What the Heck Happened to The Deep South? How to Cure Racism in America in 2016 by Hunter

What the Heck Happened to The Deep South? How to Cure Racism in America in 2016 by Hunter - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

Late March, 1864: Union General Nathaniel Banks has sent his gunboats up the river from Baton Rouge by way of New Orleans to capture Shreveport, Louisiana. Confederate General Richard Taylor, in an act of desperation,orders his snipers to shoot the smokestacks on the coal-driven boat. Buying time with their slowed pace, Taylor hollows out charred, black logs and sets them on faux wheels along either side of the riverbank towards Shreveport. As the Union approached, they caught a glimpse of "Fort Humbug" and ripped a 180 in the water back to safer ground. Yielding the naval advance, Banks sends his army from Keachi to Mansfield, and, after engaging Taylor in battle, is defeated by a General Custer/ambush maneuver. Union forces retreat back to Baton Rouge a second time and never reengage Shreveport, Mansfield, or Bossier City for the duration of the war. Then, Lincoln publishes the Emancipation Proclamation and prospectively robs the Confederate South of its way of life. Shreveport, a city both my parents were born and raised in, is steeped in a vicious racial tension and divide. And it's hard to draw the connection between a modern, blue collar town with a majority black population that never shook off Jim Crow to Post-War, Reconstruction. However, if you look closely at the historical context, this is a community that paid for its 'freedom' with the blood of sons and husbands and, despite victory, lost their way of life. That is a bitterness that survives to 2016.

The idea that we should have empathy for prejudicial behaviors or slavery's profiteers is inappropriate at best, but, to me, it's crucial to understand the origin of white supremacy as much as it is to understand the origin of, as Terrie Williams labels it, 'Black Pain.' In a time of war and uncertainty, when a fever and cold sweat could earn you your last rites, it fascinates me how we still haven't truly recovered from the constant anxieties that plagued our great-great-grandparents. Yet, when Tecumseh Sherman storms through on his March to the Sea, chances were he was going to burn your city to the ground (i.e. Atlanta). Or, take Savannah, Georgia: Sherman wrote Lincoln that, as a Christmas gift, he offered him the city of Savannah. That does something to your psyche, in my mind, if you're a 19th century American citizen dependent on the sun and rain for survival and prosperity. Like Shreveport, that is a bitterness that survives to 2016.

I would teach American history if the script was flipped, specifically from colonization to the beginning of the 20th century. To me, history has the chance to serve as a quasi-Freudian psychotherapy for our nation. If we can target the past events that have led to ongoing racial bias and analyze how that has developed our collective psychologies, White America may finally have the courage to ease their death grip on socio-political and economic welfare.

All I know is this: this essay is longer than the single page of text regarding The Civil War in my middle school history textbook and, if that's the extent of our enthusiasm for this topic, we're never going to get anywhere on the issue of race.