants "Allow teachers to teach the truth" at the end of his public comments opposing the state of Florida's plans to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools during the Department of Education meeting Thursday.
The vote also had a particular resonance in Palm Beach County, where a divided school board last month removed a reference to “white advantage” from an equity statement after some parents called it an attempt to inject critical race theory into school district policy.

Justin Katz, president of Palm Beach County’s teachers union, said Thursday’s vote “treads dangerously close to restricting the instruction of objective facts.”

“I do fear that the politicization of critical race theory is being used to snuff out any and all conversations about equity, race and racism in our schools,” said Katz, a former high school history teacher. "Educating our students with objective historical facts is literally the purpose of the existing state standards across a variety of content areas.

Richard Corcoran, the Commissioner of the Florida Department of Education sits next to Florida Department of Education Board Chair Andy Tuck as they listen to speakers during Thursday morning's Florida Department of Education meeting.
Some educators pointed out that the vote will have little practical impact on the classroom. In a statement, Palm Beach County’s school district said that what and how it teaches would not be affected.

In Duval County, a spokesman said the new rule won't impact instruction within the school district.

"Duval County Public Schools continues to build on a strong tradition of teaching American history," Tracy Pierce with Duval County Public Schools said. "We also offer African American history both as an independent course elective at the high school level and as an important topic integrated through other curriculum including social studies, English language arts, and courses across grade levels."

Pierce said the district follows all required statutes and rules regarding standards and curriculum, noting that critical race theory as its own topic is not included in the state curriculum.

Elizabeth Albert, president of the Volusia County teachers union, also noted that critical race theory is not a required part of instruction and students aren't tested on it in state exams.

"My question would be, why is he making such a stand to ban something, claiming that teachers are indoctrinating students, when this isn't even in the schools?" she said. "He's creating an issue where an issue doesn't exist."

Still, Albert added that students deserve to know what's going on in the U.S. and around the world, and telling partial truths equates to a falsehood.

The guidelines considered by the Board of Education say teachers "may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence" and prohibit teachers from sharing their personal views.

“The governor and the commissioner have been clear that teachers need to be engaging students in how to think — not what to think,” Cheryl Etters, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education told the Tampa Bay Times. “Standards drive instruction, and anything taught in the classroom must align with those standards.”

Teachers across Florida have expressed concerns with the new teaching standards, adding that discussing personal opinions should be welcomed, so long as students are provided the tools to make their own decisions.

"Teaching the facts will bring the country together," said Jacksonville-based activist Wells Todd, "not divide the country."

The new restrictions come on the heels of heightened racial tensions following the killing of George Floyd. David Hoppey, the director of the University of North Florida's education program, said it would be nearly impossible for teachers to ignore what's going on in society with their students.

"You cannot have civics without critical analysis and discussion about historical and current events," he said, adding that critical race theory can be used to help a class better understand topics like dress code enforcement, voter suppression and more.

Ahead of the vote, Florida education officials toured the state for a series of community meetings for input on the state's academic standards. Those meetings quickly became battlefields for pro- and anti- critical race theory voices.

Audience members joined Ben Frazier, the founder of the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville in chanting "Allow teachers to teach the truth" during public comments on the state's plans to ban the teaching of critical race theory in state public schools.
In St. Johns County on Tuesday, some residents discussed their opposition to critical race theory, citing not wanting discussions about systemic racism in the classroom, News4Jax reported. Others in Miami raised concerns about the new rule potentially whitewashing history lessons and limiting classroom discussions — concerns educators have also brought up. Another meeting took place on Wednesday in Baker County.

Keeley Koch wasn’t surprised by Thursday’s vote, saying the board’s move “speaks volumes to the fear people, especially white people, in our state have.”

In Indian River County, where her son recently graduated high school, there’s been a growing debate among parents and community members. For Koch, who has spoken in favor of implementing the ideas of critical race theory, however, the rhetoric used by those opposing the theory only “propagates white supremacy by ignoring the historical facts this country was founded on.”

The Anti-Defamation League has also voiced concerns with the new teaching standards.

"The rule requires that public schools provide factual and objective instruction on state-mandated subjects including, African American history, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement. Yet, it broadly prohibits any instruction about racism being ‘embedded in American society and its legal systems," said Yael Hershfield, the Florida interim regional director.

