andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> And Southern black people aren't Southern? Unlike
> Carl, who, in a metaphysically weird manner creates a
> Southern culture that has no black contribution, the
> blacks who lived down south longer than most whites
> were just aliens "reacting" to white southern culture,
Southern "white" culture would have been fundamentally 'focused' as it were by the "black problem." This perception seems to be the informing drive of the works of Faulkner. Some (white) writer, I forget who, told of his grandmother in her old age having nightmares that the blacks were coming to punish her for her racist misdeeds. (That's not phrased the way the writer phrased it, but the memory was dim and I had forgotten it completely until I typed the first two sentences of this paragraph.
And in this sense "Southern White" culture is American White Culture, for that culture is unintelligible abstracted from the "peculiar institution," which has remained equally peculiar to the present in its post-emancipation forms.
Carl should consider whether his indiscriminate attack on the south is not just a way of coming to terms (or rather avoiding coming to terms) with the racism of the north, of his family, and of his culture.
Carrol