Do whites really run scared of black history?

In my blog post yesterday, I encouraged readers to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, 'Other People's Pathologies, in The Atlantic.  As I normally do, I tweeted a few times with a link to my blog post:

Without slavery there is no democracy; without slavery there is no American dream; without slavery there's no America http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014

The United States didn't save black people; black people saved the United States of America: Ta-Nehisi Coats nails it http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014

Black culture, white supremacy, and American democracy. http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014

What's been fascinating to observe is the reaction to it, and by that I mean the relative lack of reaction or interest.

Normally when I tweet a blog post, no matter how banal, it registers about 5 or 6 click-throughs from Twitter to the blog post.  Each of these tweets got somewhere between 0 and 1 person clicking to read it, at roughly the same times of the day as I would normally tweet the link.

Regular sources of traffic to the blog (from the UK), such as Lib Dem Blogs and Lib Dem Voice have been noticeably quiet in terms of traffic.

Have I failed to sell the blog post as well as others I have written, or is indifference to black history as bad as (or perhaps even worse than) I alluded to in the post itself?  Writing the post has been almost as enlightening as reading the Coates essay.

White supremacy and the birth of American democracy

Had the Union soundly and quickly defeated the Confederacy, it's very likely that slavery would have remained. Instead the war dragged on, and the Union was forced to employ blacks in its ranks. The end result—total emancipation—was more a matter of military necessity than moral progress...

The United States did not save black people; black people saved the United States of America.  With that task complete, our "ally" proceeded to repay its debt to its black citizens by pretending they did not exist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written one of the most powerful essays on American history, and the black experience within it, that I have ever read.  I hesitated about including the words "and the black experience within it" because, at its core, it runs against the spirit of the truths that Coates writes.

Oh East is East, and West is West

I listened the other day to an interview of Jamie Bryson, leading flegger shit-stirrer flag protester and putative European election candidate (that'll be a laugh).  Now wee Jamie is not exactly famous for his joined-up thinking (in fact there are probably those who would be pleasantly surprised if he has managed joined-up writing), but there was a section of the interview that got me thinking.

Jamie was asked to imagine a world where he was First Minister of Northern Ireland, and asked whether he would share government with Sinn Féin.  Unsurprisingly he immediately ruled it out; the interviewer (David McCann) pressed him if he would share government with parties linked to loyalist paramilitaries.  Here is Jamie's response:

Personally I believe that the IRA were terrorists who set out to destroy this country. Now if the British government had allowed the UDR, RUC and the British army to take on the IRA as they wanted to…there would never have been a need for the likes of the UVF. Unfortunately the British government did not let the good men of the UDR, RUC and the British army take on the IRA, so that is why Loyalist paramilitaries came into being.

David McCann then pointed out to Jamie that the UVF was formed in 1966 (partly in response to rising tensions surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising), three years before the Provisional IRA came into existence in response to the Official IRA's failure to protect Catholic families and homes from loyalist mobs during rioting in Belfast in the summer of 1969 (1500 Catholics were forced from their homes), and from the predations of the RUC and the 'B' Specials (Ulster Special Constabulary) - the quasi-military, and almost exclusively Protestant, reserve police force of the RUC.  (I'm not trying to engage in what John Hume used to call 'whataboutery' here, just providing context for those who may not be familiar).  The depressing chronicle below provides ample context.

The Past Is A Foreign Country;

They do things differently there.

So wrote L.P. Hartley in the opening lines of The Go-Between.

But when we see photos of the past in colour, it helps bridge the gap that separates us from the world before 1960.

I love old photographs nearly as much as flags and maps, and have seen some collections of coloured (colourized?) black-and-white photos before, but another popped up earlier today on Facebook, and some of the images are amazing.

Check out some of these beautiful photographs put together by 22 Words:

Washington D.C., 1921