This site will provide resources for those who want to explore the Progressive Myth. While the site will examine the Progressive Myth primarily from our experience in Greensboro, NC, this experience is relevant beyond Greensboro because the myth exists in various forms throughout North Carolina, the South and the rest of the country.
The starting point for the site is a letter I have written to the participants in Impact Greensboro, a new human relations program in Greensboro NC. The letter appears in the next post - here is an excerpt that introduces the concept of the Progressive Myth:
The Progressive Myth insists that Greensboro is a progressive city and that Greensboro's leaders are progressive, diligently working to improve racial and economic conditions for all. The Progressive Myth is an impressively bold lie, repeated so often and in so many ways that it is accepted as truth by much of the community. Business corporations, including those that own the local mainstream media, make up an informal Power Structure that programs the community operating system to promote their interests above all else, while wrapping themselves - and their Progressive Establishment surrogates - in the Progressive Myth. Many good people live the Progressive Myth - people who do not want to understand that they are promoting the continuation of a racial and economic hierarchy.
Here is an excerpt from the second post - Understanding November 1979 in the context of May 1969:
The new black insurgents were rejecting the heart of North Carolina's progressive mystique... they were striking at the very base of white control - the power to define what is real and unreal, permissible and impermissible.
Neither Greensboro's white leaders, nor those in the nation at large, proved able to deal with this political and cultural challenge on its own terms. The issues of self-definition, self-determination, and autonomy were too large, or perhaps too threatening. Instead, white leaders perceived a conspiracy - violent in nature - to commit illegal acts, to overthrow the government, to kill and maim white people. By defining the challenge in such a manner, it became easier to avoid confronting the underlying questions and yet to feel comfortable with a response to black insurgents of total rejection and hostility... The result was irrational use of force in 1969.
William Chafe - Civilities and Civil Rights
Here are excerpts from the third post - The White Community:
The Myth of White Superiority - Black Inferiority is deeply rooted in our society and in all of the people raised in this society. But this Myth is not as simple as Black and White - we have to understand the complexity of the Myth...
Consider this passage from a letter written by a White Southerner in the late 19th Century:
"Shortly after the little cargo that the (slave ship) Wanderer brought were scattered around, I saw some of them at work in a large garden in Columbus, Ga., and was told that they were docile and quickly learned to dig and to hoe but that it was hard to teach them to eat cooked meat. They wanted it raw and bloody. They were miserable little runts, "Guinea negroes," with thick lips and flat noses; but they grew up into better shape and made good servants and I know were far better off than in their native jungles, the prey of stronger tribes and made food for cannibals."
The writer was my great, great, great grandfather...
Smith often wrote in an exaggerated version of the of the uneducated White Southerners' dialect - the "cracker dialect" - with a wink to Bill Arp and his class peers, as a way of mocking Northerners and the Northerner view that all White Southerners were ignorant fools. A hundred years later, those "blue collar" comedians on Comedy Central are making careers of playing on the modern version of this theme - Poor White People As Ignorant Fools - with a wink to those being mocked.
This Poor White People As Ignorant Fools theme is one of the most confusing and important pieces of the Myth of White Superiority - Black Inferiority - one we really need to get a handle on.
Thanks for your interest.
Randy Johnston
rjohnston@progressivemyth.com
