Revisited Richmond Va Fan District this week, 12-2022, arriving the day they took down the last Confederate Statue on Monument Ave.
Psychic landscape report– the Unquiet Dead of Richmond are Happier and less Traumatized now. Humans have acknowledged their issues actually existed. That Richmond was a center of forced breeding of enslaved people, and trafficking in children is now broadly acknowledged, and when they celebrate the Confederacy, that is what they are celebrating, ultimately.
And I would like to address the unmitigated nonsense of believing ‘nobody knew slavery was wrong.’ The presumption is revealing that ‘everybody’ in the sense they mean it, never included enslaved people themselves, or the other poor people, who saw the enslaved as a threat to their status and wages. I venture to say EVERYBODY knew that Enslavement was ‘Wrong,’ in the sense that moralists and women had issues with it, but that most everybody was powerless to stop the Very Rich from doing exactly as they pleased, legal or not. Importation of slaves continued only little abated after it was made illegal. The US fought a War against England partly over the right of American-Flagged ships not to be boarded and searched by the British Navy, so they could keep smuggling slaves and other contraband, as they always had. (Read _Smuggler Nation_) But nobody thought it was ‘right,’ even those who relied on it indirectly for their wealth and position. A few of them advanced the position that slavery had been the basis of Civilization back to Athens and Jerusalem, but they HAD to advance that position. It was anything but obvious to ordinary folks.
Still, I can imagine what it’d be like to talk with residents of Monument Ave now. Their addresses don’t mean the same thing, nor feel the same now. I imagine they feel like Victims, like people somewhere else got this whole Hating Wyt People thing going, and that got a crowd all nasty at THEM because, what, they had the money to buy a Nice House, with a Prestigious Address? And they bought some historic Home, and assumed its Expenses? That is their Great Sin? THEY never enslaved anyone, nor went to war against America. Why is everyone all hating on THEM? Still, their idea of the Nice House, that would please their friends, family, bosses, clients, etc, was to buy one on the First Street of Confederate Sympathy in the US, the veritable Ground Zero of Wyt Supremacism. So while I am sure they are blind to any guilt on their part or to deserving the hassle and cost they have absorbed, I am not blind to it. Seems about right.