This post doesn’t live here anymore. It has emigrated to my other blog:
The Big No-No: An Outsider on American Fascism, where it resides under the title:
“Racial disparity: Institutional Racism from Black Codes to the Present”
What Folks Have Been Reading
WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING
In the late 60s Richard Proenneke built his own cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with only a few simple tools. He spent most of the rest of his life there. Sam Keith fleshed out Proenneke's diary of his first 16 months, when he was making his home by a lake. I love these kinds of books!
An old Oji-Cree healer and her nephew canoe down a river in Canada, away from the world of white people. They both have to come to terms with their past. The woman has lost most of her tribe and the young man is traumatized from his recent experience in the Belgian trenches of World War One. My second book by Boyden. Can't say enough about him.
An incredibly comprehensive history of everything related to slavery in the Southern United States, from the beginning of the colonies to the end of the Civil War. Over 700 pages and I took over 30 pages of notes. I will be sharing over many posts to come!
Hamid's debut novel. I love this author. A young man in Lahore, Pakistan, is the victim of love, drugs, obsession, the class system and his complete lack of self-awareness.
A golem, created in Poland and brought to life on a ship to America, and a jinni who was trapped in a flask a thousand years ago and released in New York -- the most unusual immigrants you'll ever meet.
The only part of her life a Korean woman can control is her body, so she withdraws into it. Harrowing.
Autobiography lightly disguised as a novel about the son of Southern migrants growing up on the streets of Harlem, New York City, in the 1940s and 50s. Written like you're hearing the whole story in a bar. Quite a feat.
The story of a man struggling to make a living in Morocco. No plot, no clearly defined characters, but fascinating in its authenticity.
Pakistani man tells an American about his experience as a college student and employee of an assessment firm in America years ago. Smart, nuanced and pretty darn honest considering the unreliable narrator.
Wow! The answer to the inane platitudes about how all parents love their children and how children should always respect their parents. The protagonist must come to terms with his deeply flawed immigrant parents in order to change himself.
Seven short stories about life during the Kim Il-sung regime, by a writer who still lives and works in North Korea, were smuggled out of the country and translated. Mind-boggling stuff.
A 15-year-old autistic narrator wants to know who killed a neighbor's dog, and ends up much further out of his comfort zone than he planned. Wonderful read!
In politics, education, religion, agriculture, business--it turns out that dumbing down has been here from the start.
Fifty years of Istanbul seen through the eyes of a street vendor who migrates to the city as a young boy. It's also a window into the complicated dance between men and women in Turkey.
Hey, don't laugh, at least I'm trying.
A Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with six other people on a tiny island off the coast of Maine all winter in 1873. A woman in the present researching the Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with three other people on a tiny sailboat. What could possibly go wrong?
A man stuck between two worlds in more ways than one. Fascinating!
Historical novel about early contacts between first nations and the French in Canada. Beautifully written story that doesn't pull any punches. I bought his other two novels right away.
Beautifully written. By my children's favorite English and Creative Writing teacher! It's got rave reviews and we're all very proud of her.
Suki Kim is a Korean-American journalist. She poses as an evangelical Christian posing as an English teacher at a school for the sons of North Korea's elite. Her experience and the information she manages to get via writing assignments are incredible. Definitely a lot more eye-opening that any CNN special.
This. Explains. Everything!!!
Why has Islam not undergone a reformation like Christianity? Why is it so easy for Islamic extremist groups like IS to recruit young muslims? What would it take for Islam in fundamentalist Islamic countries to enter modernity? Does the West have a role to play?
Amazing! A man wanders endlessly through a dreamscape, becoming other people, himself in the past, everything is fluid. Kafkaesque disconnect between people and their different needs.
A multi-layered novel about the history of Libya. A fast read, but one you can repeat and find something new each time.
Twelve Americans go missing in Burma/Myanmar during a tour. Touching and hilarious, but mostly hilarious.
The most unusual murder mystery I've ever read. Incredible writing. It haunted me for days.
The quote on the front mentions that these stories are exhilerating. I couldn't disagree more. They are almost unbearably painful to read, and yet I couldn't put them down. Very well done, apart from the third story, which is written in the second tense. Please let me know if you know of ONE story that works in second tense.
Resident Alien -- Being Dutch in America 
This post has been an eye-opener. I didn’t know about Reconstruction. Looking forward to more.
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Yes, it’s not emphasized in American school history books, because American history is taught as American nationalism, not what actually happened. Everything has to be the story of America moving forward, and the story of Reconstruction in the South, and that it only lasted a decade and then things went backward doesn’t fit in that narrative. Here’s another post I wrote about reconstruction: https://residentalien.co/2014/03/24/reconstruction-now-you-see-it-now-you-dont/
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The comment (and privilege) that you referrenced at the beginning is a hard thing to answer…since the replies are just so numerous and bleedingly obvious it’s hard to know what to say. But your post is a great start!
(For more, Code Switch did a great concise look at housing discrimination and its malignant consequences. There’s a quick 6-minute video summary on this page, and link to the full show. Just in case you could use it! https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/04/11/601494521/video-housing-segregation-in-everything)
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Oh, I just saw this when I posted my post! Great! It touches on everything I mention in my post and on income, crime and education, which I’m going to address in separate posts, but which are all tied into housing and one another. Thanks!
