TRIGGER WARNING The KKK lynchings and comprehensive brainwashing of children in a death cult that the Nazis later based their whole society on. OK, they couldn't lynch Jews in public because of global outcry, but they made up for it in volume (sorry, very dark Jewish humor). Hitler Youth organization was explicitly based on the children's Ku Klux Klan and Children of the Confederacy.
Then our ancestors gave the job to the cavalry, for genocide of Native Americans, and the police, for torture and murder under color of law of Blacks, Latinos, Gays/homos/faggots/lezes (before we spoke of LGBTQs), supposed Commies, Hippies, and anybody else who threatened White Male Christian Privilege.
Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, by Kristina DuRocher
I apologize for the muck I am about to rake over with you, but
In particular, you have to know that this is the story of the Trump family up North. Fred Trump was arrested at a KKK rally. He and Donald were sued twice by the Nixon administration for refusing to rent to non-Whites. Trump ferociously demanded for years that the Central Park Five be judicially lynched, even after their innocence was proven. He hates Blacks, although he reportedly hates Puerto Ricans even more. He considers White Supremacists to be his core supporters, and does everything can think of to appeal to them. Also the Creationists who deny that they are descended from Black Africans just like the rest of us, and have viciously messed-up ideas about women's health. His children are also famously racist, as well as greedy and entitled and crooked.
The book begins with the photo up top here, of White children enjoying a lynching.
The lynching ritual offers a microcosm for exploring white southerners’ conceptions of race and gender, as all members of the white community participated. The role played by white youth in public racial violence has long remained unexplored, as no studies of the Jim Crow South consider this violence as a primary site of the construction of racial identity.Yet white southerners did employ the brutal lynching ritual to construct and maintain southern racial identity, and white children played an active role in the process.
Examining white children’s role within the white culture of the Jim Crow South, including its racial violence, reveals the shifting intersections of race, gender, sexuality, culture, and power in the New South.
As one of the most visible forms of violent socialization, the lynching ritual served the dual purpose of repressing African American resistance and reinforcing white adults’ and children’s own conceptions of racial and gender supremacy.
Lynchings offered white men and adolescent boys a public venue in which to enact their ideal image of southern white manhood within a ritual where whiteness conquered blackness in a display of uncontested masculinity. This performance was intended both to remind white women and children to obey the boundaries set up by white males and to reinforce the cultural representation of white females as submissive and deferential to white men.
And now it is the cops, and ICE/La Migra, and Betsy DeVos demanding that our schools lie to children even more, and environmental racism. Trump would bring in Federal troops to shoot up protesters with live ammunition, like Gen. Douglas MacArthur against the Bonus Marchers, if he could. He has also taken sides with the covid-19 pandemic against the citizenry, and with Russia against our military in Afghanistan, among other atrocities.
I'll say it again.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Maya Angelou
and turn out to vote against them.
Me
And no, it isn't "just a few bad apples". The actual proverb is
One bad apple spoils the barrel.
This Barrel of Deplorables is 100% compost. Which is good for growing the next crop, for good or ill, including the millions of children who escape from these cult-like influences each year.
Back to the book.
It wasn't just lynchings, of course. It was every moment of every day.
If anything would make me kill my children … it would be the possibility that [n*****s] might sometimes eat at the same table and associate with them as equals. That’s the way we feel about it.
—Unnamed southern whitewoman, 1904
Boyle remembers being told “over and over” that if she “didn’t adhere to racial conventions[,] Negros themselves” would be horrified, shocked, or embarrassed, and that she should accept that blacks knew their places and that any attempt to treat them as equals was futile.
Not horrified or embarrassed. Scared to death.
Eating with Black people was for some the sign of liberation from the tyranny of Whiteness, while for others it was, as intended, an almost insurmountable barrier.
Alice Kester and Clark Foreman are also examples of those who found redemption through sharing a meal. In 1926, Howard Kester enrolled at the Vanderbilt University School of Religion, a racially liberal campus. His wife, Alice, confronted one of the southern "sins," at a Negro Baptist Publishing House lunch. She tried to eat at the same table as African Americans, but could not keep her food down, running home in tears. After this failed attempt, however, Alice "fraternized naturally with blacks.
