quote:

They were godly

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ORIGINAL: cloudboy

Charles Blow had the best take on the Duck Dynasty business that I've read. Whole article is linked, pertinent excerpts below:


Robertson's interview reads as a commentary almost without malice, imbued with a matter-of-fact, this-is-just-the-way-I-see-it kind of Southern folksiness. To me, that is part of the problem. You don't have to operate with a malicious spirit to do tremendous harm. Insensitivity and ignorance are sufficient. In fact, intolerance that is disarming is the most dangerous kind. It can masquerade as morality.
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I want to focus on a passage on race from the interview, in which Robertson says:

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. ...They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! ...Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”


While this is possible, it is highly improbable. Robertson is 67 years old, born into the Jim Crow South. Only a man blind and naïve to the suffering of others could have existed there and not recognized that there was a rampant culture of violence against blacks, with incidents and signs large and small, at every turn, on full display.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

I grew up in a small town in Georgia and have family from small town Alabama.

I saw Klan rallies at Stone Mountain. I heard the routine use of the n word. I saw most of my friends in grade school leave when the courts forced the local school district redrawn to integrate the schools, they mostly went to a private school set up by the teachers who quite at the same time. I remember visiting my grandmother and being told to stay out of dogtown, what the locals called the town's black neighborhood. I remember being called an n lover simply because one of my friends was black. I remember when a black man was beaten for holding hands with a white girl in public.

I've seen racism here in Chicago and some of it has been ugly but none of it has been as ugly and overt as what I saw as a youth in the South.