There may well be a number of reasons why we might need to rewrite the words to our state song, Maryland My Maryland, but the reasons given by state delegate Pamela Beidle ( D Anne Arundel ) and others are not among the valid reasons. They reflect the belief in an incorrect history of the United States that reads more like the old westerns where good and evil were distinct and a moral parable was part of the story.
As a Southerner, who had family that fought for the Confederacy, let me assure you the history of the South is of a much richer fabric than that told in our national narrative. If we Southerners had not been so obliging, our nation would have had to create the South so we would have a reason for why a nation that began its life by asserting that," All men are created equal," had tolerated the abomination of slavery for so long.
If one seeks to really learn you would understand that these parts of one nation are like two seperate and dinstince parts of a national character that is part of our ongoing tapestery as a nation. The South is the repository of our feelings in there rawest form , our desires and passions that often lead to aggression. The North is the rational, scientific part of our nature, cold impersonal but often too, our conscience, reminding us of the gap between our ideals and our reality. In psychological terms these two parts of the psyche are in conflict so a national struggle was inevitable.
Howard Zinn, the historian once said all history is someone's propaganda. American history is no less susceptable to this analysis. A case in point is our belief in the fiction that somehow indentured servitiude and slavery were two very different entities. We pretend that White indentured servants sold their labor while Black slaves were sold as people.
In point of fact they were the same job, the same working conditions, the same auction block, the same transport in chains unwillingly to the new world. The difference is merely historical fiction. Couple that with the census records that show 4,000 African Americans owned slaves at the start of the Civil War and records that show as many as 60.000 African Americans were part of the Confederate army and the narrative as told in high school history class begins to fray.
The beginings of the Race arguement stem from an incident that gets short shrift from our nations histories but deserves a far larger place in our history for it is after this event that the seeds of segregation that lasted into the later part ot the 20th century began.
In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon led a rebellion of white and Black servants fighting equally beside each other. At one point in 1676 they had thrown Gov. Berkeley and the rest of the wealthy planters out of Virginia and burned the capitol at Jamestown to the ground.
When order was finallly restored with the aid of the Royal Navy the wealthy planter class had been shaken to their very core. To prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again they utilized a racial divide and conquer policy of segregation that lasted to the 1960's. They forbade Black's and Whites from having contact with each other. They freed their White servants and put some of them in charge of the Black servants. The wealthy began an appeal to whiteness, not out of inherent racism, but to maintain their political and economic power.
In the South Race has been used to distract Whites and Blacks very much like a pick pocket uses a bump so you will not notice as they pull out your wallet. By pitting Blacks and Whites against each other economically, and appealing to fear wealthy White elites have maintained control of a region since the Civil war and reconstruction, that has left the South in a condition much more like a Third World nation than a part of America.
You do not affirm black history by denying the history of working class White America. The fact that the Politically Correct version of history is still a race biased history doesn't dawn on them. One truth is that maybe instead of race the motivation was economic and therefore is no different than the employment of illegal aliens today to avoid paying good wages, observing work place safety, hour and wage laws and U. S. tax laws. with the reason being finding the cheapest labor.
But lets face it it is always easier to rewrite a song, clap ourselves on the back and pretend we have struck a great blow for human rights and call it a day, then it is to question the economic foundations of this country for the last 350 years that has always needed someone to exploit for cheap labor to the great profit of a narrow few.
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