Clark Foreman was to attend a talk by W. E. B. Du Bois, "but did not know that a dinner was involved." He refused to go at first because he had never shared a meal with an African American and felt that he could not do so. He was eventually convinced to go.
The book offers a multitude of first-person accounts of such struggles with ingrained White Supremacist "morality" in every aspect of life.
During the height of Jim Crow, the continued survival of segregation and white supremacy required the participation of whites of all ages, but especially those of the rising generation, in upholding a strict social order. White adults utilized virtually every aspect of their daily life to socialize their children into their future roles. Among those children who experienced this indoctrination firsthand, those who understood it best grew up to reject the southern customs of racism.
Very few were able to break out publicly back then. Those who did so quietly are called the people of background in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Southern social activists’ autobiographies offer recollections of their early experiences with race and gender identity. By chronicling their youthful lessons, white activists sought to demonstrate their repudiation of segregation’s mores, allowing them to correlate their childhood experiences with their adult efforts at social reform. Repeatedly, the autobiographical writings of white southern reformers acknowledge their own socialization into white supremacy and identify the sites of their indoctrination. The pattern that emerges is that early lessons occurred first in the home, followed by communal instruction and performances. These experiences often included knowledge or witnessing of the racial violence that enforced southern segregation.
White supremacist practices and beliefs evolved over the centuries,
- from the slavery and genocides of Native Americans even before 1619
- through fully developed chattel slavery
- and its blasphemous church support
- to Abolition and Reconstruction
- and then Jim Crow
- and to the requirements of various Civil Rights successes since FDR began, in 1939, to reverse Woodrow Wilson's re-segregation of the Federal government
- Truman desegregating the military starting in 1948
- Brown v Board and the legislation of the 1960s
- A Black President demonized as a Kenyan-born Muslim terrorist and Nazi
- An electoral majority for Joe Biden that none of the established shenanigans can overcome.
As white southerners attempted to adapt their culture in order to preserve their vision of the New South, the format for teaching racial identity shifted. Broadly, white domination in the South, as reflected in the actions of white southerners and their children, underwent three stages between Reconstruction and the early civil rights movement. The first stage began with the end of Radical Reconstruction in 1877 and lasted until the 1890s, when the New South socially, culturally, and legally enshrined segregation.11
The second shift in white cultural domination, and the focus of this book, spans Jim Crow at its zenith, from 1890 to 1939, as whites took active measures to preserve segregation as demonstrated by evolving methods such as standardized educational materials and new ritualized practices such as mass mob lynchings. With the rise of industrialization, urbanization, and mass culture, whites in the South faced an onslaught of potential threats to undermine their recently reclaimed social order. Without a clearly defined racial hierarchy, white males feared the disruption of the post-Reconstruction system of white privilege.
The Civil Rights era had its faint beginnings in 1939 with FDR, but the Solid South was able to prevent him from including mostly Black agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security. The GI Bill promised many benefits to returning veterans, but its implementation was given over to the states. Southern states accordingly found excuses for excluding Black servicemen from education, housing, and almost all other benefits. (The VA was and is a Federal program that they cannot directly interfere with, so they just make sure that Congress underfunds it, and then claim that it is the fault of Democrats.)
Then Truman desegregated the military, starting in 1948. The Army held out against it until 1953, when field commanders in the Korean war begged top brass for permission to integrate their units. In direct response Strom Thurmond formed the Dixiecrat party in 1948. The race to the Republican Southern Strategy was on, with Donald Trump as its epitome and self-proclaimed apotheosis. (Unlike the Roman Senate, however, ours is not in the business of declaring official God-Emperors.)
LBJ famously lamented that by his signing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act
We (Democrats) have lost the South for a generation.
Major social change requires changing minds, and at the same time it requires that its opponents die off in the normal manner. This tends to shift opinion by about 1% annually, in favorable cases, so that from a standing start we can get to a voting majority in favor of the new policy in about 50 years. It is very occasionally less, but in the worst case, White Supremacism intertwined with Creationism, it has gone on for far longer.
