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Vice Blog

New York - History Dumbshits

There are few things as funny/aneurysm-inducing as when people with no concept of historical perspective decide to get indignant about things in the past. The sterling minds at Animal magazine recently took an old documentary about the NYC subway to task for portraying the city as a viewer-friendly, lillywhite honkopolis in spite of its inherent diversity. We were so taken by the entry's final dagger that we decided to dredge up the census records from New York in the 40s to see for ourselves how much racial flava was excluded. You know what? They're right: It was probably HELL trying to keep the city's then 8% population of blacks, latinos, and other non-whites out of frame. Of course, the fact that each tiny ethnic group was sequestered in its own neighborhood enclave (the de facto segregation they contradict their whole point by mentioning) might have helped a little. Who's really to say?

The one thing that tops idiots trying to export their views onto the past is when smart people try do it. If you grew up in or spent any time in the South, you're already aware of how conservative middle-class intellectuals like to get bent out of shape about the Civil War and racism. Rather than focusing on how, just like in pre-Nazi Germany, Yankee Republicans cockblocked the South's economic recovery after the war and paved the way for the rise of Jim Crow and the Klan, these Dixiephiles spend all their energy trying to convince the world (and themselves) that slavery had nothing to do with breaking away from the Union. The big chestnut they love to toss out is how Stonewall Jackson and Robert E Lee and Jeb Stuart and everyone all claimed they would have freed their slaves if that would have stopped the war, which neatly overlooks the fact that they never did, until Lincoln did it for them (they also like to point out how Abe was secretly a racist, which therefore absolves the majority of the Confederacy from being more-or-less founded on open racism).

This whole revision-spree has led to an entire cottage industry wherein historical-fiction luminaries like Harry Turtledove and RW Richards have created their own fantasy-league Confederacies in which newly-free slaves fight alongside their former captors to Southern victory, their military prowess blessed with time-traveled-in automatic weaponry (Turtledove) and the strength to fire a ten-pound rifle with singlehandedly even if they are an old former slave who needs a cane to walk (Richards, above). It's basically the history-nerd equivalent of those stories goths are always getting in trouble for writing about shooting all the jocks at their high-school while wearing eyeliner.