Why is Southern History so Romanticized?

[EFerrari]

47. You are right about that to a degree. I don't want to minimize

slavery or the way it gets whitewashed, softened or even elided at times.

It's more that given human culture and its need to tell stories that soften painful history and that idealize itself, it's not surprising or unique that the South does it or that the whole country joins in on that particular revision in some way. The whole country contributed to that system, too, in some way.

On the other hand, there was de facto slavery in California at the missions. When the coastal peoples died of overwork, hunger and disease, the good fathers went inland to round up more forced labor. I'd have to look at a schoolbook but when I was in school, our unit on the "Mission system" didn't include any of that.

The other day I set out to look up something about "sundown towns". They weren't all in the south by a long shot. Jim Crow was officially only on the books in the South, but unofficially, tacitly, it was all over the country. Out here in California, Chicano children and Asian children had their own, lousy, schools. Juan Gonzales' new book shows how the American media itself (not only media in the South) organized and promoted instances of racial violence. And that great migration out of the South by black people after WW2 was followed by the migration of whites out of cities into the red-lined whites-only suburbs that so many of us grew up in.

It's important to insist on the real history of the South but it would be a mistake, imho, to pretend that history happened apart from the rest of the country, or that racial oppression largely ended after the South lost its war. It's not history, it's not even past, to misquote Faulkner.