Lift High the Cross
8 July 2008 - 6 תמוז 5768 by Huw
iving here, in Yankee Land, there are times when I want to say, “Stick it up your ass, Yankee.”
I listened to a city official speaking on NPR slander my people the other day, referring to Confederates as “losers”. Let me be clear - he didn’t say they were defeated in the War. He said they were “losers”. “The Confederate flag was the flag of losers” is an exact quote.
I didn’t bother to write to the city about my tax dollars, etc, because the victors get to write history and Buffalo, being - in those days, anyway - a great city, built, like all of the north, on the back of Confederate farm labour (slave and free), it only follows that now in the light of economic reversals, they would be bitter.
But this AM a new bit of news stuck home: Cross burning at South Buffalo home brings hate crime charge.
In 5 years of living in Western North Carolina, plus 18 years of living all over the rural South, I was never once anywhere where the headlines trumpeted a Cross Burning. For all that Yankees like to poke fun at the racism of the South, it is the Yankees that invented - and live up - to the stereotypes.
Yes, there were and are racists in the South, but poor whites - who couldn’t afford to own any slaves - were as beholden to the very few rich plantation holders as were the blacks. The *class* system of the South was without racial bias.
Not so, here, where blacks came after the War - only to be shoved aside into economic slavery by white workers in the mills; here, where poor and African American families are, today, ignored in favour of “quality tenants“… I see who the real losers are.
I also see the hypocrisy.
AMEN!
Ditto
I’ve lived in Florida for 33 years, and when cross burnings do occur here in the Southland (thankfully and hopefully, they’re on the wane), they do make the headlines. It’s dangerous to dismiss such manifestations of racism, regardless where they occur, as a mere “stereotype.” (Stereotypes, of course, have some root in truth and reality, but are one-sided and exaggerated in what they choose to present.)
As for the rest of the post, you make a good point. The North’s hands are no less dirty than the South’s when it comes to the way both treated slaves, immigrants and labor in general.