Black Rednecks & White Liberals, page 35
Only historical research has brought out regional differences in mental test results that cut across racial lines, so that white soldiers in various Southern states scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from various Northern states during the First World War. Only historical research has brought out the fact that black children attending Dunbar High School in Washington consistently equaled or exceeded the national average on IQ tests for decades, even though they were a substantial proportion of all black high school students in the city and were not pre-selected for admission by mental tests. Indeed, there were some students at Dunbar with subnormal IQs but they were offset by others whose IQs considerably exceeded the national average.37
The weightiest evidence of all has been the historical research of James R. Flynn, showing what has been called “the Flynn effect,” that contrary to both the logic and the predictions of believers in genetic determination of IQs, national performances on IQ tests have risen substantially over the years in more than a dozen countries, with black Americans at the end of the twentieth century answering as many IQ test questions correctly as whites answered in the middle of that century. This does not change the racial gap but it undermines genetic determinism as an explanation for that gap. None of this would have been known if the taboo on IQ research had not been defied, and much of this research would not have been done without the previous research of those who concluded that IQ differences were largely due to genetic differences. In other areas as well, history shows that initially mistaken beliefs have provided the impetus for study and research which advanced human understanding beyond where it was before the mistaken beliefs arose. Chemistry, for example, developed out of discredited alchemy and astronomy out of astrology.
In an age of clashing civilizations and of hatreds so fierce as to provoke suicide terrorism, history is both a treasure chest of experience and a powder keg.As Edmund Burke aptly put it, more than two centuries ago:In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons…and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving, dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury.38
While the lessons of history can be valuable, the twisting of history and the mining of the past for grievances can tear a society apart. Past grievances, real or imaginary, are equally irremediable in the present, for nothing that is done among living contemporaries can change in the slightest the sins and the sufferings of generations who took those sins and sufferings to the grave with them in centuries past. Galling as it may be to be helpless to redress the crying injustices of the past, symbolic expiation in the present can only create new injustices among the living and new problems for the future, when newborn babies enter the world with pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day. Both have their futures jeopardized, not only by their internal strife but also by the increased vulnerability of a disunited society to external dangers from other nations and from international terrorist networks.
To be relevant to our times, history must not be controlled by our times. Its integrity as a record of the past is what allows us to draw lessons from it.
One of the most chilling lessons of the history of the twentieth century is how deceptive domestic tranquility can be in a multi-ethnic society, when it takes only the right circumstances and the right demagogue to turn neighbor murderously against neighbor. There was not a single race riot between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka during the first half of the twentieth century and the relations between the two groups at mid-century were regarded by many observers as a model for how different ethnic groups could co-exist in harmony. Yet the second half of the century saw not only massive and lethal riots between these two groups, but also unspeakable atrocities inflicted on individuals from one group who just happened to fall into the hands of the other group. Moreover, all this fomented hatred and violence escalated into a full-scale civil war, in which this small country suffered more deaths than the United States suffered during all the long years of the Vietnam War. Both “sides” lost—and they lost because they became sides, instead of remaining fellow countrymen with different cultures.
Sri Lanka was not unique. Neighbors who had lived in peace for years, or even generations, turned on one another murderously in Indonesia, in the Balkans, and in sub-Saharan Africa, as ethnic polarization and strife were stirred up by either fanatics or opportunists. In Germany in the 1920s, Jews were so widely accepted socially that nearly half of all Jewish marriages in Germany during that decade were marriages with non-Jews. But that did not prevent the Holocaust.
While history is an explicit legacy of the past, cultural patterns and traditions are its inarticulate legacy in the differential survival of varying practices. Many who seek to subordinate history to current visions and agendas likewise seek to replace this cultural legacy.Those who regard the accumulated experiences of successive generations, distilled in social traditions, as mere “constructions”—on the same plane as alternative “constructions” that they excogitate—are ignoring the consequential processes through which those traditions have been filtered and from which they have emerged. The viability of these traditions is attested to by the mere fact that they are still here to be criticized, while the viability of alternative “constructions” has yet to be proved and they may be able to survive only in the minds of those who put them together. Notions and knowledge are different precisely because the former have not passed through the verification process, while the latter has.
Although our misunderstanding of the past cannot affect the past, it can affect the future, sometimes catastrophically. Human beings have survived too many mistakes and misjudgments to make mere inaccuracy fatal by itself. Yet the fact that nations and whole civilizations have also collapsed, with tragic repercussions lasting for centuries, is a sobering reminder that there is not an unlimited latitude for error or misconception. Sealing ourselves off from reality within a vision risks the kinds of catastrophes that blind rulers have brought down upon themselves and their countries, from the days of the Roman Empire to the cataclysm into which Hitler led Germany. The key factor in these calamities has often been a blocking of feedback from reality, epitomized by the figurative or literal killing of messengers bringing bad news.
Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.
Notes
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
1 Lewis M. Killian, White Southerners, revised edition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), pp. 98, 99, 109.
2 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 57.
3 Glenn G. Gilbert,“Introduction,” The German Language in America: A Symposium, edited by Glenn G. Gilbert (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), p. xi. Moreover, even after later generations of people in these enclaves began to speak English, their English also often contained archaic words and expressions once peculiar to the local region of the United States where they first learned English. Carroll E. Reed, “The Dialectology of American Colonial German,” Ibid., pp. 7-8.
4 Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 92.