Hershfield said it's impossible to teach about slavery or Jim Crow without examining laws that were put into place to instill segregation.

She added that from a Jewish perspective, the section about Holocaust education raises concerns.

Currently, the rule says the factual history of the Holocaust should be taught in a way that "leads to an investigation of human behavior, an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping, and an examination of what it means to be a responsible and respectful person, for the purposes of encouraging tolerance of diversity."

Hershfield said the rule could limit how the Holocaust is taught.

"For example, it could very well prohibit teaching why the Nazis used Jim Crow statutes as a model for their infamous Nuremberg Race Laws," she said. "A core tenet of teaching history is examining why events occurred for the purpose of developing critical thinking skills that can help ensure historical wrongs are not repeated in the present day or the future. The rule appears to contradict that essential value, which is a disservice to our children and society as a whole."

On Thursday, members of the grassroots organization, The Northside Coalition, rallied at Florida State College at Jacksonville in opposition of the new rule and eventually forced a recess when they started a chant during the public comment portion.

"It's an effort to whitewash, coverup and candy coat history," the group's president, Ben Frazier, said. "It is, in fact, a Republican political propaganda campaign."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/edu ... 652613002/

Ensuring ignorance of history is an effective part of stifling social progress, and that is one of the core objectives of the contemporary US Republican party.

[laklak]

Get ready, 'Murika, DeSantis is going to be Prez in 2024 and we're going to Make America Florida. This means you're all required to listen to Jimmy Buffet and Tom Petty, eat alligator tail, and smoke meth.

Come on in, the water's fine!

[Joe]

I like the first three, but can I substitute some Funky Buddha for the meth?

[Seabass]

FYI when the author refers to "Radical Republicans" he's talking about the abolitionist faction of the Republican party pre-Civil War.

The Cruel Logic of the Republican Party, Before and After Trump

Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has always been the drive of some leaders to restrict its blessings to a select few.

This is why Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump but has not vanquished Trumpism. Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with, from shattering migrant families and banning Muslim travelers to valorizing war crimes and denigrating African, Latino and Caribbean immigrants as being from “shithole countries.” Republicans have responded with zeal, even in the aftermath of his loss, with Republican-controlled legislatures targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most significant for democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority that Republicans fear no longer supports them. The focus on Mr. Trump’s — admittedly shocking — idiosyncrasies has obscured the broader logic of this strategy.

After more than a decade in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton provided fruitful targets for an audience fearful of cultural change, conservative media has struggled to turn the older white president who goes to Mass every Sunday into a compelling villain. Yet the apocalypse remains nigh, threatened by the presence of those Americans they consider unworthy of the name.

On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In outlets like National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” Trumpist redoubts like the Claremont Institute publish hysterical jeremiads warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

Under such an ideology, depriving certain Americans of their fundamental rights is not wrong but praiseworthy, because such people are usurpers.

*

The origin of this politics can arguably be found in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Radical Republicans sought to build a multiracial democracy from the ashes of the Confederacy. That effort was destroyed when white Southerners severed emancipated Black Americans from the franchise, eliminating the need to win their votes or respect their rights. The founders had embedded protections for slavery in the Constitution, but it was only after the abolition war, during what the historian Eric Foner calls the Second Founding, that nonracial citizenship became possible.

The former Confederates had failed to build a slave empire, but they would not accept the demise of white man’s government. As the former Confederate general and subsequent six-term senator from Alabama John T. Morgan wrote in 1890, democratic sovereignty in America was conferred upon “qualified voters,” and Black men, whom he accused of “hatred and ill will toward their former owners,” did not qualify and were destroying democracy by their mere participation. Disenfranchising them, therefore, was not merely justified but an act of self-defense protecting democracy against “Negro domination.”

In order to wield power as they wanted, without having to appeal to Black men for their votes, the Democratic Party and its paramilitary allies adopted a theory of liberty and democracy premised on exclusion. Such a politics must constantly maintain the ramparts between the despised and the elevated. This requires fresh acts of cruelty not only to remind everyone of their proper place but also to sustain the sense of impending doom that justifies these acts.

