Brent Staples keeps doing these interesting columns
Quote of note:
The city was also a center for mixed-race people, thanks to generations of encounters between Charleston's white elite and the legions of slaves who were needed to sustain the opulent Charlestonian lifestyle. (The historian Joel Williamson wrote that the city was "half white and half Negro, and its Negro half was more white than black.") Charleston's wealthy free people of color were often eager slave owners, and many of them shared with whites a derisive attitude toward the darker black masses.
…This reality of a socially complex, mixed-race South — with whites and blacks closely related by blood and mutually complicit in slavery — disappeared from public view as the country adopted simplistic formulations of the racial past.
The mutual complicity is limited: slave owners were a low percentage of the white community and a vanishingly small fraction of the Black community. And simplistic formulations are necessary for rhetorical purposes…clear thought is the greatest enemy of any party position.
But let's sum up a bit. Who established the racial rhetoric in this country? Who is really in denial about the total absence of the "racial purity" neo-Confederates and their ilk defend?
Wasn't me…
Anyway…
Strom Thurmond Continued: The Known World of Ms. Washington-Williams
By BRENT STAPLES
If newspapers reach the afterlife, then Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina is having a fitful time in that great Senate chamber in the sky. Mr. Thurmond, who died last year at the age of 100, spent half of the 20th century fending off the rumor that he had fathered a child of Carrie Butler, a black maid who worked in his family's home during the 1920's. He had been dead less than a year when Ms. Butler's daughter, a retired teacher named Essie Mae Washington-Williams, came forward to claim him as her father, explaining that he had met secretly with her for decades while denying her existence in public.
As a young woman, Ms. Washington-Williams calculated that having a fraction of a father glimpsed in back rooms was preferable to having no father at all. But since his death, she has laid claim to the Thurmond legacy in a very public way, not least of all by having her name inscribed alongside the names of the senator's other children on the Thurmond memorial outside the South Carolina Statehouse. Along the way, she has consciously transformed her family's story into a penetrating lesson on the history of race in the early South.
White patriarchs who trafficked in racism by day and sired black children at night are an archetype in the history of the South, where white and black families have always been more closely related by blood than many whites cared to admit. The final public outing of Mr. Thurmond was viewed with amusement in black communities across the country.
But amusement turned to perplexity recently when Ms. Washington-Williams announced that she would embrace her white heritage by applying for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a historically white group founded in the 19th century to memorialize Southern valor in the war to preserve slavery.
Ms. Washington-Williams said through her lawyer that she was not condoning slavery but was exploring her heritage in a way that she hoped would produce a richer dialogue about race. As a former teacher, she clearly recognizes the instructional value of her family's story. By showing that families who appear to be white at one time can appear to be black at another, she is underscoring the fact that race is a more elastic concept than most contemporary Americans understand.
