Scene On- Seeing White
Here are the transcripts: http://podcast.cdsporch.org/seeing-white/seeing-white-transcripts/
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Episode 35: Little War on the Prairie (conveniently episode 5 of the Seeing White series)
This one is primarily about an episode in the Midwest happening at the time of the Civil War that was happening in the east. There is a monument in Minnesota saying how hundreds of settlers were killed by the Dakota warriors. The process of uncovering the actual history and trying to teach the context and actual facts is detailed. I can't do it justice, but Gwen Westerman does in the episode.
AND she wrote a book!
Also a point that grabbed me was how in the reteaching of the actual facts of the altercation, there was a terrible disparity in quality. One teacher quoted on the show maintained a familiar ethnocentric narrative that you can hear in the Palestinian Israeli conflict or in the run up to our invasion of Iraq of any number of conflicts which is- THOSE people attacked US because that's the only was they know how to solve conflict. We are superior. We use our words to solve problems. And we had to kill to defend ourselves, not because we were trying to steal others' land. That's not an exact quote; I read between the lines a bit.
Tim Tyson captured this problem of mis-remembering on purpose toward the end of the episode:
And yet there's no memory that white people opposed the Civil War. There's no memory of General Pickett, of Pickett's Charge. He came to Kinston, North Carolina, in 1864. And the first thing he did was he hanged 22 local white boys on the courthouse lawn because they were loyal to the United States government. And you go down to Kinston now and you go out to King's Barbecue, and you look down the row of cars at all those trucks and all those Confederate flag bumper stickers. And I just want to say, you don't know who you are. They hanged your great granddaddy and you got their flag on your bumper. That's kind of interesting.
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This one is about the faux superiority of white northerners over white southerners over the topic of race.
This is a topic I've heard many white southerners complain about, especially when I wanted to talk about how we should take all the Confederate monuments down in the south and how it isn't about history or heritage unless there are memorials also to slaves or black people who were lynched, be they slaves before our time or people like Henry Marrow in 1970.
There are people who wanted to redirect me to talk about how the North isn't so great either, which is both true and was a diversion from a necessary confrontation that needs to happen.
Also covered in this episode was some overlooked nuance of the PC and anti-PC camps. I often deride (I'm guilty!) the anti-PC crowd for not acknowledging that it is in fact not good to use racial epithets, but I didn't see what they may have been getting at but never clearly delineating- that PC is sometimes partly a code for educated whites to beat up others, to use that as a class distinction. I mistook it for a primarily party divide before, but it was a class division. I don't agree with that use of PC, I always saw it as essentially the golden rule- don't call people names, be kind, treat people with respect.
Also in the episode, Tim Tyson talks about living in Wisconsin as a southern transplant. He heard the complaint of those people from Chicago coming over to get the welfare, which was code for those black people coming to take something of "ours." This kind of thing isn't acknowledged as racism so much as the memory of the segregation in the south, but is just as present and poisonous.
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