I still say nobody gives a crap about a state poem - any state.  Ask 50 people at random and 49 will agree with me.  Even most academics, to be honest. Let this thread die a quick death

 

LSU Lit. PhD. wrote:

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Kids, Paul Ott may refer to John C. Stennis as "a southern statesman" but even a cursory examination of the record reveals Stennis as a staunch defender of segregation in the 50's and 60's. As with Strom Thurmond, Stennis's defense of institutionalized racism gave way, in his later years, to greater fairness. However, I'm pretty sure that in 1964, Stennis was among the last of a dozen or so Senate holdouts who supported the filibuster preventing the Civil Rights Act from coming to a vote. As such, he can lay claim to a certain infamy that, in the historical record, will, and should, outlast his later change of heart.
Ott's half-truths about Stennis, however, are of a piece with the way that the rest of the poem dishistoricizes the poet's subject in a torrent of cliches, worn out, sentimental imagery and odd, inappropriate references to Georgia (Ray Charles "Georgia on My Mind" and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind", which is set in and around Atlanta). These latter seem to suggest that Ott's grasp of Mississippi history and culture is pretty danged thin, at best.
In other words, "I Am Mississippi" participates in the same distortion and flattening of the historical record that has been a hallmark of American thought since Columbus "discovered" the Caribes and Arawaks into extinction back in the 15th Century. Because of this, "I Am Mississippi" is an exemplary poem about an American state. In its attempt to be "nice", to neither threaten nor anger anyone it exemplifes the cultural and intellectual vacuum of the entire contemporary American scene.
Hey, did anybody see what happened on "American Idol" last night?
 

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Hey bro,how about a little historical context. You probably hate those slaveholders George Wasington and Thomas Jefferson. Slavery and segregation may be bad,but they're part of the price blacks paid to leave the hovels and jungles of Africa.

You know, LSU, that moron's comment didn't really deserve a response. There's been someone posting on here for a few weeks lately making all these racist cracks, but not offering anything worthwhile or substantive. I respond to them sometimes, but it's probably best to issue a short rebuke and then ignore them. They're like the faculty haters on here, just posting to stir people up, nothing to offer.

That eloquent response rang my bell. Nods to one of my favorite posters when I say Let Freedom Ring.

LSU Lit. PhD. wrote:

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Filiopietist wrote:
Hey bro,how about a little historical context. You probably hate those slaveholders George Wasington and Thomas Jefferson. Slavery and segregation may be bad,but they're part of the price blacks paid to leave the hovels and jungles of Africa.

Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders, sure enough, and even though Jefferson agonized over the impact slavery had and would have, he also wrote one of the founding statements of white supremacism in Notes on the State of Virginia. Further, Washington and Jefferson, as so-called "founding fathers," also contributed to the way that slavery was made an accepted part of American institutions and political processes--through the 3/5's rule of proportional representation and other tenets and practices. These flaws in the USA's founding documents and institutions led directly to the bloodbath of 1861-65 and helped make white supremacism seem normal and natural--even patriotic--for generations afterwards. So yes, I do hold Jefferson and Washington partly responsible for the persistence of racism in the USA. I'm more in the Tom Paine-Fred Douglass-Eugene V. Debs--Bill Haywood revolutionary line: anti-elitist, genuinely revolutionary, not just some rich dude who was ticked off about having to pay taxes proportional to his slave-generated income. Being able to lay claim to that lineage is one of the things I love about being American. The slaveholders are not.
As for Filiopietist's claims about how slavery supposedly raised blacks out of "the hovels and jungles of Africa", what is on display there is the exact same ignorance and ethocentrism that European and American slaveowners and slavetraders wallowed in during the heyday of slavery.
Fact is, African cultures and civilizations were doing just fine before the introduction of the profit motive by European slavers. For instance, for hundreds of years, one of the largest libraries in the world was in Timbuktu, Mali. Scholars came from all over the Islamic world to study there. Thriving pre-industrial societies in West Africa worked metal, discovered herbal treatments for tropical diseases, practiced a deeply nuanced theocratic statescraft and social organization, traded with their Arab neighbors to the north and developed intensive agriculture that was more than able to keep starvation at bay. Their ancient traditions of song, drumming, dance and poetry played the role literacy plays in Euro-American nations, providing the glue that keeps a culture coherent and alive throughout time.
American chattel slavery, however, with its insatiable hunger for disposable workers, displaced the populations of entire districts, laid waste to W. African cultures and cities, and inflamed wars between competing African nations that made it easy for Britian, France, Belgium and Germany to colonize and further exploit the continent in the c.19th and c.20th. The result of all this destruction was the fulfillment of Eurocentric misperceptions of Africa--such as that voiced by Filiopietist--that it was a continent of hovels and jungle, a place where all native peoples lived in anarchy and savagery and thus needed the tender ministrations of the Middle Passage to be made civilized and secure. And Filiopietist, old buddy, the legacy of slavery and colonialism is still being worked out in Africa, amidst the "hovels and jungles" and bloody inter-tribal wars that four hundred years of European and American greed and racism made the norm there.
Think about Africa the next time you pull a one or a ten or a twenty out of your wallet. You might want to wash your hands afterwards, but it's about 218 years too late.
School's out. Ring the bell.

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Africa sounds like a super place.I wonder why all the Africans want to come to the USA and none want to go from the USA to Africa?

