. . . . Most of our current crises are connected to this nation's founding history in genocide and African slavery -- economically, politically and socially, even down to emergency natural disaster crews.
As we all know, the vast majority of our vast incarcerated populations are of color -- and poor. Now many local California politicos and pundits -- and the state fire fighting agency -- are bitterly criticizing the state for giving prisoners early release due to the hotspotting prisons are for outbreaks of covid-19. Guess what? The state's fire fighting agency, underfunded by the taxpayers and the politicians, depend instead on what is essentially slave labor -- which for the moment at least it does not have so our homes burn. How much you want to bet California doesn't make this mistake again?
We all benefited, we benefit even now, from this nation's history of slavery and perennial racial injustice to African Americans and Native Americans, even if we are more recent immigrants, whether we are white or not.
We are seeing it so clearly with our dependence upon the poor and of color as the real line of disaster fighting -- and just to get groceries, to get medical care.* Because, you know, we believe don't need to pay them even a living wage.
Really, who believes in their heart that $1 - $2 a day for fighting these wildfires is pay? particularly for those whose lives and health are at such a high level of risk? Plus, we all know too, these firefighting prisoners are legally prohibited from getting jobs as professional fire fighters because that means paying salaries and benefits. It's so much more practical and tax saving to just refresh the prison population constantly. Keeping people who have served their sentence from getting real jobs is an effective method of ensuring that constant refreshment.
We all benefit, then and now, who aren't African American, who aren't Native American.
The brilliant light of 19th Century literature in this country couldn't have happened without the resources of slavery. Longfellow's wife, recall, was vastly wealthy, like all those Boston cultural luminaries were -- allowing them to dedicate their lives to art and culture. There were so many who had that wealth resource that within 3 centuries of first colonization the US there were enough heirs of such wealth to support a leisure class that supports the arts and literature.
Where did much of that wealth of New England and the North, like NY, come from?
As with Longfellow's wife, her father owned the vast wealth creating textile factory complexes such as his Lowell, MA. Those textiles were produced from the slave-grown cotton. Much shipping and insurance and banking in so many ways out of slavery -- even after the African slave trade to the the US was abolished, even after slavery itself supposedly was abolished.
Immediately after the war those wealthy northern and New England movers and shakers headed south** and allied with the great pioneers of neo-slavery, sharecropping, such as the Percys of Greenville, Mississippi (Walker Percy's family -- which was why he could live and write without a job.)
It is nearly impossible to look at even the brilliant light elements of our past and not see it rooted in and shadowed by slavery and genocide -- including the massive removal out of "Dixie" to make that vast territory safe for slavery.
This morning there's a Marine Dem retweeted on Bill Gibson's Twitter feed, who warns us from where he lives within a huge maga country enclave, that 'they' hate 'us' with almighty passion, they are voting.... it's all about white vs everyone else -- and women. If you can only get it by giving over all power to the insane, and destroying what's left, and dying too, so be it. Long rage the covid-19 hoax! as proclaimed by a relative undergoing chemo for cancer in a rally in a waiting room of fellow unmasked cancer victims.
It merges well with Jon Meacham on the history of the revisionist Glorious Lost Cause history of the War of the Rebellion -- which began immediately.***
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/books/review/lost-cause-meacham.html?
[....]Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending. In our own time, the debates over Confederate memorials and the resistance in many quarters of white America, especially in the South, to address slavery, segregation and systemic racism can in part be understood by encounters with the literature of the Lost Cause and the history of the way many white Americans have chosen to see the Civil War and its aftermath.
To Pollard, the Southern side had fought nobly for noble ends. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” he wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” Pollard declared that a “‘war of ideas,’” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was now unfolding.
And in many ways it unfolds still. The defiance of federal will from Reconstruction to our own day, the insistence on states’ rights in the face of the quest for racial justice and the revanchist reverence for Confederate emblems and figures are illuminated by engaging with the ethos of which Pollard so effectively wrote. He enlarged on his thesis in “The Lost Cause Regained,” published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The issue was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”
The Civil War, then, was to be fought perennially....
We're already fighting our second civil war -- but while they are using their guns and everything else already, we insist on pretending it hasn't happened yet and it won't happen because we are going to win (one) election. Which latter is in NO WAY assured of happening either. They certainly are doing everything, including shooting, to make sure it doesn't happen.
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* For a breathtaking account of earlier dependence on coerced African American labor even when slavery supposedly was over, see John M. Barry's Rising Tide (1997) for how the Walkers did it in their Yazoo Delta Kingdom in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
** One of the most well recognized among those even now, is J.P. Morgan. Not to mention all the racial injustice placating D.C. and presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt did for them, helping make labor laws and court cases go away, as he did for the Walkers with whom he happily went hunting.
*** In truth, though Meacham doesn't mention it, the revisionism began at least as soon as Vicksburg fell, with Davis and others suddenly dropping 'slavery' from their cause for fighting -- though it was top and center in their constitution as a 'nation' and the secessionist state constitutions, and in their many other printed works before and after secession.
