Samnell's Big Thread of Civil War Stuff


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Just as nonsensical, since there are full-blooded Berber North Africans who don't look any darker than white Europeans with at most a light tan.


Totes McScrotes wrote:
Just as nonsensical, since there are full-blooded Berber North Africans who don't look any darker than white Europeans with at most a light tan.

Generally "black" is linked to sub-Saharan African, not North African populations.

Of course, that's complex genetically in and of itself. As I understand it (and I haven't paid much attention to new research in the last decade or so), there's more genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa than in populations from the rest of the world put together. Obviously excluding those who've come from there in the last few centuries.

And aboriginal Australians would probably be lumped into "black", despite no particular relation.
Again: "looks black to me".


Totes McScrotes wrote:
The idea of "black" and "white" seem pretty peculiar to the Western hemisphere on that count, certainly African tribes had prejudices against one another as anyone who's read Things Fall Apart can attest, and for that matter Europeans still do maintain certain biases against one another. Just look at English nationalists attacking Polish immigrants, the idea of calling that "white on white" crime would be ludicrous.

Of course. White is "normal" and so requires no particular explanation. It certainly doesn't warrant pathologizing; that's for other people. The American Way, you know?

But I'd say more that anti-black prejudice, and our modern ideas about race in general, are a product of the Early Modern Atlantic World. There are certainly precursors. When slavs were the slaves traded around the Mediterranean (some of whom would grow cotton in Spain) they were often called black slavs. This ties in with traditional depictions of peasants as black (from the dirty farming life) and has crossover with black devils in medieval art. But blackness as an immutable racial construct that warranted symmetrical treatment of all guilty is an idea that co-evolved with the slave trade, first when West African slaves were brought up to Iberia and then across the Atlantic. All of this happened roughly contemporaneous with the fall of Constantinople and subsequent shortage of slavic slaves, since the Ottomans monopolized that trade. Before that, the big slave traders were Genoans and then Venetians.

This isn't quite the same as inter-European biases, I think. I can't speak to the contemporary situation over there, but most of the biases got imported from the mother countries to North America. Whiteness studies have hit on a good metaphor. It makes intuitive sense to a lot of people if you tell them that the Irish weren't seen as white, for example. But there's a fair dearth of sources actually saying that. Rather it seems the Irish were treated as a species of inferior white. When Irish immigration heated up, both major parties accepted the premise that the Irish could be voters. The Democrats were big on it and the Whigs less enthusiastic, but the notion that they should be absolutely excluded was restricted to a splinter third party that fell apart because it couldn't agree on slavery and couldn't decide if it hated Irishmen, Catholics, Germans, or Irish and German Catholics. Doesn't mean that the Irish weren't hated, and that they didn't get tarred with a lot of the same stereotypes that black Americans faced, but I think there's a meaningful difference.

Totes McScrotes wrote:
I remember hearing the notion of "whiteness" coming around to convince poor, uneducated whites that they had more in common with white aristocracies than they did with poor, uneducated blacks in largely the same economic situation. Samnell, I'd wager you've forgotten more about the Klan's strategy in post-war Mississippi than I've ever known, so I'll defer to you on that point but suffice to say that Karl Marx's ideas had been reaching American audiences shortly prior to the outbreak of the war. (Tangential, but I'd always heard the Klan was founded after the war by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who then left after it became too radical even for him; now I'm hearing it was around during the war or possibly before.)

Whiteness as a class was a big factor in antebellum American thought. It's most conspicuous in the South, but of course not unique to it. The proslavery argument was that slavery gave whites a class to do the work that none of them should have to do and so, in its way, made them all into men of leisure and notional equals. It also provided a concrete example of what a lack of freedom looked like, creating a kind of psychological capital. In the trade, the idea is usually called Herrenvolk Democracy.

That said, afraid I'm not as up on the early Klan as I'd like to be. I understand that it was, very briefly, essentially the Moose Lodge for Confederate veterans to engage in fratboy hooliganism. It quickly turned into a white terror organization. Bedford Forrest wasn't quite a founder, but did join pretty early on. His eventual disassociation with it is hard to take at face value because it comes at a time when the Klan had largely accomplished its mission in his neighborhood. So he could afford to be gracious in victory, and make that graciousness a kind of victory lap in itself.


Lava Child wrote:
America seems to suffer under the idea of the 'one drop' rule of race when it comes to african heritage - that any African blood makes one black. My Jamaican and South african friends have explained to me that in their society, people of mixed heritage are considered a separate racial class. That being said, biologically, race as we see it is not an accurate description of genetic heritage.

indeed.

It can be a very ugly thing to live with.


So the same, standard, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative that one day poor white yeomen farmers could work their way up to becoming rich plantation owners if they just work harder?
Yeesh, the deeper you go the worse it gets. I don't even want to think about what that implies when you factor in what Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.


Totes McScrotes wrote:
So the same, standard, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative that one day poor white yeomen farmers could work their way up to becoming rich plantation owners if they just work harder?

Not exactly. (Well, it does get worse the deeper you go.) The argument was that you were already pulled up, since you had slaves to use as mudsills. A mudsill was that part of a house that raised it up a bit over the level of the surrounding ground so that when it rained you wouldn't get mud inside. It worked out that having slaves do certain work meant no white man had to suffer the indignity of doing it.

If phrased poorly, this could go over very badly. There are recurrent cases of proslavery men going a bit too far and hard in attacks on wage labor in particular and getting poorer whites riled, but it's also clear they had a kind of social capital even independent of all the ways that large enslavers would give out patronage, the degree to which slavery was normalized and integrated into Southern life (not so much into Northern life before the emancipation movements, but there are some borderline cases), the fear of revolts, and the hope that you would get ahead and have slaves yourself.

The last should not be at all discounted in the nineteenth century. Americans have always been deluded well past the point where there's clearly some kind of illness involved about our ability to advance, but nineteenth century white Americans can make today's bootstrap types sound like depressives. Theirs was the era of great progress, unstoppable and eternal. If you couldn't make it back East, you could move over a state or two for cheap land (which we stole fair and square in a series of shotgun deals) and try again. Get in on the ground floor, squat the right claim, and you could build yourself a real future.

It didn't usually work out, or even necessarily involve the independence they imagined it might bring, but it's something millions of Americans believed in. I'm doing pretty low-level stuff on territorial Kansas right now and working with testimony that many early settlers gave. Some of them are boring "I just moved over from Missouri" types but quite a few of them are on their third or fourth state. It's not really a representative sample and the territorial census returns aren't complete enough to let me make one (most only list a single place of origin, to which one might have answered either place of birth or latest residence) but none of them seem to have seen their mobility as at all unusual. Some of that is down to Kansas notoriety too, but the hops usually fit into the normal arrangement of moving more horizontally across the map than vertically so with the exception of some New Englanders, I expect Kansas got more of the same rather than a qualitatively different migration.


Arnold Weinstein did a Teaching Company course on 20th c American fiction which I really liked in which he traced the defining American myth of the titanic, godlike, hegemonic, imperial self (I don't think he called it a myth but I call it that), and also the shadow of that, which he calls Nobody, as in the figure of Bartleby or Dickinson's "I'm nobody".


Huh. I was at the Nashua Public Library one time and picked up his series on "Classics of American Literature" out of the free bin (Starts at $399.95 online, I just read). I'm in between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Emily Dickinson, but I still haven't finished Leaves of Grass, so I've been stuck in limbo for a while.

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