On 2 January 2011 20:55, Barrett Brown
<barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Send me whatever they wrote, I'm in a mood to fuck with some bad journalists.
Hi,
My scanner isn't working, but I will just type the text.
It's from John Coski's "The Confederate Battle Flag" (Harvard University Press, 2005), p.300.
"Historians now recognize the injustices heaped upon African Americans in the name of (white) national reconciliation, but this belated recognition does not erase the legacy of a century in which white southerners were not asked to dishonor or feel ashamed of their ancestors and in which black southerners had no voice in determining the heroes and symbols of their region. During a recent dispute over the renaming of Confederate Memorial Hall at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, a black math professor asserted bluntly that "the race problems that wrack America to this day are due largely to the fact that the COnfederacy was not thoroughly destroyed, its leaders and soldiers executed and their lands given to the landless free slaves." 13 Shocking as this statement was, it verbalized the frustration that some people feel toward the moderate settlement of America's Civil War. It also suggested what could have happened to the losers of the conflict but didn't. It underscored the challenges facing a society that reincoporated a defeated people, their beliefs, and their symbols."
This is a complete paragraph. The preface, page X, tells you Coski's attitude:
He is claiming detachment yet explicitly rejecting African-American claims. His expression of "shock", and his implication in the footnote that my essay was over the top, are anything but "detached". He's taking sides.
The "13" is a superscript, the footnote can be found here.
Note, that the quotation is wrong: I wrote "freed" not "free," and the "debate" I wrote about concerned the statue of the Klan founder, not the building. Neo-Confederates and their apologists like to leave that out because it's harder for them to defend Forrest. Also, back in 2003 it was a set up: they wanted to drag me into the court case concerning the building, so it was important for them to emphasize that I was writing about the building, and not the statue, which has nothing to do with Vanderbilt.
Also, the footnote is wrong since I am not a native of Jamaica. I am an African-American, born in Rochester, New York and everyone in my family is an American citizen. I moved to Jamaica for positive reasons but the reality is no one else would offer me a job.
Happy New Year,
Jonathan