After Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, plus having my finger on the pulse of the Official Victim Class where I live and work, I’m removing my rose-tinted Ray-Bans: There will never be a post-racial America. Those who truly desire harmony (and I believe there’s not many who actually do) don’t have the power or influence to compete with those who are inflaming racial tensions in America.
The present occupant of the White House promised a “post-racial America.” But then he also promised you could keep your doctor and health plan if you liked it, and that he would cut the national debt in half or he wouldn’t run for a second term. Obviously he does exactly the opposite of what he promises…with one glaring exception: his mission statement of “fundamentally transforming” America.
Got a whole lotta’ that going on.
The Official Victim Class never cared how or why the fatal shooting in Ferguson occurred. All they needed to know was who is black, who is white, and their minds were made up, permanently.
Exactly their same attitude in the last two presidential elections, come to think of it.
So anyway, Radical Times is about the first “race war” in America–the South during Reconstruction, when blacks truly were oppressed. The original cover was okay, but nothing special. I like this new one much better.
The novella is a quick read with action, lost history, and my first attempt at a romantic sub-plot.
And hopefully it’s much less depressing than what’s going on, now.
There is a PBS special that covers this subject:
Reconstruction: The Second Civil War.
It can found on YouTube in two parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOJch5C8aEg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KNhf3ZkSuU
It is PBS, but from the American Experience series, so a little bit more driven by actual history than Wishtory. But it does have a PBS bias, about how those mean southerners managed to frustrate the good intent of reconstruction.
What it told me, as I had seen it before the war in Iraq, that there would be blood between the Sunnis and the Shiites as the Sunnis were the historical rulers of the region and they would never tolerate Shiite interlopers from taking control of the region. And the past 10 years have born that out. There has been a remarkable similarity between the way Reconstruction went and the way the Sunnis pushed and clawed their way back into prominence and control despite the presence and power of the US Federal Government.
Eventually the north wore down, and continued assertion of whites in the south, the historical natural dominant group, whether electoral pressure, outright defiance of US authority, via intimidation, or outright violence began to draw less and less reaction from Washington and held less and less interest from the everyday people in the north. It was the the virtual tie in the election of 1876 between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B Hayes that lead to the Compromise of 1876. Union troops were withdrawn from the South, effectively ending construction. And a limited interpretation of the Commerce Clause allowed the Southern States to conduct there affairs as they chose until the Civil Rights era in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
It was no shock to me then when Baghdad erupted into sectarian violence in the days after Saddam’s ouster. He knew he was sitting on a powderkeg and only brutal repression of any potential uprising could keep these two groups from clashing. His removal led to an immediate rise in violence as fairly integrated areas of the city immediately began to oust the minority group in that region of the city. And the country was defacto partitioned into the Sunni in the West, the Shiite in the East, the the already protected Kurds in the North.
To speak of a post-racial America is a fantasy. One feminist blogger in writing about the recent Riots said “Privilege is like Oxygen, you never think about it until it is gone.” Bill Clinton said “White People need Political Correctness. They are destined not to be the majority race in this country and they had better accept today to prepare for those times when they are not.”
What Iraq shows is that “groups” be it ethnic, religious, and even Red/Blue white people will not coexist, because it is not in human nature to do so. Inevitably, one group will own and dominate the bulk of resources, of sexual access, of privilege and position. And history has shown that the historically dominant group was in that position for a reason and they will claw and fight to maintain that position.
The question is “When will whites wake up and see the conflict for what it is, and that blacks will never accept a truly post racial society that doesn’t involve some eradication of whites via miscegenation and absorption in a reproductive manner?”
It’s really looking like it will come to that.
I cringe at some of the statements made by Vox Day and the Dread Ilk, and now you, about racial conflict. Because I don’t identify myself by race or ethnicity, don’t want to, and don’t want to adopt an “us vs. them” mindset. Because this didn’t have to happen. We could have coexisted peacefully.
But my point is evidently moot. Maybe it didn’t have to happen, but it’s happening. Human nature, like you say.
With the invasion across our border, the largest demographic will soon be Hispanic. They and the “black community” do identify by race and ethnicity, and have an “us vs. them” mindset. They couldn’t care less about the harmonious polyglot we could be, and already consider me the enemy (about 95% of them do, anyway). There’s nothing I can do to change this, either–even on a local level with those I work with and even once considered friends. I know because I’ve tried. When the lines are drawn it’s obvious which side they’ll be lining up on.
It’s all so damn sad.