fenario72 fenario's List: Racism

• The Alabama of Folsom—and Lee—was marked by a profound localism.
• rarely identified with candidates on the basis of issues,”
• “Instead, they tended to give greatest support to the candidate whose home was nearest their own.”
• Politics was not ideological. It was personal. What it meant to be a racial moderate, in that context, was to push for an informal accommodation between black and white.
• the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended Folsom’s career, because the racial backlash that it created drove moderates off the political stage.
• Folsom lost his job to the segregationist John Patterson, who then gave way to the radical George Wallace
• It was the Brown decision that brought him back. Old-style Southern liberalism—gradual and paternalistic—crumbled in the face of liberalism in the form of an urgent demand for formal equality.
• Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch
• much closer to Folsom’s side of the race question than he is to the civil-rights activists who were arriving in the South as Lee wrote her novel.
• He forgives the townsfolk of Maycomb for the same reason. They are suffering from a “sickness,” he tells Scout—the inability to see a black man as a real person. All men, he believes, are just alike.
• Someone in Finch’s historical position would surely have been aware of the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915. Frank was convicted, on dubious evidence, of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan.
• led by a poor white farmer, Walter Cunningham. The mob eventually scatters, and the next morning Finch tries to explain the night’s events to Scout. Here again is a test for Finch’s high-minded equanimity. He likes Walter Cunningham. Cunningham is, to his mind, the right sort of poor white farmer: a man who refuses a W.P.A. handout and who scrupulously repays Finch for legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, and a crate of smilax and holly.
• Finch tells his daughter, is “basically a good man,” who “just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” Blind spots?
• Folsom was the same way. He knew the frailties of his fellow-Alabamians when it came to race. But he could not grasp that those frailties were more than personal—that racism had a structural dimension.
• He frequently repeated his pledge that he would not force black children to go to school with white children.
• Speaking to the Alabama Education Association in 1955, the governor recommended a school construction bond issue and implied that the money would help prolong segregation by improving the physical facilities of Negro schools.
• One of Atticus Finch’s strongest critics has been the legal scholar Steven Lubet, and Lubet’s arguments are a good example of how badly the brand of Southern populism Finch represents has aged over the past fifty years.
• Lubet writes:
• The “she wanted it” defense in this case was particularly harsh.
• And in case Mayella had any dignity left after all that, it had to be insinuated that she had sex with her father.
  
• The scholar Lisa Lindquist Dorr has examined two hundred and eighty-eight cases of black-on-white rape that occurred in Virginia between 1900 and 1960.
• Justice was administered unequally in the South: Dorr points out that of the dozens of rapists in Virginia who were sentenced to death between 1908 and 1963 (Virginia being one of the few states where both rape and attempted rape were capital crimes) none were white.
• White women retained their status as innocent victim only as long as they followed the dictates of middle-class morality.”
• Her mother is utterly immoral and without principle; and this child has been accustomed from her very babyhood to behold scenes of the grossest immorality.
• The reference to the mother was important.
• “Though Sizer did not directly impugn the victim herself, direct evidence was unnecessary during the heyday of eugenic family studies,” Dorr writes. “The victim, coming from the same inferior ‘stock,’ would likely share her mother’s moral character.”
• When the defense insinuates that Mayella is the victim of incest at the hands of her father, it is not to make her a sympathetic figure. It is, in the eugenicist spirit of the times, to impugn her credibility—to do what A. A. Sizer did in the John Mays case: The victim, coming from the same inferior stock, would likely share her father’s moral character. “
• Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days.

• He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.

  O
• he understood that Dickens bore the ideological marks of his time and place. His class did not see the English social order as tyrannical, worthy of being overthrown.
• Dickens thought that large contradictions could be tamed through small moments of justice. He believed in the power of changing hearts, and that’s what you believe in, Orwell says, if you “do not wish to endanger the status quo.”
• Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson.
• His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell.

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• “An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right.”
• “social Darwinism”
• The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin’s writing.
• Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards.
• It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas.
• In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:
• It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
• Most disturbing of all, in The Descent of Man, Darwin prophesied:
• “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
• While it must be very clearly emphasized that the gentle-souled Darwin himself never supported ill treatment of any race or group, his words inspired a movement to
• “scientific” racism.
• breeding humans for excellence, is a word coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1865, six years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
• “Eugenics,”
• In America itself, between 1907 and 1958, in states including Indiana, California, and Washington, some 60,000 genetically “unfit” persons were legally sterilized against their will. Germany took eugenics to the point of murder, euthanizing 70,000 of the unfit.
• Mein Kampf
• Hitler gives a Darwinian-style analysis of how the struggle for existence mandates a defense of the Aryan race.
• “struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.”
• arguing that the preservation of a “creative race” is “bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right of victory of the best and stronger
• in this world.” He calls for “a more noble evolution.”
• 1937 German propaganda film, Victims of the Past
• “In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven’t just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply.”

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