Shall we?
When I first read about Governor Haley Barbour’s comments regarding the Civil Rights era in Mississippi, I prepared myself to be not even a little shocked.
Barbour has a habit of adding a healthy dash of bullshit to anything having to do with race, so I expected to see comments spinning [insert well documented oppression here] as being blown way up into a whole bunch of diddlysquat.
In a recent profile Barbour offered up his personal opinion that White Citizens Councils of the 1960s were a positive anti-Klan force in his community and that the Civil Rights era wasn’t “that bad”.
Yep, that’s Barbour!
The same Governor Barbour who once joked about watermelon’s and black people.
The same Governor Barbour who said slavery wasn’t significant enough to warrant mention in Virginia’s freakish Confederate History Month celebration.
The same Governor Barbour who said the South of his recollection was integrated by the 1960’s.
Sigh.
In Barbour’s fantastically revised history, Mississippi was one big happy family where everyone got along, White segregationists fought the Klan and black people chose to live separate and unequal with our own watermelon adoring people. Everything was going just great until a bunch of communists came down and stirred up trouble!
***cue unicorns, rainbows and showers of bedazzled stars***Pause…consider…continue.
I’ll leave the correction of that bullshit to the outstanding Civil Rights documentary Eyes on the Prize…
…and ponder with some alarm that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
6 comments:
I think for Barbour though, he is longing to repeat the past...
The collective attention span of the average American, works well with this type of revisionist history.
White supremacy has not disappeared, it has simply mutated.
Rather than blatant 19th century unembarresed declarations, it has become coded, dog whistle speech.
Mr.Barbour and many like him, have mastered this technique.
He tried to walk it back and as is usually the case made it worse.
These are the people the moderate Democrats make compromises with. People like Barbour shouldn't even be ON the left-right spectrum to begin with.
Yeah.. people like Barbour mystify me. Of course, being a straight white male, he would know ALL ABOUT what being black in Mississippi was like.. not. One question: if it was all so hunky-dory, then why are 80-90 percent of the black folks in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois (my neck of the woods Shark-fu) pretty much all from Mississippi, or have roots from there?
And if Barbour is so great, then why does Mississippi lead the nation in poverty, obesity, poor health, poor healthcare etc... he wants to go where? and be president of who?
Of course it wasn't that bad -- he's fucking white!
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