LSU Lit. PhD. wrote:

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Filiopietist wrote: Hey bro,how about a little historical context. You probably hate those slaveholders George Wasington and Thomas Jefferson. Slavery and segregation may be bad,but they're part of the price blacks paid to leave the hovels and jungles of Africa. Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders, sure enough, and even though Jefferson agonized over the impact slavery had and would have, he also wrote one of the founding statements of white supremacism in Notes on the State of Virginia. Further, Washington and Jefferson, as so-called "founding fathers," also contributed to the way that slavery was made an accepted part of American institutions and political processes--through the 3/5's rule of proportional representation and other tenets and practices. These flaws in the USA's founding documents and institutions led directly to the bloodbath of 1861-65 and helped make white supremacism seem normal and natural--even patriotic--for generations afterwards. So yes, I do hold Jefferson and Washington partly responsible for the persistence of racism in the USA. I'm more in the Tom Paine-Fred Douglass-Eugene V. Debs--Bill Haywood revolutionary line: anti-elitist, genuinely revolutionary, not just some rich dude who was ticked off about having to pay taxes proportional to his slave-generated income. Being able to lay claim to that lineage is one of the things I love about being American. The slaveholders are not. As for Filiopietist's claims about how slavery supposedly raised blacks out of "the hovels and jungles of Africa", what is on display there is the exact same ignorance and ethocentrism that European and American slaveowners and slavetraders wallowed in during the heyday of slavery. Fact is, African cultures and civilizations were doing just fine before the introduction of the profit motive by European slavers. For instance, for hundreds of years, one of the largest libraries in the world was in Timbuktu, Mali. Scholars came from all over the Islamic world to study there. Thriving pre-industrial societies in West Africa worked metal, discovered herbal treatments for tropical diseases, practiced a deeply nuanced theocratic statescraft and social organization, traded with their Arab neighbors to the north and developed intensive agriculture that was more than able to keep starvation at bay. Their ancient traditions of song, drumming, dance and poetry played the role literacy plays in Euro-American nations, providing the glue that keeps a culture coherent and alive throughout time. American chattel slavery, however, with its insatiable hunger for disposable workers, displaced the populations of entire districts, laid waste to W. African cultures and cities, and inflamed wars between competing African nations that made it easy for Britian, France, Belgium and Germany to colonize and further exploit the continent in the c.19th and c.20th. The result of all this destruction was the fulfillment of Eurocentric misperceptions of Africa--such as that voiced by Filiopietist--that it was a continent of hovels and jungle, a place where all native peoples lived in anarchy and savagery and thus needed the tender ministrations of the Middle Passage to be made civilized and secure. And Filiopietist, old buddy, the legacy of slavery and colonialism is still being worked out in Africa, amidst the "hovels and jungles" and bloody inter-tribal wars that four hundred years of European and American greed and racism made the norm there. Think about Africa the next time you pull a one or a ten or a twenty out of your wallet. You might want to wash your hands afterwards, but it's about 218 years too late. School's out. Ring the bell.

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Hey bro,you love Timbuktu! That's great,it was one of the leading centers of slave trade,way before white folks came along. Put them on your list with George Washington and John Stennis.What about the african slave traders. They were enslaving their brothers way before whitey came along. What about today's slave trade in Mauritania and Sudan? No white folks involved with that. I'll give you the societies with "songs ,drumming,dance and poetry": I'll take the alphabet anyday. The Robert Mugabes,Ide Amins,Samuel Does,and the rest are responsible for their actions,not the USA.   Maybe they forgot to teach you that at LSU.

400 year old wrote:

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Blaming all of Africa's problems on "400 years" of western greed is very oversimplified.  The Africans themselves were and are far more than simple victims in this scenerio.

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Through my Southern Mississippian eyes, I see blacks in native dress speaking Afrikaans. I can buy fish from a market stall selling African Caribbean food. I see white South Africans who speak with nostalgia about their homeland.  The native born European blacks seem so distinguished and well dressed on the tube train. I don’t know any personally … yet. There’s a South African food store just down the block where I get my ground maize (that’s corn meal to you all.) It seems to me as if the blacks here still have their dignity and self-respect; a real identity. This is not something I can say about the African-Americans where I come from. Something is just not right about that. There doesn’t seem to be a respect for culture in Mississippi besides MS culture, whatever that is.

 

Let’s abolish slavery once and for all and free ourselves from this over-simplistic mentality which ferments and mutates in closed minded system called Mississippi.

Denmark Vesey wrote:

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I hope LSU Ph.D. gives up trying to teach you anything Filiopest: racist cretins like you will only be instructed by Dr. Winchester, Dr. Kalishnikov, Dr. Remington. The day can't come soon enough . . .

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Let me get this straight -- you're accusing someone else of being a racist, and your solution is shooting them. And that makes things better?

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=OPINION04

I believe reasonable people can stipulate that slavery is wrong and that the US would have been better off if slaves had never been brought to this country. It's a fair question to ask who is better off,the descendants of those slaves brought many generations ago to the US or the descendants of the black africans who remained in their country.By any objective measurement of quality of life,those enjoying American citizenship are fortunate. The US was a very minor participant in the African colonization game of the late 1800s. Our country did back several African rulers from 1960 on who proved to be corrupt dictators. Mobutu of Zaire (or whatever the country is called thesedays) comes to mind.Usually it was a case of our anti-communist dictator versus their communist dictator.Our country,in particular this administration,has provided billions of dollars in aid to sub-Saharan Africa. Africa is a continent of great natural resources. Hopefully the black leadership will become more competent and less corrupt with time.