I don't understand the South.

[hifiguy]

46. I discussed this in a post yesterday responding to lovemydog

and repost it here..

Like Richard Feynman, I am not afraid to say I don't know. But I think there are some clues. Racism is the metaphorical original sin of the United States. Lincoln's "forgive and reunite" policy was profoundly misguided and laughably inept and Reconstruction was ended decades too soon after a tepid and half-hearted effort at changing the social structure of the defeated south. The south should have remained occupied for at least 50 years and the Confederate leadership should have been hanged or jailed for treason depending on their degree of responsibility for beginning and continuing the Civil War.

The only examples in history that are even vaguely relevant are offered by the post-WW II era. Germany and Japan were made to face the evil and the consequences of their actions. Societal attitudes were changed - albeit at the point of a howitzer - during the occupation, but the change took root. Japan and Germany have been respectable members of the "family of nations" for more than 65 years now and show no signs of being anything else in the years to come. The lessons were internalized in a way that was never even tried in the US. The most rabid racists in this country might have been given the same treatment and seen the light but that horse left the barn 150 years ago. Their untrustworthiness and underlying evil were illustrated by the south's imposition of Jim Crow as soon as the Union troops left. They were never made to face and own their evil, unlike the Germans and the Japanese.

It is very hard, if not impossible, to uproot deep-seated antipathies in large number of people, particularly when those people are often possessed of fairly low-level critical thinking skills if they have them at all. Racism in the US seems now to be a tribal thing, and its most virulent form is no longer confined to one area of the country as it was in the Civil War and antebellum eras. Possibly expressions of racist thought can be more vigorously condemned in public, yet how does that address the "between the lines" racism spouted by the right-wing media? Tribal hatreds are nearly impossible to squelch. See the Shi'a v. Sunni example. They have kept it going for a thousand years.

There are no easy answers, and there may be no answers at all. New laws aren't the answer, because the enactment of a law does nothing to change the deep-seated, tribal animosities passed from generation to generation. The passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts surely prove that.

So I wind up back with Feynman. I don't know.