The writer Alan Gergainis says white folks who feel innocent because they're not southern should remember. All of us in this country are answering daily if we're paying any kind of attention to the sins of the fathers and grandfathers that are visited, as the Bible says, under the second and third generation. The rest of the country is just as much America as the south is. And Alan says the European who discovered the place, set the tone for America as a whole, right from the start.
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.