As the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, years after the end of Reconstruction, Southern Democrats engaged in “intensive propaganda of white supremacy, Negrophobia and race chauvinism” to purge Black men from politics forever, shattering emerging alliances between white and Black workers. This was ruthless opportunism, but it also forged a community defined by the color line and destroyed one that might have transcended it.

The Radical Republicans believed the ballot would be the ultimate defense against white supremacy. The reverse was also true: Severed from that defense, Black voters were disarmed. Without Black votes at stake, the party of Lincoln was no longer motivated to defend Black rights.

*

Contemporary Republicans are far less violent and racist than the Democrats of the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. But they have nevertheless adopted the same political logic, that the victories of the rival party are illegitimate, wrought by fraud, coercion or the support of ignorant voters who are not truly American. It is no coincidence that Mr. Obama’s rise to power began with a lyrical tribute to all that red and blue states had in common and that Mr. Trump’s began with him saying Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.

In this environment, cruelty — in the form of demonizing religious and ethnic minorities as terrorists, criminals and invaders — is an effective political tool for crushing one’s enemies as well as for cultivating a community that conceives of fellow citizens as a threat, resident foreigners attempting to supplant “real” Americans. For those who believe this, it is no violation of American or democratic principles to disenfranchise, marginalize and dispossess those who never should have had such rights to begin with, people you are convinced want to destroy you.

Their conviction in this illegitimacy is intimately tied to the Democratic Party’s reliance on Black votes. As Mr. Trump announced in November, “Detroit and Philadelphia — known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily — cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race.” The Republican Party maintains this conviction despite Mr. Trump’s meaningful gains among voters of color in 2020.

Even as Republicans seek to engineer state and local election rules in their favor, they accuse the Democrats of attempting to rig elections by ensuring the ballot is protected. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who encouraged the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, tells brazen falsehoods proclaiming that voting rights measures will “register millions of illegal aliens to vote” and describes them as “Jim Crow 2.0.”

But there are no Democratic proposals to disenfranchise Republicans. There are no plans to deny gun owners the ballot, to disenfranchise white men without a college education, to consolidate rural precincts to make them unreachable. This is not because Democrats or liberals are inherently less cruel. It is because parties reliant on diverse coalitions to wield power will seek to win votes rather than suppress them.

These kinds of falsehoods cannot be contested on factual grounds because they represent ideological beliefs about who is American and who is not and therefore who can legitimately wield power. The current Democratic administration is as illegitimate to much of the Republican base as the Reconstruction governments were to Morgan.

continued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/opin ... party.html

[L'Emmerdeur]

Hey, these guys get it!

From one of many cesspits of right-wing idiocy:

Young people are enamored with "anti-racist" rhetoric because they think they are fighting racist systems in America. The TRUTH is they are fighting America itself and the very values the country was founded on.

- PragerU · Jul 11, 2021

[Seabass]

Lol.

[JimC]

Out of the mouths of babes...

Good to see an admission from the right that America was founded on racism, though...

[Hermit]

Hey, these guys get it!

From one of many cesspits of right-wing idiocy:

Young people are enamored with "anti-racist" rhetoric because they think they are fighting racist systems in America. The TRUTH is they are fighting America itself and the very values the country was founded on.

- PragerU · Jul 11, 2021

Slavery (4 million slaves by the start of the civil war) and the 3/5th rule definitely were values the country was founded on.

[Hermit]

[pErvinalia]

[Brian Peacock]

Me too.

[L'Emmerdeur]

A fairly succinct exposition on the origins of systemic racism in America through an examination of early laws of the colonies. As I understand it teaching a class in middle or high school based on this would be illegal in several US states now.

'The History of Systemic Racism that CRT Opponents Prefer to Hide'

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a lightning rod for conservative ire at any discussion of racism, anti-racism, or the non-white history of America. Across the country, bills in Republican-controlled legislatures have attempted to prevent the teaching of CRT, even though most of those against CRT struggle to define the term. CRT actually began as a legal theory which held simply that systemic racism was consciously created, and therefore, must be consciously dismantled. History reveals that the foundation of America, and of systemic racism, happened at the same time and from the same set of consciously created laws.

