And the South — to be honest — is a region where we are particularly vulnerable to the way in which this narrative of racial difference still haunts us, and infects our economic, social and political structures, because we have in the South done something worse than silence, we’ve actually created a counter-narrative and invited people to take pride in their southern heritage. We’ve basically minimized the hardships of slavery and extolled its virtues — as if there's any virtue at all to being owned by another human being. We’ve ignored the lynchings and the struggles and the violence and terror that kept people of color from having any opportunities for fairness and equality, and we haven’t really addressed all of the pain and injury that was created by decades of segregation. So, I think we're not going to make progress until that changes.
randomuser - per our debate earlier.
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tacocat: We’ve basically minimized the hardships of slavery and extolled its virtues
I was more or less just thinking about this after seeing an art print of a genteel plantation house with hoop skirted women, regal men and carriages at the ready to presumably ride them around a countryside shielded from human suffering or some shit (it was such a bad painting I questioned every thought that went into it). The American South is a weird place, I live there, I'm fully aware of this. What kind of culture has a romantic view of and yearns for a simpler time when people were owned by other, much richer people?