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Here is a book review of a book with theme showing how history was slowly rewritten in Charleston S.C. and even effectively America for that matter because there were few voices gving a counter narative in America.
https://tropicsofmeta.com/2018/05/28/reconciling-race-slavery-and-memory-in-the-cradle-of-the-confederacy/
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Awesome, Curt! I will put it on my ever-growing list of books to read. I might as well tell everyone now that I’m writing my own book, eventually, about fascism and authoritarianism in America, so I’m reading like crazy and this is just the kind of case study that’s useful to illustrate a lot of points.
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I think that it was the 5th grade but it might have been the 6th or the 7th grade when a boy moved to our suburb from Dallas TX and was in my class.
This boy had learned US history from a southern perspective very well.
It was really a culture shock for me to hear some of the things that he said.
Many northern whites eat this narrative that the civil war was a northern mistake up. But for me there was an obvious problem.
Let me explain it by using some dialog.
Dallas Boy: The North invaded the south not to liberate slaves but to prevent southern states from forming their own country like the 13 original colonies did in 1776.
Me: So do you mean that my ancentors who fought in the Union army were the bad guys?
Dallas Boy: No they were simply mistaken. They had been duped in to thinking the slaves in the south were mistreated and lived worse lives than even poor white people in the south. The motive of the people who duped them, the carpetbaggers, was to start a war to be able to colonize the south for themselves.
Me: So you are not saying that my union army ancestors were evil you are saying that they were idiots instead?
The thing is if I did not buy what he was selling that would mean that I was calling his ancestors who fought in the confederate army either evil or idiots. By extention anyone who honors the wrong side in the conflct must either be evil or and idiot since either they can not recognize the truth or the do not care about the truth.
Usually it is the victors who write the history. In the case of the civil war, rather than sending the slaveholding landed gentry to be worked to death in Haitian sugar plantations the northern leaders let them continue the war by other means.
The southern slaveholding landed gentry was much more successful the second time around. We now have a USA in which not only the southern slave states but many other states are breeding grounds of American execptionalism. A few states along the east and west coasts and the norhtern border with Canada are not yet fully functioning breeding grounds. But they are battle grounds in which the ideological decendents of imperialism hold as much sway as those who long for a civil republic.
A civil republic is not possible when African Americans have less than 10% of the wealth per capita as whites. We can not even say that we are getting there until that figure rises to at least 65%.
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I would say 100%. But yes, there’s a whole lot wrong with what your Dallas boy claimed.
Carpetbaggers was a term used for Northerners who came to the South after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, to help set up and oversee the full and democratic integration of the former slaves. Carpetbaggers were not a thing before Reconstruction.
And no, Dallas boy’s ancestors who fought for the South in the Civil War were most likely not evil or idiots. Odds are they were poor and therefore couldn’t pay their way out of being drafted. The actual slave owners didn’t have to join and many even left to Europe for the duration.
Also, there weren’t thirteen original colonies. That’s a way of keeping the American creation narrative nice and neat. Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Rupert’s Land and the Island of St John, as well as East Florida and West Florida (the Florida panhandle and parts of present-day Georgia and Alabama) were also British colonies in 1775. I am not familiar yet with the present-day Canadian areas, but East and West Florida were invited to join in the revolution. They chose not to, for many reasons. East and West Florida, for instance, didn’t feel that being under British rule was all bad. They felt that the British were much better able to defend them from the French and the Spanish. But that just doesn’t sound as good in history books: The American Revolution, where 13 of the 20 or so British colonies fought the bad British for independence, and some of those that didn’t join are now Canada and some didn’t join because they didn’t think Britain was bad and they are now part of America anyway… Better to ignore the fact that so many colonies didn’t want to fight because there were many more things at play besides the tax on tea and lack of representation.
A little aside: What’s also left out of the history books is that the Native American nations were also invited to join the rebels to fight the British for independence. Some did, some didn’t. Again, in the South, the British were more willing to stay near the coast and not intrude too far into their land, while the colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were constantly moving west and battling the tribes. In 1763, in the Treaty of Paris, at the end of the French and Indian war, the British had promised that colonists wouldn’t move west beyond the Appalachians, for a while at least, and when they did, it would be gradual and in an orderly fashion. Whenever Virginians encroached on Indian land and slaughtered Natives and destroyed their villages, the leaders complained to the British governor, and the British army usually stopped the colonists. It wasn’t in their interest to see the British go and be at the mercy of the American colonists.
Also, the South in the 1860s didn’t want to have their own country the way the 13 colonies did in the 1770s. But to a degree he was right, so let me start there. In the 1770s, those 13 colonies wanted to handle their own business, without interference from Britain, and without being taxed and regulated by Britain. And their business included the slave trade from Africa and slavery within America. In England, in 1772, it was decided that slavery didn’t exist under British law, which meant nobody could be a slave in England. The colonies saw the writing on the wall and wanted to be independent before the British took their slaves away. Remember, Washington, Jefferson and Madison were all slave owners and the constitutional convention was held in South Carolina, which was the center of the African slave trade.
The South, however, apart from slavery, was fine with the North also fighting the Native Americans to clear land for white settlers moving west into the Kansas and Nebraska territories in the 1800s, but then they insisted they become slave states while the North wanted them to be free states. So the South was going to fight to keep slavery, AND get those territories and make them slave states as well. And they were willing to break away from a country that was stronger together; they weren’t breaking away from an oversees empire. Not the same thing at all.
Thanks for comment!
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