...

Three arguments have been put forth about whether the first Africans arriving in the colonies were treated as indentured servants or as slaves. One says that European racism predisposed American colonists to treat these Africans as slaves. Anthony and Isabella, for example, two Africans aboard the White Lion, were acquired by Captain William Tucker and listed at the bottom of his 1624/25 muster (census) entry, just above his real property, but below white indentured servants and native Americans.

A second argument counters that racism was not, at first, the decisive factor but that the availability of free labor was. “Before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them,” historian Lerone Bennett wrote, “the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black [and native] bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures.”

In this view, slavery was not born of racism, but racism was born of slavery. Early colonial laws had no provisions distinguishing African from European servants, until those laws began to change toward the middle of the 17th century, when Africans became subject to more brutal treatment than any other group. Proponents of this second argument point to cases like Elizabeth Key in 1656, or Phillip Corven in 1675, Black servants who sued in different court cases against their white masters for keeping them past the end of their indentures. Both Key and Corven won. If slavery was the law, Key and Corven would have had no standing in court much less any hope of prevailing.

Still, a third group stakes out slightly different ground. Separate Africans into two groups: the first generation that arrived before the middle of the 17th century, and those that arrived after. For the first generations of Africans, English and Dutch colonists had the concept of indefinite, but not inheritable, bondage. For those who came after, colonists applied the concept of lifetime, inheritable bondage. Here, the 1640 case of John Punch, a Black man caught with two other white servants attempting to run away, is often cited. As punishment, all the men received thirty lashes but the white servants had only one-year added to their indentures, while John Punch was ordered to serve his master “for the time of his natural life.” For this reason, many consider John Punch the first real slave in America. Or was he the last Black indentured servant?

Clearly these cases show the ambiguity, or “loopholes,” of the system separating servitude from slavery in early America. What is also clear is that one by one these loopholes were closed through conscious intent of colonial legislatures. In this reduction of ambiguity over the status of Africans, the closure of loopholes between servitude and slavery, are the roots of systemic racism.

[Seabass]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... od/619463/

3 Tropes of White Victimhood

Leading conservative pundits today are pounding themes that were popular among opponents of Reconstruction.

By Lawrence Glickman

About the author: Lawrence B. Glickman is a history professor at Cornell University. He is the author, most recently, of Free Enterprise: An American History.


In the conservative world, the idea that white people in the United States are under siege has become doctrine. In recent weeks, three prominent figures have each offered their own versions of this tenet.

In June, Brian Kilmeade, one of the hosts of Fox & Friends, claimed that activists were “trying to take down white culture.”

Also in June, Tucker Carlson, speaking on his nightly show with an anti-white mania graphic in the background, implied that racial strife was imminent and asked: “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?”

The same month, Pat Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and the host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s flagship show, The 700 Club, said that militants are telling “people of color … to rise up and overtake their oppressors.” He worried that, “having gotten the whip handle—if I can use the term,” people of color were now in a position “to instruct their white neighbors how to behave.” Robertson warned that if this trend continues, “America is over. It is just that simple.”

Kilmeade, Carlson, and Robertson all blamed critical race theory, a school of legal thought developed in the 1980s that has become the latest fixation of the conservative outrage machine. But the panic they expressed has a much longer history, with roots going back to white-supremacist rhetoric from before the Civil War—and particularly apparent during the attack on Reconstruction, America’s experiment in interracial democracy that lasted from 1865 until 1877.

Indeed, each of the three pundits expressed a key strand of the rhetoric of racial reaction that was pervasive among critics of Reconstruction: Carlson deployed inversion, by which white people declare reverse racism or anti-whiteness to be the crucial problem of prejudice and white people to be uniquely oppressed as a result of excessive power granted to Black Americans; Robertson deployed projection, in which white people assert that they will be treated the way they treated Black people during the Jim Crow era; and Kilmeade deployed victimization, as when a white southerner in 1875 described his region as “stripped of her honors, her glory, her pride … trampled into dust” by recently enacted laws.

