Day Lilies and White Privilege

I finally caught one of our day lilies in bloom. They're buried so deep in the underbrush of our garden that they're almost impossible to see. This clump by the bird bath gets the most light and I believe it's the only one that has a flower. One of the many tasks on my someday-I'll-get-to-it list is to liberate our day lilies from the twilight darkness in which most of them live, either by moving them or pruning the plants around them.

I showed you the bud of our pink dahlia a few days ago -- here it is in full flower.

I had a relatively low-key day yesterday. I got two calls from the NHS wanting to know the results of my Day 2 post-travel Covid test. Unfortunately those results didn't come until 1:30 this morning (negative), so no doubt they'll be calling again today to follow up. I honestly don't mean to complain about this NHS contact, because I understand the need for it, but I wonder why they call me so often. Wouldn't once a day, or once every two days, be sufficient?

Then again, the NHS is the only excitement I get at the moment.

I'm reading an interesting book called "Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy," by Edward Ball. It traces the life of the author's ancestors -- one in particular -- in 19th century Louisiana, bringing to life the racism and violence of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. I've found it quite illuminating, and also painful -- I come mostly from Southern ancestors myself, and it's not difficult to imagine them holding similar attitudes to Ball's. I have never heard, though, that my relatives joined the Ku Klux Klan, as Ball's did -- and I'm still unclear on the extent to which my family owned slaves. They were farmers, and somewhat prosperous, but they weren't wealthy.

One thing I like about the book, though, is its insistence that we consider the effects of our racist past on the structure of our current society. While I was in Florida I had a discussion/argument with my brother-in-law about white privilege, and how I understand that although I personally try to hold racially progressive views, I have benefitted from wealth and opportunities accrued by my ancestors through the labor and oppression of black workers. And I recognize that while I can link no specific incidents to my family, anti-black violence is part of my heritage.

For example, Ball relates the story of a brutal attack by white supremacists, including his great-great grandfather Constant, on a political gathering at Mechanics Hall in New Orleans in 1866:

It is not a distortion to say that Constant’s rampage 150 years ago helps, in some impossible-to-measure way, to clear space for the authority and comfort of whites living now — not just for me and for his fifty or sixty descendants, but for whites in general. I feel shame about it. That is not a distortion, either. I am an heir to Constant’s acts of terror. I do not deny it, and the bitter truth makes me sick at the stomach.

Whites are my people, my tribe. They were Constant’s people, his tribe. In that way he belongs to us, and to hundreds of millions. I know the honest way to regard race violence is this: American history is full of it. It is pandemic. The United States was founded upon racial violence. It is within the core of our national identity.

Here is a way not to see these events: The marauders like Constant are immoral, abject and bad people. They are not like us, they belong to someone else. 

It is truer to say this: the marauders are our people, and they fight for us.

I think that pretty succinctly summarizes the concept of white privilege. I would add -- not to deny but to more broadly acknowledge that privilege -- that while the American South elevated racial violence to extreme levels, we are hardly the only country or society to oppress, or benefit from that oppression.

It's also interesting how little I know about some of these events. I know Reconstruction was a violent period, but I don't ever remember hearing about the Mechanics Hall riots, in which hundreds of people were killed, wounded and arrested (mostly black, many of them attacked simply because they happened to be on the street at that time). It makes me realize the blind spots in my own knowledge. Was I just not paying attention in history class, or did we not talk in detail about episodes like this?

Anyway, it's a thought-provoking book.

Here's one more garden picture. Our wildflower seedlings, which I planted several weeks ago, have finally grown to a respectable size, and some of them are about to bloom. It looks like a few blue cornflowers made it after all!