The Confederacy was a con job on whites - and still is

[struggle4progress]

Posted: Friday, August 7, 2015 10:30 pm
BY FRANK HYMAN

... We lived wherever the Marine Corps stationed my father: Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas. My favorite uncle wasn’t in the military, but he did pack a .45-caliber Thompson submachine gun in his trunk. He was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan. Despite my role models, I was an inept racist as a kid. I got into trouble once in the first grade for calling a classmate the N-word. But he was Hispanic.

As I grew up and acquired empathy, I learned that for black folks the flutter of the Confederate flag felt like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And for the most prideful flag-wavers, clearly that response was the point ...

What the flag symbolizes for blacks is enough reason to take it down. But there’s another reason white Southerners shouldn’t fly it. Or sport it on our state-issued license plates, as some do here in North Carolina. The Confederacy — and the slavery that spawned it — was also one big con job on the Southern white working class. A con job funded by some of the antebellum one-percenters, and one that continues today in a similar form ...

One can love the South without flying the battle flag. But it won’t help to get rid of an old symbol if we can’t also rid ourselves of the self-destructive beliefs that go with it.

http://www.richmond.com/opinion/their-opinion/article_9ebc40d8-08c0-5081-8a69-c49693517f82.html

[DonCoquixote]

1. I went to the Oak Alley Plantation

near New Orleans. One thign that stood out was the fact that all these plantations were self enclosed little kingdoms carved out of the brush. Going to town was rare, and even then mostly in indulgence for the Owner (i.e. whorehouses.) The way they managed this is that there was a class of slave that was still not allowed to read, but was allowed to have enough skill to be useful, which prevented the owner from having to deal with the craftsmen in town. Blacksmiths were common examples.

Now...I ask you, how many blacksmith shops, or other artisan/crafter, were shut down because the Plantation owners did not want to bother paying a white person? Think of what that did to the idea of an artisan as a whole, which of course, means the whole idea of labor. It's no accident that Dixie mocked the north as a bunch of "mechanics" who tried to be "above their station"; yes, they did aim that insult at WHITE people. Any wonder why unions are still weak in Dixie?

[Hydra]

2. Many people don't realize that what hurts one of us hurts us all

As well as enriching and empowering a very few.

[Live and Learn]

3. +1 nt

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, struggle4progress.

[MisterP]

5. it's the same story with the full-blown white supremacists: there's very few actual white people

they seem to like

[Enthusiast]

6. Kicked and recommended!

Excellent piece.

[Igel]

7. It's so easy to confuse symbol and reality.

Then to dismiss the reality implies that the symbol has to go.

Rather misses the point that symbols are conventional associations between a sign and a referent. By "conventional" I mean there's no required association, but the association is made by members of a community. When I tell my "urban" students that I got a "hoe", their conventional association with that string of sounds is different from mine and they assume I got a hooker.

This is pure Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussurian thought is the foundation of a lot of post-modernist thought, the soil in which Derrida and others found the interstices into which they could pour themselves and claim that space as their own and foist it on others. A lot of people love pomo thinking because of where it gets them, but really have no use for Saussure as soon as he gets in their way. If you have interstices, they're inter-something.

If you're interesting in understanding and communication it always--and I mean always--pays to make sure that you know that the referent intended by a symbol is. If a person isn't interested in communication, then all that "What does he intend?" crap is just crap. But then that person really shouldn't have any pretense to understanding or claims to be interested in communication.

[Raster]

8. It was the wealthy upper crust plantation and slave owners that clamoured for succession and...

...consequently war. Many of those upper crusters were specifically exempted from mandatory service in the army of the Confederacy. I believe owners of more than 20 slaves - by Confederate law - were not subject to conscription.