These tropes of inversion, projection, and victimization overlap. During the Reconstruction era, and long afterward, white reactionaries in both the South and the North projected that the movement for racial equality was animated by what the Confederate-nostalgic newspaper The Watchman and Southron called a “hatred of the white people of the South and a determination to humiliate them as much as possible.” Using the language of inversion and victimization in 1875, the Louisville Courier-Journal—which was associated with the anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party—described Reconstruction as a “scheme of upturning society and placing the bottom on top: an effort to legislate the African into an Anglo-Saxon.”

Here it is worth pausing to state the obvious: Nothing akin to what the Mississippi politician John D. Freeman called in 1868 “negro superiority and supremacy” ever happened—or was ever even close to happening. Although many white people like Freeman maintained that Reconstruction would inevitably culminate with their being “enslaved and crushed out of civil and political existence,” the goal of Reconstruction was not oppression. It was racial equality.

Even during the most radical phase of Reconstruction—when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed; the southern states rewrote their constitutions; Black Americans held a wide variety of national, state, and local political offices; and the federal government briefly committed to enforcing civil rights—that equality remained largely aspirational, as white southerners retained their tight grip on political and economic power. As the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune observed in 1868: “How four millions of blacks can establish supremacy over eight millions of whites, both having the same political rights, has not been shown by any mathematician.” Rather than the future of “negro domination” many white southerners claimed to fear, the white supremacy they yearned for—and all its attendant violence—returned full throttle a little more than a decade after the end of Reconstruction. It was no longer underpinned by chattel slavery but by new relations of peonage, exploitation, legalized segregation, and disenfranchisement.

This reality did nothing to halt the emerging narrative of white victimization. “When the future historian comes to write up the history of the American union,” according to a Kansas City newspaper associated with the Democratic Party in 1867, only two short years after the abolition of slavery, “he can truthfully inscribe upon his last page this epitaph: ‘Here lies a nation, that in giving freedom and independence to the negro, lost its own.’” The enemies of Reconstruction described inclusive democracy as not just psychologically unsettling but illegitimate, what a letter writer to The Courier-Journal called in early 1868 an “inversion of … just and lawful relations.” The writer demanded a future in which “the white race would spring back to its position of natural supremacy, while the black race would fall back to its position of natural subordinacy.”

In 1867, the Charleston Mercury, which had been the South’s leading secessionist newspaper, translated white allegations of racial subordination into a diagnosis of political unfreedom: “the despotism of the barbarous negro over the white man.” The areas where critics of centralized state power identified overreach almost always involved efforts to promote racial equality. Anticipating an image that we tend to associate with Friedrich A. Hayek’s 1944 critique of the incipient welfare state, The Road to Serfdom, the former Union General Abram S. Piatt of Ohio said in 1867 that the “the Radical party has advanced on the road to despotism.” He singled out the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been set up by Congress in 1865 to assist the roughly 4 million recently emancipated Americans, and the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, two of the federal government’s most significant efforts to legislate on behalf of Black freedom before the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

Opponents of Reconstruction regularly employed the freedom/slavery binary to describe their claimed loss of liberty. “There is no negro slavery now in the Southern States,” declared the white supremacist Daily Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, in 1868, “but a vast deal of white slavery.” This was a remarkable assertion of inversion, coming as it did only three years after the end of America’s nearly 250-year history of chattel slavery.

One term used to describe the process of the “inversion of … established order” —which the Charleston Mercury characterized in 1867 as “white slavery under negro rule” —was featured in Tucker Carlson’s graphic: anti-white. Historically, those who deployed inversion almost always paired anti-white with pro-negro. In 1867, for example, The Chicago Times—a strongly Democratic paper founded with the backing of Abraham Lincoln’s foe, Stephen A. Douglas—complained that a civic group planning to invite as speakers some former abolitionists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and Anna Dickinson, was showing itself to be “pro-negro, anti-white man.” Variations of the “pro-negro, anti-white” pairing appeared frequently, sometimes using the N-word. In 1870, the strongly anti-Reconstruction Memphis Appeal described the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed suffrage to all adult, male American citizens, as the “crowning victory” of Radical Republican “anti-white negroism.”

