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firebreath613Yesterday, I got sucked into the History Channel's The Ku Klux Klan: A Secret History. It totally creeped me out.
Here's the thing. When you think of the Klan, you think of burning crosses and lynchings - horrific acts that any sane, moral person would object to. What got to me about the documentary: In the 1920s, the Klan grew have MILLIONS of members across the United States. And most of them DIDN'T get into it to hang blacks or burn down buildings. They weren't necessarily in favor of terrorism or murder; they saw those acts as the extremist, or perhaps necessary evils.
No, it was much more insidious. It was about exclusion. Excluding blacks, Jews, Catholics, union members. They spoke of lofty ideals about purity, patriotism, chastity, Christianity, conformity. They had members who were highly educated from Ivy League schools. They had members in all ranks of government and authority - judges, police, senators, etc (kind of like "Fight Club"). They marched in Fourth of July parades. Basically, it was our version of Nazism, and it included about 15 percent of the nation's population.
The Klan, of course, had its ups and downs and got more extreme in the '60s. And Klansmen who killed blacks or white civil-rights activists usually got off scott-free on their trials because of sympathizers in the juries. They HATED MLK with a passion. Even as late as 1979 the Klan had the manpower to bring terror upon an anti-Klan protest.
The more subtle aspects of the Klan are the ones that are disturbing me. Because most people you meet now would agree genocide and torture are wrong. How long does it take to get from fascism and exclusion to slaughter? Todd reminded me that Tulsa was the KKK headquarters in the '20s. And an OU vice president, Edwin DeBarr, who had his name on the chemistry building for a long time, was a grand dragon.
Oklahoma the state, Todd reminded me, was formed by a bunch of whites who didn't fit in elsewhere. I think about this sometimes, too. If you're familiar with college football, you've heard of the OU Sooners. People at OSU like to make much of the fact that "Sooners" are cheaters, because they cheated on the Land Run of 1889, which is true. Sooners of the football kind, in fact, have been cheaters, but that's another matter. Most of Stillwater is named after "Boomers" - it's in Payne county and contains Couch and Boomer parks - who were WORSE than Sooners (OU's chant is "Boomer Sooner," so it's not off that hook). Samuel Couch and David Payne were two guys who were pissed off that the Indians had their own land and decided to take it back, outside the law.
We used to have "Land Run Day" in grade school and preschool, and it was kind of fun. You got dressed up like a "pioneer" and then you raced to get the best spot on the playground for lunching. But no one ever told us that the Land Run was all about taking land that belonged to the Indians. Granted, the Land Run stretched from Stillwater to Norman and that area was the "Unassigned Territories." But what happened? We took over their assigned territories, too.
Oklahoma had Indians before we put Indians there. They were fearsome buffalo-hunting nomads like Comanches and Apaches. And of course, the government was terrified of them. The Five Civilized Tribes were the ones we could bully around. They were the most assimilated - the Cherokees, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek. They built towns with homes, churches and schools just like white towns. And what is their reward? They got forced to WALK from Georgia and other Southern states to Oklahoma, land the whites didn't want. (Where the Comanches and Apaches could terrorize them, too.) Later, the whites said, "Wait, we do want it!" So we took it back.
Anyway, the KKK documentary made me think about all the things I hate about being in Oklahoma. Conformity. It's a culture where most people try their hardest to blend in and be just like everyone else. I was trying to find things I like about Stillwater (where the best dive bar is named after a Civil War battle - and I don't want to know why). I meet up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_the_antihero at this pool hall called JR Murphys, which was playing heinously bad '80s and '90s music, as in Richard Marx and Vanessa Williams. And in came a gaggle of sorority and frat types - all the girls had the same bleach blonde hair. The exact same hair. They looked so much alike you could not distinguish one from the other. Interestingly, frats and sororities: Started for the same reason as the KKK. Exclusion, right?
Purity. A friend of mine, she's 29, too. And she's been getting hell from her family and people at her church for sleeping at her fiance's house.madkitty made me watch "Equilibrium" and at the time, I thought the premise was kind of ridiculous: Who would outlaw emotions? But then it's like, yeah, it does happen on a much more subtle level.
