https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4923804
Or by hiring me to write something, or do some other sort of work, through your choice of
https://www.guru.com/freelancers/priscilla-king
https://www.fiverr.com/priscillaking
https://www.freelancer.com/u/PriscillaKing
Or by buying any product discussed/marketed in any post at this web site, either with a postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or a Paypal payment to the address you get by writing to salolianigodagewi ; addresses are at the very bottom of this screen.)
Problem: Most young Black men are decent, law-abiding people. Enough young Black men are violent criminals that people, including older Black men, who see a young Black man approaching on a city street instantly brace for trouble. Because of this stereotype people, including police, sometimes feel a need to counterattack when young Black men are not actually attacking anybody. Even when the young Black men in these scenarios are not injured or killed, they're more likely to be found guilty of more serious crimes, on less evidence, than any other demographic group in America. Even if you're not personally acquainted with any young Black men, you know this is just not right. (I'm not only acquainted with some, I'm related to a few, so my sense of the wrongness of this situation is urgent.)
Possible Solutions: (1) Hire and train more young Black men as police officers, to improve the ability of the police force to recognize young Black men as individuals.
(2) Pay more attention to young Black men who are behaving well, and not exclusively as athletes or musicians, to improve the ability of the general public to see beyond stereotypes. Build consciousness of the possibility that a young Black man approaching on a city street might be a teacher, doctor, mechanic, storekeeper, chef...
(3) Write more movies and TV shows with a richer assortment of young Black men in all kinds of roles that somebody out there might want a child to see as models--from truck drivers to astrophysicists.
(4) If you are a young (or mature but well preserved) Black man, just hang in there and keep being decent and teaching people to see you, at least, as a good neighbor, a friend, or even a rescuing hero. If you are a Black man with a talent for teaching elementary school or operating a library, bookstore, wholesome video game arcade or cafe or some other sort of place where youth hang out, do the work that will be piled on you; it is needed. If you are not a Black man, find a colleague who is one, who is doing a good job, and promote what he is doing.
(5) Pick fights, insult other people's ancestors, and attack symbols of their family history. Make sure people see you as a bully with a chip on your shoulder.
One of these thoughts is not like the others! One of these thoughts just doesn't belong!
As a Daughter of the Confederacy, I've traced most of my ancestors back through the 1850s--all of my ancestors were in the United States by 1850. Of the ones who were male and physically qualified, all but two were Confederates. Each one joined the Confederate Army at a different stage in life, for different reasons. Slavery was not the issue in the war--money was--and only one of those Confederate ancestors ever owned slaves.
Living in Virginia, I see lots of people whose first approach to studying our history, which those who don't learn are doomed to repeat, involves identifying with their Confederate ancestors. Even descendants of Union troops who get interested in the actual battles tend to be interested in the Confederate Army's strategy--what were the "great" but not victorious leaders thinking? how could winning this battle have convinced Confederate troops that they could win the war? would it have been possible for them to have won this other battle? and so on. Descendants of Confederates can't always name their Confederate ancestors or remember any family legends about them, but they tend to assume that, if they'd existed in 1862, they would have been where some of their DNA really was.
The wave-Confederate-flags, salute-a-print-of-General-Lee's-portrait stage is one I remember feeling embarrassed by when I was going through it at ages nine and ten. It's a childish reaction; even to a child it surely can't look or feel much like an adult's understanding of history, philosophy, or morality.
I was blessed not to have to spend a lot of time with that fantasy of "Whoever my great-grandfathers were, whatever they did, must have been heroic." One of my great-grandfathers had been an especially young Confederate; living people had known him. And one of the first things I learned about him was that he did not keep waving that Confederate battle flag. He later served in the U.S. Army, as did his eldest son, my grandfather; they were buried under U.S. flags. If he'd been a sloganeer he probably would have said that it was his duty as a Virginian to defend Virginia, from Pennsylvania when necessary, along with Pennsylvania when possible.