Pat Robertson’s language of Black Americans holding the “whip handle” previously gripped by the slaveholding class was also a popular metaphor a century and a half ago, when it was employed to advance the view that Black Americans had usurped coercive power rightly belonging to white people. In describing the soon-to-be eclipsed political dynamic of Reconstruction, in which white politicians had to attend to the concerns of all Americans rather than just their fellow white men, one commentator wrote in the Georgia Weekly Telegraph in 1874 that “the negroes feel they have the whip-hand.”

This was one of many invocations of the material implements of enslavement and anti-Black violence that white opponents appropriated during the Reconstruction era and beyond. They also described themselves as manacled or having chains riveted upon them by Reconstruction’s indignities. Barely two years after the close of the Civil War, Mississippi Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys announced that, if the Radical Republicans were to succeed, he and his fellow white citizens would “have to take back seats or be elevated at the end of a rope”—two instances of projection in one breath.

Not all projection involved the threat of racialized murder or violence. Much of it focused on being forcefully rendered powerless. White opponents of Reconstruction routinely claimed that “social equality” was being “crammed down our throats, with the aid of the brute force of the negro”; or that white people’s rights were being “trampled into the earth, in order that an aristocracy of four million negroes shall be established upon their graves”; or that Black “iron heels” were stepping on white necks to “crush out their last hope of liberty.” All of these images reversed the reality of power in the postbellum South.

The self-pity and victimization expressed by Brian Kilmeade also reflects the ambient mood of Reconstruction’s enemies. The former Confederate and future United States Senator Ben H. Hill of Georgia declared in 1868 that the Reconstruction government aimed to “disfranchise and degrade whites for no reason but that of a vindictive hatred.” Similarly, an observer at Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1868 claimed to be sickened by being forced to listen to endless “encomiums upon the negro race,” alongside “wholesale denunciations of the whites of the South.”

Another way that opponents of Reconstruction projected the topsy-turvy world they claimed Radical Republican rule had created was to reverse the most infamous passage in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case. In what scholars have since described as the worst decision in American judicial history, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Ten years later, in 1867, a Virginia newspaper decrying “negro rule” claimed that Reconstruction was based on “the arrogant assumption that the true white men of the South have no rights which need to be respected.” The following year, The New York Times, reporting on conventions that were rewriting constitutions across the South to make state laws equitable, noted that the “colored delegates” to those conventions “evidently think the people … have no ‘rights’ or sympathies which the Conventions are bound to respect.” The “people” the newspaper referred to were understood to be white. In 1870, Pennsylvania’s Northumberland County Democrat, whose motto was “We Support the White Man’s Ticket,” repeatedly employed the N-word to characterize those, including the state’s Republican governor, John W. Geary, who, in the newspaper’s view, would deny that white men had rights worth respecting.

Setting a template for future backlashes, critics of Reconstruction voiced their opposition as besieged victims in registers of humiliation and disgust, and they married their victimization with promises of imminent violence. President Andrew Johnson modeled this language when he said that Reconstruction amounted to a form of “military tyranny” that would “precipitate” a violent response “more damaging than the last civil war,” a deadly threat given the destructiveness of that conflict.

Many Democratic opponents of Radical Republicanism, echoing Johnson, claimed that white humiliation would inevitably set off a spate of extralegal violence, which they framed as fully justified. “If ever a people had a right to rebel against tyrannical Government,” said a Missouri newspaper editorial headlined “The Cost of Negro Government,” “the people of this country possess this right.” When the paper referred to the “people of this country,” it meant, of course, its white citizens. “We are a law-abiding people,” wrote Elbert Hartwell English, who had served as chief justice of Arkansas before Reconstruction and would do so again in 1874, when Redemption came to his state, “but the meanest reptile will sting when trampled upon,” implying that a violent response was not only justified but instinctive and inevitable as long as the “trampling”—in the form of the “radical political schemes and theories” promoting equality—continued.