Time's up.
Joe Biden will be President, probably with a female POC as Vice President; we will take the Senate; and we will enact the dreaded Pelosi Agenda and more.
The Rest of the Book
I can't do justice to a 224-page book crammed with detail in a Diary. It covers all of the familiar phenomena, such as segregated schools and businesses, hypocrisy on sex, systematically rewriting history and denying science, and setting about gerrymandering and voter suppression with gusto, but with startling detail about attitudes and practices and the means used to maintain them. In particular, every intervention meant to advance the South is assumed by White Supremacists, usually correctly, to be aimed at breaking down White Supremacism and systemic racism everywhere. Thus the hatred for Darwin and Obamacare and the public schools and the idea of free college or trade school for all and the UN and WHO and the Paris Climate Accords.
White Supremacists consistently vote against their economic interests and ours
as long as Blacks get hurt worse.
Lee Atwater
There is, of course, a separate political story about all of the more recent machinations of the White Supremacists for prolonging their power beyond its sell-by date, which should have been Al Gore being elected President in 2000. He was, of course, but for assorted Republican party lying, cheating, and stealing, with a Supreme Court majority as willing, even eager accomplices.
In order to delineate how white adults encouraged and transmitted their vision of white culture to their youth, in each chapter I explore a site of socialization, detailing its own sources and methodologies within each section.
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1. “My Mother Had Warned Me about This”: Parental Socialization in the Jim Crow South
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Learned Our Lessons Well”: The Growth of White Privilege in Southern Schools
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Consumerism Meets Jim Crow’s Children: White Children and the Culture of Segregation
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“The Course My Life Was to Take”: The Violent Reality of White Youth’s Socialization
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Violent Masculinity: Ritual and Performance in Southern Lynchings
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“Is This the Man?”: White Girls’ Participation in Southern Lynchings
Conclusion
Girls came under extreme social pressure to confirm the most outlandish accusations against any Black man whatever, and usually did so. We have a number of later confessions of making such false accusations, which are excused to this day with the most vile Conspiracy Theories about such memes as Cancel Culture.
Denial of civil rights, segregated schools, and segregated businesses, but extreme socialization to violently oppressive social roles, too, oppressing and repressing women, the young, and anybody else who came handy. Socially-approved police lynchings under color of law are now particularly under the spotlight, but we cannot dismantle systemic racism until we have all of the pieces of the multidimensional jigsaw puzzle.
Further Reading
This is just a tip-of-the-tongue taste. There is far more than any one person can know. Raising Racists gives dozens more references.
The only officially authorized history of the original Ku Klux Klan, written by the daughter of the founder of that organization in Alabama.
Yes, it's as bad as you think.
- History of the Ku-Klux Klan aka The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible empire, by Mrs. S. E. F. Rose aka Laura Martin Rose
Adopted as a textbook in many Southern schools in the Jim Crow era.
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N.A.A.C.P., Lynching of Rubin Stacy, textbook
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Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race, by Jennifer Ritterhouse
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Strange Fruit, Biography of a Song, by David Margolick
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Too Much and Never Enough, by Mary Trump
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The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass
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To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
See also the Grokking Republicans Book List, including The Authoritarians, The True Believer, and The Theory of the Leisure Class.
The vast literature on the KKK, Jim Crow, The New Jim Crow, the Holocaust, Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Pot, King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo, the Crusades, the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, South African Apartheid, and too much more to even list, on Man's Inhumanity to Man.
Man was made to mourn: A Dirge[1]
Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, –
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
Robert Burns, 1784
This is the most tragic picture of man's inhumanity to man. I've been to Mississippi and Alabama and I can tell you that the hatred and hostility in Chicago are really deeper than in Alabama and Mississippi.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1966[14]
For most of this country's history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man's inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.
Barack Obama, 2008[15]
Movies
The South
- Gone With the Wind
- Song of the South
- Birth of a Nation
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- In the Heat of the Night
Nazis
- The Triumph of the Will
- The Tin Drum
- Schindler's List
- Jojo Rabbit