I am interested in history, as this web site shows. I like to see younger people taking an interest in history, identifying with their ancestors. When I see Confederate flag motifs on cars, shirts, houses, etc., in Virginia I think, "So that's the level they're on," and hope some of them will join me on a more advanced level of historical studies. I'd like to hear more discussion of the complexities of the Civil War, the impossibility of identifying either side of that war with the philosophical issues of our own time. But if all you know about your great-great-great-grandfather is that he was a Confederate, and you don't know in which of the Confederate troops he fought or what his given name was, then you probably, understandably, feel a need to identify with General Lee.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with your feelings about Black people, if any. Some people have both Confederate and Black ancestors, and their family stories tend to be more interesting than "After his wife became ill, Great-Grandfather took advantage of the nurse," although sometimes they turn up that kind of stories too. What are they supposed to do? Blame, hate, disown their Confederate ancestors to honor the Black ones? Or vice versa? Please. Why can't those of us who are adults with a little education encourage young people to try to understand their ancestors--all of their ancestors--in a balanced historical perspective?
Then there was, a few weeks ago, a discussion on The Blaze about whether Northerners should fly or buy Confederate flags (apparently somebody wanted to sell the things at a county fair in Wisconsin). My initial comment was that collectors of Nazi memorabilia, in the English-speaking countries, tend to be proud descendants of the victorious troops who've preserved the spoils of war; as a Southerner I don't feel welcomed by Yankees flying Confederate flags. Not terrorized, but not welcomed. Well, someone said, what about those descendants of Confederates who had moved north in the past 150 years. Well, wouldn't a better demonstration of loyalty to their Confederate ancestors involve moving back to their ancestors' farm? It can be hard to take these things seriously, or believe that people do, but evidently a few people do.
Like it or not, gripers, this is America. When the English moved in, one of the sneakier strategies the more hateful English immigrants used, to gain an advantage against the then-majority ethnic groups, was to encourage old feuds and quarrels between groups. And what I learned about my own ancestors, well before the Civil War, was that they didn't buy into that. The ones who came from Europe recognized that Virginia and North Carolina were places that naturally inspired gratitude to God, as shown by burying the feuds and quarrels they had left behind in Europe. The Irish ones married the English ones, the German ones married the French ones, and the ones who reached the Tennessee border married Cherokees. They appreciated the value of interpersonal distance in limiting interpersonal conflicts, but apart from periods of military "duty" none of them had any serious quarrels or blood feuds with anybody; they were Christians. That's an example I wish more people's ancestors had set, and more people were willing to live by.
Here's a good exercise for those currently waving Confederate flags--or claiming to feel terrorized by the sight of them. Read the collected, preserved, reprinted letters of General Lee. Pay particular attention to his support for General--no, President--Grant.
Yes, he wrote a lot of letters. No, you're not done with this exercise yet. Now read the letters of Martin Luther King.
Now try to imagine these two misguided, yet still definitely Christian, gentlemen living at the same time. After reading their letters, do you doubt that they would have shaken hands? I don't.
So what's causing this blindness to history and common sense, this effort on the part of Afro-American gripers to stir up hostility among Euro-American Southerners who were at least trying to rethink their stereotypes of young Black men? I do have a guess. When people grow weary in the service of any good cause, prudent leaders look for a quick-and-easy victory to encourage them.
Thus feminists, confronted with the excessive simplicity of the Equal Rights Amendment and the impossibility of rallying Americans to support drafting girls into the military, became hypersensitive in the 1980s to nice innocent words. They liked to pick on the words that ended in "-man," including "human" and "woman," although some feminists claimed that those were formed by a different process and still usable. To me the suffix "-man," pronounced "m'n," sounds different enough from the word "man" that calling Barbara Lee a Congressman makes as good sense as calling me (in the 1980s) a Takoman (one whose Washington neighborhood of choice was Takoma Park), or calling any fourteen-year-old a freshman. But after some ritual grumbling about the clunkiness of "Congressperson" and the beloved resonance of "America, America, God shed His grace on thee, / And crown thy good with brotherhood...", most Americans conceded that it was sensible and courteous to stop insulting people with the presupposition that they were male. Most of us, even if we still say "Congressman," do now write general sentences like "Each student should bring her/his..." or "All students should bring their...", and old documents containing "Each student should bring his..." now seem musty and misogynist.
