Chase,

I want to make sure I understand "exactly" what you're saying, so I'm going to post your statements and then ask a question or make some remarks?

"People speak of an open discussion. That ain't going to happen until people are willing to openly discuss race in this country."

I don't know what "openly discuss race in this country" means. I am fully aware and do discuss racism, sexism and culturalism. My take on how to address these problems is probably where you and I differ. Now, if you're talking about the shotgun totin', yee-haw yellin, N-Word screamin' night riders of the South. I think this stereotype exists in extremely small numbers and is probably more a result of poor upbringing generally, and too much Budweiser, than a planned conspiracy to deny women and minorities their civil rights. I guess we go back to that question, which I can't address until I understand it. What do you specifically mean when you say "openly discuss race in this country"?

"Slavery existed in the South, that's a fact of that time. It has also existed in other places and with other groups of people."

Okay, for me, Slavery and Racism are two (2) different and distinct things. I believe slavery was an institution driven by greed and the desire to make money. I do not believe the slaveholders would have had any problem, were it legal, in using Africans, Arabs, Native-Americans (which they did) or any other weak minority, including white races from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Racism, existed throughout the United States and flowed from the throats of both Northern and Southern leaders, slave or free state. Now I know, an institutionalized and codified form of racism existed in the Southern states for a longer time than it did in the North, but even today many surveys show the most racist cities in the U.S. are in the North. Atlanta and Memphis are not the hotbeds of racism, cities like Boston and Cincinnati are.

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I think the terminology is where we get a little "bogged down". See, I can commit the heresy, that I don't believe a plantation owner with 1,000 slaves was necessarily a racist. That's not to say he wasn't, but I don't believe the two (2) terms are "absolutely" interchangeable. I believe people can be so driven by greed or can be sociopathic or apathetic to the degree that hating a particular race or group of people has nothing to do with their motives. I'm not so sure third and fourth generation slave owners gave a thought to hatred of a race. As a Southern child, I was aware of the different class distinctions between blacks and whites, but I didn't "hate" anyone. It was just the way things were and I was ignorant to any other way of living.

I believe most, not all, of what we describe as Southern racism came after the Civil War and was a direct result of Military Rule, a devastated and impoverished South, over 250,000 dead sons and a fear of an immoral or amoral and uneducated predatory underclass of free former slaves. It seems very understandable to me, that if everything I own and love is taken away from me by, what I consider to be, a foreign government. I'm going to hate them. If after their "hobnailed boot" is removed from my throat and I have the political majority to retaliate in my state, I'm going to direct my accumulated anger against any reminders of that thing I hate. The poor freed blacks, were a living, breathing reminder of that hatred. And since Southerners couldn't get back at you or the North, I believe a great deal of Southern hatred became racism toward African-Americans.

In addition, the pre-war propaganda in the South was to convince Southerners that the North intended to unleash three and half million "animals" on the South who would attack us on the road to town, ravage our daughters and destroy our civilization. The propaganda worked, and may I say, this view of African-Americans being sub-human and physically and sexually aggressive was not unique to the South. You must know, that Mid-Westerners, in particular, though they were against slavery and its spread, absolutely did not want to live in close proximity to African-Americans for many of the reasons stated above.

Maybe, the answer to a lot of our problems is to be sensitive to and learn the language of our counterparts. I am not intuitive enough to act on the statement "an open discussion about race in America." I also think we need to have "an open discussion about culture in America." See, I'm convinced that many times we misidentify racism as cultural bias. This would be the distinction that I do not prejudge or have bias against someone who is racially different from me. I have a prejudice against someone who is culturally different from me. It's not the black guy, who works for IBM next door, with a wife and two kids, that cuts his yard regularly that worries me. It's the guy driving through my neighborhood in the "low rider" with the dew rag and five other homeboys in the car with him that gets me a little uncomfortable. Now see, what I've said could be called racist, but I didn't identify this person by race. I put a picture in your head of a cultural appearance and if you've got a problem with blacks, I guess it's a black guy. If you have a fear of Latinos, I guess it's a Latino guy. In a black or Latino neighborhood, I'm sure a bunch of skinheads or Aryan nation guys would provoke the same reaction.

I guess I just don't understand, what does racism have to do with the American Civil War from an historical viewpoint. I do understand what racism has to do with the Klan and other white supremacist groups commandeering Confederate symbols. I do understand how minorities view those symbols as representations of those hate groups. But, that has nothing to do with the Civil War. Slavery has something to do with the Civil War and as I stated earlier, I don't think the two things are the same.

If we discuss racism, shouldn't we be talking about the Reconstruction and "Jim Crow" periods and how racism emerged from the Civil War period with the freeing of the slaves? In other words, doesn't the North need to assume some of the responsibility for freeing the slaves and then turning its collective back on the predictable result of abandoning them in a clearly hostile South?

Maybe our problem today is the same as it was then. We want to celebrate the righteous act of freeing the slaves from an Evil South, but we don't want to acknowledge that to truly free them from poverty, ignorance and a self-destructive "slave mentality" culture, we need to educate them, resettle them, provide for them for a generation or two and then put them out in the world to fend for themselves. Imagine how different the U.S. might be today, if the government had lived up to even "40 acres and a mule", a myth that people still think the federal government helped freed slaves get started in their new lives. This is why I am distrusting of any claims that the North's primary motive in fighting the Civil War was to free the slaves and all that entails. Freed blacks were hardly any better off after emancipation than before. Yes it's true that no document enslaved them, but the chain gangs, work farms, no ability to vote, "Jim Crow" justice and all the rest, were just as much a part of Northern apathy as they were of Southern bigotry.

Jim