Of course, the prudish stuff is a Southern Baptist thing, and my folks and plenty of Southern Baptists I know are not racists. Afraid of the unknown other, and right now that's the gays. I feel like some of that fascism is boiling to the surface against Islamic and Arabic Americans. It's weird. Most Americans I know, myself included, like to think we're a better country than most places, being founded on democratic ideals about freedom. But horrible things that we supposedly oppose have been going on since our founding. It's disheartening when you think about it. It is true, that we do have more freedom of speech and religion and more equal rights for women and minorities than many places in the world. But the thing we aspire to, we've never really achieved.
Todd and I had a really interesting conversation about all the really ugly things that are socially accepted in our society, and the subtle ways racism, misogyny and homophobia thrives. Like, why are the Rolling Stones so big still? Why not the Who? Well who represents unabashed swaggering machismo?
Chanelle likes to say sometimes that hipsterism reinforces white supremacy. I think that's too broad of a statement to make. Most hipster artists in Oakland can afford to be poor, which is not a luxury that say a black person born in West Oakland would have: Do I want to be rich or poor? I choose poor! Like, "I went to Darmouth and now I am rejecting corporate values and living without a job." (This could apply to me, too).
I went out with this guy Monday who was into the whole spockmorgue music scene. Which is the hippest of hipster cliques in the Bay Area. It's all about noise and chaos and costumes, and he admitted as much. Although devoted spockmorguers will tell you it's about making the audience part of the performance. He's a very creative guy (and the sort that always falls for me, I don't know why). He wants to make art with multicolored shit (not real shit, mind you) and candy blood.
When he brought up spockmorgue, it was like he flipped a switch inside me: NOT INTERESTED. And I realized: I am so sick of those people. I want nothing to do with them. Sure, I might like to go to spockmorgue show for the spectacle, to watch boys run around in nothing but socks on their penises and scream like derranged animals. But I'm really over that crowd. Because it is about exclusion and superiority. And cynicism and sarcasm and post-feminist, post-civil-rights irony espoused by Vice magazine. What, you don't get it? You must not be that intelligent.
Here's what I've come to terms with: I don't ever want to get jaded to the point I don't like music that sounds like music. I like songs that are pretty. I like songs that express emotion. I like songs that remind me why life is beautiful and painful and sad and hopeful. I want songs that make me want to shake my hips or fall in love. Arcade Fire speaks to me 100 times greater than Friends Forever. I don't WANT to have to listen to bearded seals wailing to get my rocks off.
And while I admit, multicolored poop and edible blood are imaginative - Chanelle (and Kurt Vonnegut in "Bluebeard") would ask, "What does this art say about the human condition?" OK, the contrast: Cute and unoffensive crossed with unpleasant bodily functions. Shallow, thanks! I met a humble guy who sings country songs (and he didn't call, but that's OK), and he was infinitely more interesting to me. How many people in the world have sung country songs? Millions. Yet I'm convinced his art is more honest and affecting.
I love a lot of "hipsters" to death. They have rad haircuts and handmade clothes. Some wear baseball shirts and Chuck Taylors. But the ones I love are the ones who are open-minded, who accept people regardless of how they dress, who are interested in learning and find out life's meaning and connecting to other people. Those are the people I really like and the people I want in my life. They also make the art and music that I connect to.
People who are about exclusion - don't need them. I guess I want to exclude the people who are about exclusion. Which probably makes me some sort of hypocrite. It's a contradiction I can live with.
Here's the thing. When you think of the Klan, you think of burning crosses and lynchings - horrific acts that any sane, moral person would object to. What got to me about the documentary: In the 1920s, the Klan grew have MILLIONS of members across the United States. And most of them DIDN'T get into it to hang blacks or burn down buildings. They weren't necessarily in favor of terrorism or murder; they saw those acts as the extremist, or perhaps necessary evils.
No, it was much more insidious. It was about exclusion. Excluding blacks, Jews, Catholics, union members. They spoke of lofty ideals about purity, patriotism, chastity, Christianity, conformity. They had members who were highly educated from Ivy League schools. They had members in all ranks of government and authority - judges, police, senators, etc (kind of like "Fight Club"). They marched in Fourth of July parades. Basically, it was our version of Nazism, and it included about 15 percent of the nation's population.
The Klan, of course, had its ups and downs and got more extreme in the '60s. And Klansmen who killed blacks or white civil-rights activists usually got off scott-free on their trials because of sympathizers in the juries. They HATED MLK with a passion. Even as late as 1979 the Klan had the manpower to bring terror upon an anti-Klan protest.
