INTEGRATED HISTORY

Some people segregate historical narratives--e.g., the story of America--into histories of separate peoples. However, they cannot be separated without creating a sanitized, falsified history. A true historiography of America is the history of one country, not separate peoples. (And, yes, part of that narrative IS the legal segregation of "races" who were still in a relation with each other.) Explicitly, you cannot write the (white) history of America, as if there is a such thing, without writing alongside (actually within it) it the history of people of color in America. How would you write the narrative of the founding of (European) America without including the story of Native Americans? History is a fabric in which you cannot look at only the warp without the weave (there would be no "fabric," no substance).


 If there is any such thing as a "white history," it can only be understood as a relation with people of color in America. At the level of individual people, many white families in America (mine included) can only properly be understood by including (largely unacknowledged and unwritten) narratives of relations with blacks. No group "deserves" a "place"--that's segregated historiography; but the real story must be written and taught.


Historical themes and strands must be chosen. If a widely lauded and salient theme of America--what we are about and who we are--has been the historical development of freedom, liberty, democracy, empowering the common man, justice, and so on--how could you disinclude the narrative of black struggle for all these things? Is it not logical to make the case that this is one of the most important narratives in American (indeed world) history? This narrative can ONLY be written, not by segregating the story, but by including "black history" as integral to the American narrative.

NEW AGE (NON)ORGANIZATION

I think it facile to claim, as some people do, that a rather amorphous, mostly unconnected group of people--in this case, the so-called New Age "movement"--has any conniving strategy to take over an established religion (Christianity). It is instead a "Christian-spiritualist" idea to attribute to an unorganized group of people a reification which is not there. It is a trait of the human mind to find meaning, such as finding faces in clouds. Humans are, after all, what I call Homo habilis sententia--Man, Meaning-Maker (admittedly a rather clumsy label). Others describe the phenomenon as "hypertrophy of social cognition"--seeing intention, direction, purpose, even when there is none. I would say "New Agers" believe that any spiritual development occurs only in the hearts and minds of people. They are a rather passive lot.

To use the words of Alice Bailey and other Theosophists, who were writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is, I believe, looking too far outside the current historical context to an earlier outmoded time. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, a top, medaled scientist at the time (and not a Theosophist) used language, and believed, in ways we today label racist. Terms such as "primitive races" reflected the thinking of the time and would have been used in Christian pulpits throughout North America and Europe. The evolutionist-primitive/superior races language was written in every school textbook used in America. Those were the beliefs at that time and led to the "White Man's burden" program of taking Christianity to the "inferior races." In contrast, the Theosophists seem quite benign.

Anachronistic use today of writings to judge past peoples is invalid historiography. Otherwise, we would have to judge Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and others, in a different light. They were, after all, what we today would understand as individuals terribly bigoted toward African-Americans and Native Americans. But my concern here is the use of history--earlier esoteric writings of a century past--to judge people who today might think of themselves as "New Age." By the same token, it would not be proper to judge Christians today using sermons from yestercentury.

SINGLE-STRING THEORY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE

In the 1990s I used to hear about a Southern secessionist group called the Southern League, named after the secessionist Northern League, of Italy. It was forced to change its name to the League of the South after it was threatened by lawsuit from the AAA minor league baseball association with the same, and prior, name.

The League of the South was based more or less at the University of Alabama and published an "academic" journal (I had some copies) and held conventions, one of which took place here on the Gulf Coast a few years ago.

What distinguishes them is their patina of academic, intellectual, and nonracist rhetoric. They are mostly university professors who espouse States' rights, "Southern culture and heritage" (their version), and a traditionalist, conservative, regionalist return to supposed historic values.

There was an interesting academic battle going on a few years ago between them and a female historian at the University of Alabama, who published some articles about them. Seems I recall that one of her main points was that, in spite of claims of being nonracist, in truth they are that.

I say she is correct. Yesteryear's Southern (white, Christian, traditionalist) values WERE racist. It would be, I believe, an obfuscation to espouse those values and somehow pretend to excise the racialist subtext of those traditions. This would be a falsification of history, revisionism at its worst. Its historiography is not up to acceptable standards.

Southern culture came about as interaction, a close intertwining, of white and black subcultures. One canNOT be understood without looking at the other. As a methododology of historiography, the League of the South is trying to unravel one thread of a string that has two threads. Both threads make the string what it is.

So, for the League of the South and others of the same ilk to claim that there was some pure white, Southern culture is a historical impossibility. Only in their imagination could one exist. In the real world, it did not.