Doin' Other People's Genealogy

Isn't it amazing how interested floggers are in doing other people's genealogy? At least, as long as they can use it to cast aspersions on people they don't like? If the genealogy doesn't have smear-potential, apparently they're not interested.

Andy Hall seems to really be enjoying smearing Paula Deen... I mean, I doubt a deluxe banana pudding from scratch would put such pleasure on his cyber-face....

The White Lies of Paula Deen

This harkens back to the time when Brooks D. Simpson, Professor of History at Arizona State University, did my genealogy in an effort to smear and embarrass me (it didn't work).

Connie Chastain's Family Heritage: A House Divided

I wonder if Andy's genealogy diggin' and his presentation of it is more reliable than Simpson's. The professor's "efforts" left out a lot of information anybody who does history could have and should have easily found online -- the same place he found what he did report on. I mean, if I found them, he could have found them -- and likely did. Of course, if he had reported the whole story, its smear potential would have plummeted precipitously (pardon the alliterative redundancy -- but this subject deserves it).

I reported on the professor's (deliberate) omissions here:

How a Professor of History Does ... History? 

Shall I take a page from Andy's book and call Simpson's misreporting "white lies"? Na, it's not that important.

And neither is what Paula Deen says about her ancestors (it's really not all that important what "n" words she has used, either) -- nor is what her ancestors did all that important, unless you're a flogger looking for something you can use to smear somebody as a scum-sucking Southern racist slaver-monster -- using more polite and scholarly language, of course ... though that's exactly what you're wishing to put into people's heads.

I dunno, folks. I don't know anything about Paula Deen. But somehow, I can't imagine she'd make a worse employer than your average hate-motivated, smear-mongering flogger. Do they not realize how their drooling desire to denigrate comes across --  that if you have to smear somebody to create warm fuzzies of moral superiority in your views and positions, maybe those positions aren't so lofty to begin with?  Maybe they don't.

Or maybe they know, but they just don't care -- generating the warm fuzzies is just too important, it's like an addiction.  After all, if they don't smear creepy azz crackers with the racist tar-brush, they might be mistaken for a creepy azz cracker themselves...

(Interesting that Andy, who is such a stickler for proper attribution when his own work is cited, has none for the photo of Paula Deen on his blog -- or if he credited it, he's hidden it well.)

In the comment thread following the blog post, Andy makes some interesting observations to commenters.  He sez, "We are all imperfect, but most of us manage to avoid saying the ridiculous things Deen has said and apparently believes. Deen has made a fortune as a public figure, and inevitably gets more scrutiny than others. That’s just how that works. "  Well, no, that's not true. People say far, far worse things all the time -- but if they're liberals, left-leaners and progressives (and not white Southerners) they don't get reported on or held accountable. How many rappers not only say, but record, things that are far worse than ridiculous, but get no scrutiny at all, particularly from the likes of Andy Hall?

Andy also holds forth with, "Having had a slaveholding ancestor doesn’t reflect on us, as individuals living in 2013, one way or another. What we do with that information does, though, because that’s up to us."  And, of course, he thinks HE is one to properly judge what someone else does with that information, and if they don't do it the way he thinks they should, he might blog about them and, with more scholarly wording, imply that they're stupid, ignorant, scum-sucking racists....

To another commenter, he notes: "You’re willing to condemn chattel bondage in the abstract, but not in any specific case, nor apply any real moral onus to those most directly and intimately practicing it."

Of course, I can't speak for the person he directed the comment to, but I can certainly speak for myself on that subject, and the problem I have with floggers and their ilk is the tunnel vision they have used in focusing on "those most directly and intimately practicing it," who mostly happen to have been white Southerners, while almost totally ignoring the enablers of chattel bondage, such as northerners who bought slave-grown cotton to process in their mills, or ship to Europe, who financed the purchase of slaves and insured slaves -- without whom there could have been no slavery for Southern white people to directly and intimately practice. This is because focusing on northern slavery-enabling is of no use whatever in demonizing white Southerners.

When Andy and his fellow floggers show the same interest in condemning those in the north without whom Southern slavery could not have existed, when they show the same enthusiasm for smearing the descendants of those enablers if they aren't properly pretzeled up with level of guilt and shame the floggers think they should be (which is what they expect of Southerners), perhaps I can be persuaded to hold their blogs in something besides total contempt.

Perhaps someday they will credibly deny that they are motivated by the PC/Civil Rights era mission of making Southern white people humanity's and history's most heinously evil people.  But, frankly, I suspect hell will freeze over first.  So for now, my perception is that they choose to blog about the civil war "memory" and the civil war "era" (which, apparently, has no end) from the primary motive of using it to denigrate white Southerners.