The more subtle aspects of the Klan are the ones that are disturbing me. Because most people you meet now would agree genocide and torture are wrong. How long does it take to get from fascism and exclusion to slaughter? Todd reminded me that Tulsa was the KKK headquarters in the '20s. And an OU vice president, Edwin DeBarr, who had his name on the chemistry building for a long time, was a grand dragon.
Oklahoma the state, Todd reminded me, was formed by a bunch of whites who didn't fit in elsewhere. I think about this sometimes, too. If you're familiar with college football, you've heard of the OU Sooners. People at OSU like to make much of the fact that "Sooners" are cheaters, because they cheated on the Land Run of 1889, which is true. Sooners of the football kind, in fact, have been cheaters, but that's another matter. Most of Stillwater is named after "Boomers" - it's in Payne county and contains Couch and Boomer parks - who were WORSE than Sooners (OU's chant is "Boomer Sooner," so it's not off that hook). Samuel Couch and David Payne were two guys who were pissed off that the Indians had their own land and decided to take it back, outside the law.
We used to have "Land Run Day" in grade school and preschool, and it was kind of fun. You got dressed up like a "pioneer" and then you raced to get the best spot on the playground for lunching. But no one ever told us that the Land Run was all about taking land that belonged to the Indians. Granted, the Land Run stretched from Stillwater to Norman and that area was the "Unassigned Territories." But what happened? We took over their assigned territories, too.
Oklahoma had Indians before we put Indians there. They were fearsome buffalo-hunting nomads like Comanches and Apaches. And of course, the government was terrified of them. The Five Civilized Tribes were the ones we could bully around. They were the most assimilated - the Cherokees, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek. They built towns with homes, churches and schools just like white towns. And what is their reward? They got forced to WALK from Georgia and other Southern states to Oklahoma, land the whites didn't want. (Where the Comanches and Apaches could terrorize them, too.) Later, the whites said, "Wait, we do want it!" So we took it back.
Anyway, the KKK documentary made me think about all the things I hate about being in Oklahoma. Conformity. It's a culture where most people try their hardest to blend in and be just like everyone else. I was trying to find things I like about Stillwater (where the best dive bar is named after a Civil War battle - and I don't want to know why). I meet up with
_the_antihero at this pool hall called JR Murphys, which was playing heinously bad '80s and '90s music, as in Richard Marx and Vanessa Williams. And in came a gaggle of sorority and frat types - all the girls had the same bleach blonde hair. The exact same hair. They looked so much alike you could not distinguish one from the other. Interestingly, frats and sororities: Started for the same reason as the KKK. Exclusion, right?Purity. A friend of mine, she's 29, too. And she's been getting hell from her family and people at her church for sleeping at her fiance's house.
madkitty made me watch "Equilibrium" and at the time, I thought the premise was kind of ridiculous: Who would outlaw emotions? But then it's like, yeah, it does happen on a much more subtle level.Of course, the prudish stuff is a Southern Baptist thing, and my folks and plenty of Southern Baptists I know are not racists. Afraid of the unknown other, and right now that's the gays. I feel like some of that fascism is boiling to the surface against Islamic and Arabic Americans. It's weird. Most Americans I know, myself included, like to think we're a better country than most places, being founded on democratic ideals about freedom. But horrible things that we supposedly oppose have been going on since our founding. It's disheartening when you think about it. It is true, that we do have more freedom of speech and religion and more equal rights for women and minorities than many places in the world. But the thing we aspire to, we've never really achieved.
Todd and I had a really interesting conversation about all the really ugly things that are socially accepted in our society, and the subtle ways racism, misogyny and homophobia thrives. Like, why are the Rolling Stones so big still? Why not the Who? Well who represents unabashed swaggering machismo?
Chanelle likes to say sometimes that hipsterism reinforces white supremacy. I think that's too broad of a statement to make. Most hipster artists in Oakland can afford to be poor, which is not a luxury that say a black person born in West Oakland would have: Do I want to be rich or poor? I choose poor! Like, "I went to Darmouth and now I am rejecting corporate values and living without a job." (This could apply to me, too).
I went out with this guy Monday who was into the whole spockmorgue music scene. Which is the hippest of hipster cliques in the Bay Area. It's all about noise and chaos and costumes, and he admitted as much. Although devoted spockmorguers will tell you it's about making the audience part of the performance. He's a very creative guy (and the sort that always falls for me, I don't know why). He wants to make art with multicolored shit (not real shit, mind you) and candy blood.
