Posted on 12/21/2003 7:56:20 PM PST by UnklGene
Racial differences don't matter unless your roots are 'bigoted' -
By Barbara Amiel (Filed: 22/12/2003)
When he was 21 and the 20th century was nearly 25 years old, Strom Thurmond, scion of a South Carolina family, made love to a young black maid who worked in his parents' home. Did she respond willingly to the pale young man, who was taking a degree in horticulture at Clemson College? The maid was no slave. Her sexual desires were her own to satisfy, if she had any.
But what did that mean to the 16-year-old? Her "place" in Southern society was fixed. She could not vote, eat or be schooled with whites and most aspects of her economic wellbeing depended on the whim or sufferance of the local white community.
So Strom and Carrie had sexual congress. Perhaps it was done quickly in the kitchen of the small-town lawyer's home, or in the sweet hay of the neighbouring farms with the tree crickets singing. Perhaps she dreamt of a different life when she felt him around her. From this encounter, Carrie Butler became pregnant. She gave birth to the mixed-race daughter of the late Senator J. Strom Thurmond, who was, for so many years, the die-hard voice of racial segregation in America.
"Segregation now, segregation tomorrah and segregation forever," thundered Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas to the damn liberals up North and his battle cry was shared by Strom Thurmond, who in the 1948 presidential election had run against Harry Truman on the States Rights' Democratic Party ticket. James Strom Thurmond, the senator from South Carolina who set a record with his 24-hour filibuster against a piece of civil rights legislation, this man with a half-black daughter.
Last week, the daughter, Essie May Washington-Williams, now a circumspect, retired school teacher of 76, went public with the announcement of her heritage. Rumours had circulated for years, but Essie Mae had refused to talk. She had kept the secret ever since her mother took her to meet her father when she was 14. Her relationship with her father, she said, was "loving". She had waited till his death to confirm the rumours, successfully suppressed for three quarters of a century, because "I did not want to hurt him".
Essie May gave an interview to CBS star news presenter Dan Rather, a reflex liberal. Their dialogue was from Ionesco or Pinter. Dan Rather searched and scratched at Essie Mae's memory for any trace of exploitation in the relationship, for shame and threats and anger. Essie Mae couldn't understand his questions. Yes, she had disagreed with her father over his policy on race, but his position, she supposed, was just "political". He had to get elected and he had done some good things for black people and had been good to her. She was grateful to him. Without his support, she would not have gone to college.
Interviewer and interviewee were both speaking in English, but they might as well have been speaking in totally different languages. They had different assumptions, different values, and not because they came from different races. Their souls came from two different worlds and the world of Essie Mae's was by far the more attractive. As the interview progressed, Dan Rather's world emerged as one inhabited by entitlements and resentments, a world of which Essie Mae had no sense.
To be surprised by the loving relationship between Essie Mae and her segregationist father is to misunderstand the South. There could be great intimacy without equality between the races. It was like the relationship between liege lords and serfs, colonial masters and subjects. The further into the 20th century we got, the rarer such relationships became, but they were not rare historically and human nature was not formed in the 20th century. Essie Mae was loved and supported by Thurmond almost all her life, as was her mother. The conviction that they were not equals was acute in Strom's mind and it existed side by side with his affection for her. Though his public political stance softened during his life, in his soul he was probably a segregationist till the day he died.
Race itself is mysterious. When physical and cultural differences are subtracted, what difference is left, what exactly is this strange sense of "otherness"? Even physical differences can be misleading unless they are pronounced. Essie Mae would have been described as "high yellow" in her earlier lifetime - a pale-skinned Afro-American. She looked to me clearly of black ancestry, but then I knew her story. A friend, knowing nothing of her life, assumed she was white. A close-up of Anthony Hopkins opens the film American Pastoral. His face is the hue appropriate to an American Jewish professor, but I knew the story and thought the features of this Welsh actor looked almost African. The observation was simply in my mind.
A montage Serge Eisensten once made juxtaposed the shot of an actor's face to various elements - food, a woman, a pistol, an intruder - with each frame of the actor's face expressing the appropriate response of hunger, lust, fear and anger. In those days of silent films, the critics were amazed at the actor's virtuosity in conveying the different feelings by subtle facial changes. In fact, Eisenstein revealed that he had repeated the same shot of the actor in each juxtaposition. All the acting took place in the critics' own mind. This operates in ideas as well. Quote a line and attribute it to Hitler and the reaction will be quite different from when the same line is attributed to Churchill.
Race defies rather than defines us. The differences are more than skin colour or physiognomy, just as ethnicity is more than language. One can make too much of it, as the extreme Right tends to, or make the mistake of thinking that differences don't exist at all, as Left liberals usually do. The differences must be very small, because if they were evident, they would cease to be mysterious. Racial particularity is mysterious precisely because it is so microscopic and almost incapable of being articulated. The similarities of human beings outweigh the differences by a factor of a million. Cultural differences probably create 99 per cent of the remainder. The rest is something one simply feels, something silent, something else.
As an immigrant schoolgirl in Hamilton, Ontario, those friends I gravitated to turned out to be Jewish like myself, though I didn't know it at first. Only one professed it; the rest passed as gentiles, coming from non-practising families. I wondered then, as I do now, what was it I sensed?
What on earth makes Jews different - so slightly but nevertheless different - from gentiles?
Ultimately, racial differences are of no importance whatsoever, unless you are unfortunate enough to live in a bigoted culture as Essie Mae did. Even then, as her case shows, the similarities of human emotions shared by all men and women of every colour and creed are of far greater importance than race - which is, I suppose, an appropriate way to end this column, on the third day of Chanukah, just before Christmas.
What a load! I live in Frisco. Anybody who thinks that lefties aren't hung up on race is a complete and utter re-tard.
Why do stay there?
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Good weather. Great food. Great entertainment/culture. Physically beautiful (for the most part). High wages. Nice outdoors stuff nearby. Clean air. It's really just the politics that's screwed up here.
The author was doing OK until he tried to intimate that "Jews" are a race.
Guess his religious bigotry, or educational deficiencies, are showing.
So true. I've met a few racists in my time, mostly when I was a kid, but all the conservatives I know wish that black folks would come over to our side.
I'm reminded of a time when I was about 14, and my best friend Brian and I were doing landscape work for my father's sideline business. A very nice, very elderly, and very southern lady next door to where we were working invited us in for a soda break. While we were there, out of the blue, she started discussing black people and how their homes all have a funny smell. We thought her assertion was quite ironic, because we both noticed immediately upon entering her home that her house had a strong strange odor!
I watched this interview and this sums it up very well.
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