9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Southern and National Societal Violence, 2001-07-02
I grew up white in the Jim Crow South. I did not understand the violence against blacks and whites alike. My kin and their friends spent more energy and money trying to keep the blacks under, quite often depriving themselves and familes of education, recreation, jobs, etc. I also did not appreciate the manner in which the law intimidated (although I saw it regularly) primarily blacks and sometimes whites. My education was the usual truncated, incomplete set of lies about how my world had come to pass (and the Civil War was still very relevant as was white power indoctrination). Race was a primary consideration in everything, always first having fear of blacks.Ms. Hadden has laid out how 250-300 years of fear of their own slaves conditioned many generations of whites of all classess to use violence routinely and casually, against blacks and then one another. The beneficent slave owner was a total lie. The story of arms in America and our high murder rates cannot be fully told without reference to the slave patrols and their successors, and into this century where we have a mindless lack of control over a population which has more than one gun for each person. The colossal, monumental political and social, not to mention moral, cowardice and religious collaboration of the South, and the North with an evil system is largely beyond comprehension without works like this one. What do whites today owe blacks? A total respite from their now inbread fears stemming from 300 years of violent, socially approved and state-enforced discriminatory practices, some still blatantly even today. And what are we to make of rates of incarcertationl, particularly black, today, if not an extension of bias and violence from another age.
Until America comes to terms with the lies called history which have concealed just how vicious their ancestors were and the horrors they perpetrated, we do not deserve racial peace. Again, I remember the stark, raging hatred of blacks on the part of people I was supposed to hold in high regard -- family and friends. And, always, the fear, always self-manufactured. And then, after centuries of these expectations, whites just cannot understand why some blacks would respond in self destructive manners, thereby fulfilling the false prophecies. And why blacks do not trust whites or police - 300 years of terror.
Ms. Hadden, thank you for helping to drive back darkness and let the light into a festering and immoral situation.