Monday, May 25, 2009
KKK
One thing we really didn't talk about is the KKK. I was surprised that Effie viewed them in a positive way. I guess I didn't realize that they were ever seen as something positive by society outside of the people who liked the idea of killing black people.
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If you think about it, many people in society had black servants, especially in the south. So I'm sure they thought of them as property and inferior human beings. Just because they were "society" people, didn't make them decent or righteous. I think one goal of the KKK was to protect the rights of white Americans, and many of them saw the freedom of blacks as a threat against their rights. I guess it stems from them not seeing blacks as equal and therefore not thinking blacks deserve the same freedoms as they had (like education, land ownership, etc.) I wasn't surprised that some people thought of them in a positive way.
Forgive me for putting this into an analogy that I understand ;-) It's like Sirius's family and their perception of the Death Eaters. And it's not unique to the south, either. I just finished /The Dante Club/ and late-nineteenth century Bostonians had all kinds of "protective" prejudices. The Irish hated the Italians because they feared the few jobs available to them would be taken away. Etc. etc.
Well, I guess it isn't that I didn't think that there were white society people who agreed with the klan, it was that I didn't see the klan as having a positive public image. I thought that they hid from the light of day so to speak.
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