Post by Will Dockery---------------------------------------------------------------
PROBLEMS? Please try viewing this with Netscape Navigator.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Are you living in the Stone Age
or does living in
Racistville GA merely *seem* like living in the Stone Age?
Well, it isn't any secret that this is one of the racist areas in the world,
and in fact was founded on racism, since you asked, here's part of the
story:
http://www.youpoetry.info/re-crashing-the-black-helicopters
Re: "Crashing the Black Helicopters"
From the archives, reposted for information, discussion, historical and
other fair use purposes:
From: Will Dockery (opb…@yahoo.com)
Subject: ‘Gods & Generals’: Rich Man’s War
View: Complete Thread (3 articles)
Original Format
Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan, alt.arts.poetry.comments
Date: 2004-11-30 08:42:34 PST
An aspect of the Civil War routinely ignored by Hollywood:
Rich Man’s War:
Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower
Chattahoochee Valley
By David Williams
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998. $34.95
Reviewed by Thandeka
The importance of David Williams’s new book, Rich
Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the
Lower Chattahoochee Valley, cannot be overestimated.
[...]
The socioeconomic factors in the South that led first
to the Civil War and then to the defeat of the
Confederacy, focusing primarily on the thriving
industrial center of Columbus, Georgia, and its
surrounding area, which by 1860 was producing almost a
quarter million cotton bales annually. During the
war, this area became a center for war-related
industries because it was deep in the southern
heartland, far from major theaters of combat; had rail
connections to every major city in the South; and was
at the head of navigation on the Chattahoochee River.
The southern planter
class created the white race for purposes of class
exploitation. Until then in Colonial America,
people’s race was defined by their class, and there
was no distinction in law or custom between European
and African servants, all of whom were known as
"slaves." Not surprisingly, these bondservants lived,
loved, worked, and rebelled against their upper-class
oppressors together.
[...]
But under the planters’ new race laws, race was
defined by genealogy. Masters and servants who could
claim that all their ancestors came from Europe became
members of the white race. In truth, of course, the
"poor whites" continued to be viewed as an alien race
by the elite. As one Georgia planter wrote a friend,
"Not one in ten [poor whites] is. . . . a whit
superior to a negro." Privately called "white trash"
by the elite, the poor whites were publicly embraced
as racial kin by the planters, 3.7 percent of the
population who owned 58 percent of the region’s slaves
and were dead set on keeping their exploited workers
divided by racial contempt. Because the antebellum
South’s pervasive class exploitation depended on
fabricated white racial pride, any challenge to racial
solidarity among whites threatened to reveal the
hidden class system. Here lay the path to revolution.
"The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters
of the blacks. . . . but they are also the oracles and
arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom
is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy
and degradation is purposely and fiendishly
perpetuated."
[...]
Georgia’s very decision to secede
from the Union was never put to a popular vote.
Rather, it was made by secession delegates, 87 percent
of them slaveholders in a state where only 37 percent
of the electorate owned slaves. These delegates knew
better than to heed anti-secessionist delegates’ plea
to submit the decision to the electorate for final
determination. After all, more than half the South’s
white population, three-quarters of whom owned no
slaves, opposed secession.
[...]
To add insult to injury, planters continued growing
cotton (rather than food) and traded with the North as
poorer whites and the army faced starvation. Not surprisingly,
by 1863, food riots were breaking out all over the
South, led by the starving wives left behind as their
starving husbands, sons, and fathers died for the rich
men and their slaves.
And always, the racial degradation of the poor white
continued.
[...]
The bands of poorer Southern whites who organized
against the Confederacy and who indeed were abused and
exploited by their overlords, first as wage-slaves and
then as canon fodder. Sadly, these Confederate
deserters never understood that not even the one thing
they held onto as their own-their self-image as
whites-actually belonged to them. Rather it was one
among many means used by rich men to exploit them.
Again, in advance of the whiners and hypocrites, the above excerpt was
posted for information, discussion and histirical purposes... thus, fair
use.
And so it goes.
—-
Happy to shed some light for you about the way things really went down in
Shadowville, Peter.