I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong"
Writing in The Mind of the South, the late historian W. J. Cash began to muse about the catastrophe that resulted in the South he experienced as a white man. Like many of us, he, too, surmised it had something to do with the freedom, brief, experienced by former enslaved Blacks.
After Reconstruction, he writes, under "the influence of Transcendentalists and the Unitarians," the North began to drift "toward general sophistication and liberation of the old beliefs while, in the South, southerners "labored under the sense of suffering unbearable and unjust" ills. Deliverance from within or from without the North didn't appear forth coming. The South, consequently, "clung more closely to God and ardently reaffirmed their belief."
The "god" the white Southerners turned to would be the same one they were acquainted with for decades. All through the enslavement of Black people. It was the same divine entity that sanctioned the enslavement of those Blacks, subhumans. It was the same divine entity that would want to see Blacks return to their "place," like children, seen serving and always muzzled.
The South, as Cash notes, returned to a more primitive past, one that represented "a purer dispensation and a safer fortress." As a result, "the level of education and information in the South" decreased "tragically" in the decades "after Reconstruction. "Illiteracy increased among millions," Cash continues; for white universities "ceased in effect to exist for loyal whites." These institutions "went for long years thereafter with empty halls and skeleton faculties." Colleges and schools "died literally by the scores," Cash adds. "If the leadership of the Old South in its palmiest days had too often been only half educated, even by American standards, the leadership of the land in 1810 would be scarcely better instructed and scarcely less simple in outlook than that of the first generation to emerge from the frontier."
The South dug in its heels, and their perceived suffering and subsequent victimhood led them to see a "god" that not only would save them, but also would lead the way toward retribution. The "god" of the Master, as scholar of law, literature, and African American studies, Imani Perry has written of this entity, frowned on the pursuit of elitists endeavors, such as education. Southerners noted, on the other hand, how Blacks welcomed education with open arms.
The "god" of the Old South served to boost "patriotic pride" and also to serve as "a shield for the South's defense." It wasn't a move forward but, instead, a more toward the "glorification of the past," an evangelical past, akin to the sixteenth century, Cash explains. Ideology grew in the place of common sense. For here was an existence that demanded of Southerners that they follow a way of thinking and doing and to deviate would mean one wasn't a Southerner. "And one thought it, said it, exactly as it was ordained, or no one stood in pressing peril of being cast out for a damned n-word-loving scoundrel in league with the enemy."
It was a way of being that promised to restore the racial social structure.
The only literacy necessary was one in which allegiance to the "god" of the Master, the Old South, mattered. Unless, of course, institutions of higher education, instilling the same principles of hating Blacks and anyone who challenged Southern values and beliefs, offered a Christian pedagogy!
Yankees could keep their educational institutions. The South had a dream!
*
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
W. E. B. Du Bois recognized that the Southern Dream portended a coming a nightmare for the newly free Black. The South would drop the dream on the ancestors and the living survivors of slavery. In fact, "god" of the Master, serving as the voice of the mega-Southern narrative, wouldn't hear the prayers of the Blacks. He couldn't possibly do so and survive! This "god" began the process of putting Blacks in their place.
The dream of factories, writes Cash, "shall create a sanctuary for the falling common whites, and place thousands of them in an employment which, by common agreement, shall me closed to the Negro." Cotton mills, then, became "the only avenue" on which poor whites no longer had to compete with Black people. "People were urged to take stock in the mills for the town's sake, for the poor people's sake, for the South's sake. Literally, for God's sake." The dream was that there would rise a South-- as new South, rich and powerful "that it might rest serene in its ancient position, forever impregnable, writes Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880.
*
It was with the help of Northern Abolitionists, white and Black, who advanced the education of Black people, writes Du Bois, particularly when the "greatest step was preparing "Black teachers to work in the South. Black colleges, "which despite determined effort to curtail the efficiency of the Negro public school and despite a sustained and violent attack upon higher education for Black folk," succeed in providing "teachers and leaders for the Negro race at the time of the greatest crisis."
A crisis, I might add, white Southerners found themselves in and tried to remedy. It is this same crisis the fascists among us in America face today. In contrast, Blacks in America after Reconstruction saw themselves in competition with Denmark's literary rate, writes Du Bois.
The eagerness to learn, "was exceptional in the case of poor and recently emancipated folk." Usually, Du Bois explains, a people so degraded, according to psychology, would regard "ignorance as a natural and necessary," rung on the ladder of a societal hierarchy. Individuals on this low rung of the ladder would "exalt their own traditional wisdom and discipline over 'book learning.'"
But then there was the matter of taxes. Southerners didn't want to pay taxes for public schools when "the chief beneficiaries of the new system" would be Black people.
Northern philanthropy, however, helped save "the Negro public school system not enlightened Southern opinion," just as Northern philanthropy was there helping to contribute to the rise of Negro colleges.
The rise of Black educational institutions, as Du Bois notes, gave birth to a divinity, among white Southerners, that not only saw to the galvanizing of hate toward Blacks, but also envisioned this divinity would eviscerate Black Americans. "It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South, which overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation."
Race as the foundation that establishes the working class, as in white working class.
Any socialist movement worth its salt must know that it's race not solely class. That's the American nightmare of a dream! That is why a new order is necessary and not one that offers more of the same"
For, to echo a Bogart film, it is the stuff dreams were made of: a nightmare with monsters preaching hate but greedy enough to deceptively belief themselves righteous. It had become an America tradition, always in pursuit of returning to a past that never was one of innocence.
We know Jim Crow rose from this dream. From another dream, came the civil rights and voting rights of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, as Du Bois asks, "how is it that men who want certain things done by brute force" so often depend upon the mob? Total depravity, human hate and Schadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in America."
Look to MAGA and the politicians who appease this mob and set them to act against fellow human beings. Look to the South African tech bros, an unhappy lot, desiring to forego it all for a one-way trip to Mars.
It's been the Southern Dream, since 1776. Once former enslaved Blacks set out away from the plantation and took to the road, indulging in the activity of free people, seeking family, friends, employment, food, and shelter, it was as if the South collectively stopped breathing. The late French philosopher Rene Girard would speak of a crisis of distinction. White identity represented something that was distinctly different from Blacks who were inferior, subhuman, in need of guidance from the benevolent whites. After all, God ordered the creation of such a racial hierarchy.
Only whites were free. Only whites understood the responsibility that comes with freedom. How could "slaves," who work the land and breast feed white babies, cook and clean, know anything about freedom? On the other hand, white America was the epitome of freedom. And now, these creatures who used to be enslaved and used to be under the control of a superior race, as it's written in the Bible, are also free? They are to share in this freedom?
When the South finally exhaled, it saw itself and its institutions "losing their vitality," to use Girard's words. The "protective facade of the society" gave way to a society in unrest. All social values would "rapidly" erode, threatening the "whole cultural structure." It would have seemed to the South that it's order was on the verge of chaos. Every free Black man, woman, and child, meant a loss of money, profits, for white Southerners, for the Northern industries as well as its educational institutions.
What a nightmare!
It's no wonder today that Trump demands an all out war against Black Americans. The dream, an American Dream, is all about turning back in time.
I feel sorry for Americans who see their worth in terms of money and "god." The "god" of the Master! How much is in the bank? Where's the car? What make of car? What church do you attend? Do you forgo the "evilness" of "politics"?
And they hate. They hate me. Those without values of empathy, compassion. Love, hate those who look like me and who, in particular are educated. Know them all too well. We can't have her influence others who are tolerated because obedient.
America is far from perfect; it's project of democracy isn't complete.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America
And that's the point, isn't it!
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