CNN shocked ... the DNC plantation revolt

Im’a gessin you are talkin out your ass halve the time.

Wrote no Southerner from the Civil War era ever.

There’s no room to be smug against Southerners when you’re not even aware of history enough to spot an obvious forgery.

When history is faked or forged, it cheapens the real thing. What happened to blacks was terrible, and it needs to be remembered exactly like it was for a lot of reasons. First, faking things gives deniers or minimizers a foothold to attack the real history. It happens a little bit in Civil War and American slavery history but you really see it a lot in Holocaust denial. Second, fake facts lead to wrong lessons. If you see something in history you don’t want to happen again, you have to analyze the problem accurately. Third, and this ties in a little bit with the first point, if you want to bring reconciliation between two groups, in this case being white and black Southerners, neither side should latch on to fake caricatures of the other. Some of the historical truths are hard. So to stop someone from looking away from something they don’t want to face, you got to stick to what cannot be denied. The real posters are shocking to modern sensibilities on their own terms. Forging fake language on them gives a white Southerner an excuse to look away and discount it, while making the white Southerner feel villainized by the dishonest Other. Keep it totally real, and there’s no valid reason to not take in the full implication of what the real poster means. What it would have looked like to put blacks on a platform and auction them off. Possibly separate their families. What would you have seen in their eyes? Anger? Defiance? Sadness and resignation? I sort of think many of them would have looked like John Coffee from The Green Mile. Sweet, gentle, and sad. But would have bared it as their lot in life. Which for me would have been the worst to see. However I can imagine in, it happened in some form. So make me consider it. Don’t give me the excuse by adding a lot of modern political garbage to it.

Confederate flag stuff is similar. There’s a right and effective way, and then an ineffective way, to challenge Southerners about it.