Thus, likewise, the whining about renaming things that were named after Native Americans. Meh. I think many of these names are intended and used to honor actual people, not to defame them; I think, even when the names are used in a silly way, the whining sounds even sillier; to the very limited extent that I'm a football fan (I'll sit through a game if the man in my life wants to), I can think of good reasons to rename the Washington Redskins, as in ending the "They mean their faces are red because they've not won the Super Bowl since 1989?" routine, but I know of no way renaming the'Skins would help anybody in Pine Ridge survive another Dakota winter. However, most owners of sports teams and other commercial ventures want the names they use to appeal to customers, so in most cases renaming has been a quick-and-easy victory for any Native Americans (not that I personally know any) who've seen it as a victory.
Well...it just happens that the birthdays of Martin Luther King, Robert E. Lee, and also General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, all fall within the same week: January 15, 19, and 21 respectively. Before King's time, some people had been observing a "Lee/Jackson Day" in mid-January. So around 1970 when people wanted to add "Martin Luther King Memorial Day" to the calendar, nationwide, some people objected to this observance being scheduled on the same day as Lee/Jackson Day.
Meh. Those of us who don't work in government offices tend generally to feel that people should celebrate holidays that are meaningful, at times that are meaningful, to them, and that if government offices were able to find people willing to work on Christmas Day (and take a corresponding holiday to celebrate, e.g., Moon Walk Day on July 20), that would be a good thing. Lee/Jackson Day was a nuisance to many independent workers, and Martin Luther King Day is one now.
Anyway, the image of protesters waving images of Dr. King and protesters waving images of General Lee, on opposite sides, entered American consciousness around 1970. Over the last fifty years a lot of people have been willing--I was willing--to stop displaying Confederate flag motifs if they allegedly distracted or alienated people, at least when we were in the North, as a point of courtesy. So apparently some activists think that demanding that everybody stop displaying Confederate flag motifs is one of those easy-victory thingies.
They're wrong about the reactions of Southerners. I have never, not even in grade four when I didn't know better ways to show pride in my state and my ancestors, felt so inclined to wave a Confederate flag as I do this week. I don't believe it's right to give bullies what they want; I perceive the screeching about Confederate flags and images as crybullying, and I don't want to seem in any way to support it. That's the reaction of a Southerner who's been getting by just fine without a Confederate flag, ever since the Carter Administration. Do you even want to know what Southerners for whom a Confederate flag is their only link with their great-grandfathers are saying?
They're also wrong about the usefulness of this strategy in achieving its intended purpose. Remember, #BlackLivesMatter activists, the goal is (or should be) to build awareness of the good qualities of Black men. Crybullying and picking useless quarrels are not good qualities.
They're wrong even about the use of this strategy in rallying support from adults who identify as Black. I didn't plan to write about this topic today, but when I checked this web site's feed, this was what I saw:
The quarrel-seekers are quarrelling with Andrew Young:
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/08/24/civil-rights-leaders-opinion-on-confederate-statues-wont-sit-well-with-the-left/
They are quarrelling, in a very ugly way, with NBA athlete-turned-analyst Charles Barkley...Ambassador Young's argument was based on politics, but Barkley, oh dear, dared to mention that young Black men could break down that hateful old stereotype by brawling less among themselves. He will now become a target, like Bill Cosby. Pray for him.
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/08/25/charles-barkley-is-branded-a-black-white-supremacist-after-comments-on-crime-confederate-statues/
They are quarrelling with Stacey Dash, apparently about a lot of other things I've not been following, other ways they've been trying to define Blackness as Left-ness:
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/08/25/stacey-dash-blasts-maxine-waters-as-a-corrupt-media-buffoon-the-backlash-is-intense/
Sigh. In the name of Martin Luther King, in the name of Robert E. Lee, in the name of the ancestors of the members of this web site...can we all, please, stop picking stupid quarrels about symbols, and move on with the substance, already?
There is still a real need for more awareness of the existence of good, kind, decent, honest, peaceable Black young men.
No comments:
Post a Comment