Long after the defeat of Reconstruction, these tropes persisted. They reemerged in especially robust form in the 1940s and ’50s, with the onset of the period that historians call the “long civil-rights movement.” In an echo of the earlier rhetoric of coercion, Sam Englehardt, a segregationist leader from Alabama, said in 1958 that the federal government was “attempting to ram integration down our throats.” Opponents of civil rights began to talk about the onset of what they called the “Second Reconstruction”: the government stepping in again to promote Black Americans’ civil rights after many decades of inaction. Reviving the language of victimization and self-pity, they made explicit and repeated references to the horrors of the first Reconstruction. “In recent months and years,” The Southern Watchman, a vehemently white-supremacist newspaper published in Greensboro, Alabama, by a man named Hamner Cobbs, said in 1943, “the South has been subject to an organized campaign of vilification, the likes of which no section of America has witnessed since the original Reconstruction.” Two years later, Cobbs requested that the government provide “assurance to the white people” concerned about losing their status. The specific assurance he asked for was a promise from the nation’s “political leadership” that “there will be no tampering with white rule,” meaning no effort “to repeal or tamper with the poll tax,” one of the means of preventing Black Americans from voting.

As the civil-rights movement accelerated, claims of “anti-whiteness” emerged again. All manner of supposed provocations—the 1961 documentary Walk in My Shoes, which focused on the lives of Black Americans; the Kennedy administration; the Black Arts Theater of Harlem—were labeled “anti-white and pro-Negro.” In 1979, a letter writer to a Louisiana newspaper, identifying himself as a high officer (“Giant, Province of Rapides”) of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, described Freedom Road, a historical drama on NBC, as an “even bigger anti-white show” than Roots. Anti-white continued to be a favorite term of white supremacists even in the post-civil-rights era.

Robertson’s metaphor of the whip handle has been used less often since the advent of the civil-rights era—which may be why he seemed to seek permission to use the phrase (“if I can use the term”)—but analogies to slavery continue to be an important part of the vocabulary of what I have called “elite victimization.” During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, Attorney General William Barr and other critics of commonsense public-health measures compared mask wearing and state and local shutdowns to enslavement.

The path from the backlash to Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement to Kilmeade’s, Carlson’s, and Robertson’s modern-day declarations did not follow a straight line, and claiming that the template for the 21st-century Republican Party was fully set during the 19th century would be reductionist. Yet the posture of resentment that once undergirded the reactionary response to Reconstruction continues to characterize an important tendency in the American right. According to a recent New York Times analysis, most people who participated in the Capitol insurrection of January 6 came from areas that are “awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.”

Such a perspective, however at odds with reality, is authorized by the tropes of victimization, inversion, and projection, which encourage white Americans to inhabit a fantasy world in which they are disempowered, degraded, humiliated, and vulnerable to abuse and violence, while people of color are given “special advantages.”

All of these rhetorical gestures boil down to one issue about America that remains as relevant today as it was in the 1860s and ’70s: Whose country is it? Who belongs here?

Many white people have long rejected the idea of sharing political power. It was this conviction that led them to view Reconstruction as the “great political crime of the century,” as J. P. Thomas, the superintendent of a military school in South Carolina, said in 1868. It also led them to proclaim the appointment of a Black man as the postmaster of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1868 to be not a shining example of the possibilities of multiracial democracy, but hurtful and demeaning, an “expression of contempt—a slap in the face of the State—an unprovoked and unfeeling insult.”

And it was this same conviction that led Tucker Carlson to claim, just this past April, “I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?” Carlson was echoing the zero-sum logic that white reactionaries have spouted for more than a century.

One of the most telling moments of Donald Trump’s presidency, and our present political moment, came last December, after he was voted out of office but before the insurrection he fomented. “We’re all victims,” he told a crowd in Georgia. “Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They’re all victims. Every one of you.” Like the opponents of Reconstruction, Trump milked feelings of humiliation to authorize a politics of what President Johnson called “restoration”—the Reconstruction-era version of “Make America great again.”

The opponents of Reconstruction succeeded in their campaign against racial equality, setting the country on a path to great division and intolerable oppression. Those who traffic in these tropes continue to threaten to defer the promise of justice and democracy—yet again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... od/619463/

[Seabass]

I just finished this guy's book. It's a good read if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Race, history, and the military have been topics in the news as Congress debates renaming military bases named after Confederate generals. In his new book Robert E Lee and Me, former soldier, former head of the West Point history department, and current New America International Security Program fellow Ty Seidule challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy exploring why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy—that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans—and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it.

Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

[Seabass]

It was just some sweet old ladies having a tour of the capitol. Just a little light trespassing. No big deal.