When he brought up spockmorgue, it was like he flipped a switch inside me: NOT INTERESTED. And I realized: I am so sick of those people. I want nothing to do with them. Sure, I might like to go to spockmorgue show for the spectacle, to watch boys run around in nothing but socks on their penises and scream like derranged animals. But I'm really over that crowd. Because it is about exclusion and superiority. And cynicism and sarcasm and post-feminist, post-civil-rights irony espoused by Vice magazine. What, you don't get it? You must not be that intelligent.
Here's what I've come to terms with: I don't ever want to get jaded to the point I don't like music that sounds like music. I like songs that are pretty. I like songs that express emotion. I like songs that remind me why life is beautiful and painful and sad and hopeful. I want songs that make me want to shake my hips or fall in love. Arcade Fire speaks to me 100 times greater than Friends Forever. I don't WANT to have to listen to bearded seals wailing to get my rocks off.
And while I admit, multicolored poop and edible blood are imaginative - Chanelle (and Kurt Vonnegut in "Bluebeard") would ask, "What does this art say about the human condition?" OK, the contrast: Cute and unoffensive crossed with unpleasant bodily functions. Shallow, thanks! I met a humble guy who sings country songs (and he didn't call, but that's OK), and he was infinitely more interesting to me. How many people in the world have sung country songs? Millions. Yet I'm convinced his art is more honest and affecting.
I love a lot of "hipsters" to death. They have rad haircuts and handmade clothes. Some wear baseball shirts and Chuck Taylors. But the ones I love are the ones who are open-minded, who accept people regardless of how they dress, who are interested in learning and find out life's meaning and connecting to other people. Those are the people I really like and the people I want in my life. They also make the art and music that I connect to.
People who are about exclusion - don't need them. I guess I want to exclude the people who are about exclusion. Which probably makes me some sort of hypocrite. It's a contradiction I can live with.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 01:44 am (UTC)I guess you missed out on the Oklahoma History requirment in middle school! I took Native American History in college, too.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 03:01 am (UTC)clearly those were the most influential though.
Date: 2006-01-06 04:39 am (UTC)-C.
Re: clearly those were the most influential though.
Date: 2006-01-06 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 01:50 am (UTC)1) This whole controversy has blown up in my hometown.
and 2) I found out over break that my dad's aunts (he's from Arkansas) boycotted my grandparent's wedding and refused to ever acknowledge my grandmother because she was Catholic. And possibly also part Native American. It all kind of makes sense why she was so secretive about her background and burned a lot of family documents/photos before her death.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 02:04 am (UTC)I didn't mention that most of my family has Cherokee blood (we're from Tahlequah, Cherokee HQ and not a single one of my kin got on the Indian Roles, because they didn't want to be labeled as "Indians").
It's fascinating, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 02:22 am (UTC)Yeah it's a big problem because now with Indian gambling, none of the tribes want to register new people because there's the whole issue of money. So if you're Native American and want to apply for federal funding to go to college, unless you're registered (and if the tribe won't accept new registrees due to casino paranoia), you can't get the funding & are screwed.
My friend
We had some people come out from Elko last summer about a project they're doing to "archive" Paiute culture and there was a whole discussion about interviewing older tribe members. All by the almost completely white cohort in the room. When I started asking questions about the above, the one person in the group who actually was Paiute started talking about how yeah, it's going to be really hard to get people's trust to participate when they've been told for so long to deny that essential part of themselves, not to mention the whole issue of outsiders like anthropologists and linguistics coming in to study their "exotic" culture.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 03:15 am (UTC)I thought, "Somehow you're not the sort of person I imagine this scholarship was designed to help."
But it's true, keeping up the traditions was frowned on, for sure. Now, it's like a tourist attraction. Although, I have to say Red Earth festival could be an excuse to write off an OK trip. But perhaps I could do a really good story on Indian assimilation!
no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 12:09 am (UTC)BTW.
Date: 2006-01-06 04:41 am (UTC)Not to mention utterly creatively bankrupt.
The same people that are all into "the morgue" were all really big into indiepop when that was big in the late 90s.
They make me want to puke.
And as much as I don't like to be exclusionary, sympathies with the morgue, can indeed be a "first strike" for me too.
-C.
Re: BTW.
Date: 2006-01-10 12:08 am (UTC)Great minds think alike. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 12:08 am (UTC)