5 Lewis M. Killian, White Southerners, p.100.
6 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), Vol. I, p. 365.
7 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, (New York: Modern Library, 1969), pp. 476n, 614-622.
8 Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, enlarged edition (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1860), p. 34.
9 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 634-635. See also Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), pp. 16-18.
10 T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People: 1560-1830 (London: Collins, 1969), p. 367. See also Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, p. 231. G. M.Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries (New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1986), p. 451.
11 Henry Thomas Buckle, On Scotland and the Scotch Intellect (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 38; James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 18.
12 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 84, 93-94, 231-232.
13 Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 81.
14 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 55-56. Even after Scottish schools became strong,“they were not strong in areas of the southwest which contributed much to the American migration.” David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 722.
15 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 630.
16 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp 45-47, 49; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 365-366, 740-743; Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1958), Vol. I, p. 484; Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom, pp. 12, 65, 147, 527; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), Vol. I, pp. 363, 369; Forrest McDonald,“Cultural Continuity and the Shaping of the American South,” Geographic Perspectives in History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese and Leonard Hochberg (London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1989), pp. 231-232; Lewis M. Killian, White Southerners, pp. 108-109.
17 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, Chapter VI; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 622, 624, 626, 628, 629, 736-738, 766-771; Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, Vol. I, p. 484. See also Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, pp. 334, 341, 554, 555.
18 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, Chapter VIII. See also David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 718, 721-723, 755- 756 ; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, pp. 301, 415, 426, 558-560, 592; Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, Vol. I, pp. 484, 488; Forrest McDonald,“Cultural Continuity and the Shaping of the American South,” Geographic Perspectives in History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese and Leonard Hochberg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1989), p. 233; Lewis M. Killian, White Southerners, p. 100.
19 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 172-173; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 298-306, 345-346, 680-682.
20 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 246-247; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 367-368; Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, Vol. I, pp. 460, 496; Forrest McDonald,“Cultural Continuity and the Shaping of the American South,” Geographic Perspectives in History, edited by Eugene D. Genovese and Leonard Hochberg, p. 233.
21 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 90-92, 128-132.
22 Ibid., pp. 258-259.
23 Ibid., pp. 146-147; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom , edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, p. 414.
24 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 118-122.
25 See, for example, David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 705-708; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, pp. 207-211.
26 See, for example, David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 606, 615, 668, 736, 755, 756; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, p. 555.
27 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 621.
28 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, p. 12.
29 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 615.
30 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, p. 257.
31 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 737-738.
32 Philip E. Vernon, Intelligence and Cultural Environment (London: Metheun & Co., 1970), p. 154.
33 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, p. 163.
34 Samuel C. Hyde, Jr.,“Backcountry Justice in the Piney-Woods South,” Plain Folk of the South Revisited, edited by Samuel C. Hyde, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), pp. 229-230.
35 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, p. 555,
36 Ibid., 476n.
37 Daniel J. Boor stin, The Americans, Vol. II: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 208.
38 Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, p. 163.
39 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, Vol. II, p. 210.
40 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 756.
41 Forrest McDonald, “Prologue,” Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, p. xxi.
42 Ibid., p. 30.
43 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 633.
44 Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the United States to 1860, Vol. I, p. 484.
45 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 607, 684.
46 J. C. Furnas, The Americans: A Social History of the United States 1587-1914 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), p. 29.
47 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture. p. 147.
48 Daniel J. Boor stin, The Americans, Vol. II: The National Experience, pp. 100-101.
49 J. C. Furnas, The Americans: A Social History of the United States 1587-1914, p. 295.
50 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 146-147, 148-149, 151.
51 Ibid., p. 149-150.
52 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture,p. vii. See also pp. xiv-xv; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 758.
53 Forrest McDonald, “Prologue,” Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, p. xxiv.
54 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1944), p. 560.
55 David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 766-767.
56 Ibid., pp. 765, 767.
57 George Shepperson,“Scotland: The World Perspective,” The Diaspora of the British, Collected Seminar Papers No. 31, Institute of Commonwealth Studies (London: University of London, 1982), p. 52n. See also Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001), p. 108.
58 J. E. Cair nes, The Slave Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 81.
59 Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860,Vol. I, pp. 483-484.
60 Ibid., pp. 81-82, 143, 144; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, pp. 64, 85, 87, 90, 147, 257, 290, 327, 391, 397, 421, 448, 527.
61 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, pp. 103, 305.
62 Ibid., p. 12.
63 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, pp. 168, 177, 212, 214, 220, 317, 423.
64 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, pp. 258-259, including footnotes.
65 Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860,Vol. 1, p. 47.
66 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, pp. 295, 302, 540.
67 Ibid., p. 540.
68 Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860,Vol. II, p. 831.
69 Ibid., p. 839.
70 Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South, p. 48.
71 Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860,Vol. II, p. 838.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., pp. 838-839.
74 Robert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Agency (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), p. 148.
75 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, Chapter III; Ror y Fitzpatrick, God’s Frontiersmen: The Scots-Irish Epic (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Ltd. 1989), pp. 71-72.
76 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 261.
77 Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), p. 148.
78 Ibid., p. 168.
79 Ibid., pp. 168, 175.
80 Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture, p. 19; Virginia Brainard Kunz, The Germans in America (Minneapolis: Lerner Publication Co., 1966), pp. 11-12.
81 Rupert B.Vance, Human Geography of the South, p. 106.
