Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
I'm trying to remember if there we had any. I mean, there must have been some superficial mention of the civil rights movement in our pitiful history classes, but I don't remember much.
I remember out-of-class arguments with Matt Anderson* who had some "interesting" theories about coming racial conflict, but not really any classroom discussions about race and the differences people experience before college.
Although that's not exactly true. I think we had to write a persuasive paper for 9th grade English and I wrote in favor of affirmative action quotas. No idea where I got that from at the time. I guess we read and must have discussed Too Kill A Mockingbird too.
*If this weren't Minnesota, maybe I'd feel the need to change his real name.
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I had an interesting conversation with one of my kids on race over the weekend. His school was teaching him that one of the great things Lincoln did was push the "with malice toward none and charity toward all" stuff as the war wound down, and that the subsequent reconstruction period was mean-hearted.
I asked if the real tragedy might be the end of reconstruction, the failure to stand by blacks in the south, and the emergence of the Jim Crow south, and said that we should be careful about assuming what Lincoln did was best or that reconstruction was a mistake given how badly the next hundred years turned out in the post-reconstruction south. He was thinking about that.
I asked him to imagine a smart, hardworking kid like himself, who was just freed from slavery in Georgia in 1865, and what his life would be like over the next fifty years, and what would he, in that position, think about reconstruction.
We still have to pick up this conversation, it was just five minutes between other things going on, and I have to get more of his thoughts on it. His first take was to ask a bunch of questions about Jim Crow, which I thought was a great first take.
I know it's bad in America to suggest that Honest Abe may not have been right all the time, but, hey, slavery and slavers still kinda piss me off.
