http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/06/01/honoring-african-american-civil-war-soldiers-but-still-searching-for-the-mythical-black-confederates/Even while trying to free our minds, there is much gunk and debris nested in the consciousness of those who were once colonized, excluded, made the Other, or oppressed. Consequently, those narratives that serve to legitimate Power are often reproduced by the very same individuals who are resisting it. In much the same way that a fish does not know that it lives in water, black Americans often accept and internalize White dominant scripts, frames, and narratives about both our history and present. Thus, we often see our selves through the White gaze.
When those moments are present and reproduced–especially by black folks who are trying to generate a counter-narrative in the face of White supremacist fictions about the humanity of black people–they are glaring. Consider the following quotation from The Tennessean’s piece “Black Soldiers Celebrated as Civil War’s Forgotten Heroes,” where one of the members of the 13th United States Colored Soldiers Living History Association, the group featured in the story, observes that:
“It was a painful time, yes. But I want people to understand that African-Americans were not all slaves and property and mindless and un-ambitious,” said Norman Hill, a retired executive with the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. “We were strong; we weren’t all just raggedy slaves. These men marched for what they believed in.”
For lack of a better phrase, that just hurts. The irony is grand: A black man channeling the ancestors’ freedom struggle and expressing how manhood rights were earned, and freedom dues paid, in blood, yet still holding on to a white supremacist fiction of happy lazy slaves on the yee olde plantation, shiftless and weak, saved by the good graces of White civilization and the benevolent hand of the planter class.
Video and more at the link --