When I was a little kid growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, we played cowboys and Indians. Back then we're talking around 1970, my parents hadn't had their consciousness raised about that sort of cultural appropriation. For the cowboys we had guns with suction cup darts, and we ran around the yard shooting at each other. We played civil war and of course nobody was a Yankee. All the Yankees were imaginary. And then I thought of the world somewhat as up north and here. You may have heard him in a couple of our recent episodes. Tim Tyson is another white guy, roughly my age.
When it comes to America’s racial sins, past and present, a lot of us see people in one region of the country as guiltier than the rest. Host John Biewen spoke with some white Southern friends about that tendency. Part Six of our ongoing series, Seeing White. With recurring guest, Chenjerai Kumanyika.
Image: A lynching on Clarkson Street, New York City, during the Draft Riots of 1863. Credit: Greenwich Village Society of Historical Preservation.
Shannon Sullivan’s books, Revealing Whiteness and Good White People.
Thanks to Chris Julin, whose 1991 NPR report on the Wisconsin fishing rights dispute we featured.