Quote of the Day: Black/White in America

From Southern writer William Faulkner, and decades ago, describing white American fear that lasts even unto today. The reason for Black Lives Matter.

That’s what the white man in the South is afraid of: that the Negro, who has done so much with no chance, might do so much more with an equal one that he might take the white man’s economy away from him, the Negro now the banker or the merchant or the planter and the white man the sharecropper or the tenant. That’s why the Negro can gain our country’s highest decoration for valor beyond all call of duty for saving or defending or preserving white lives on foreign battlefields, yet the Southern white man dares not let that Negro’s children learn their ABC’s in the same classroom with the children of the white lives he saved or defended.

© 2017 Faulkner Literary Rights, LLC. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Literary Estate of William Faulkner, Lee Caplin, Executor.

From “On Fear,” which appeared in the June 1956 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Quote of the Day -- On Race in America

William Faulkner wrote these very insightful, telling, even indicting lines all the way back in 1956. They could not be more true of us, then as well as, sadly, even now, today, this much father along in 2017.

That’s what the white man in the South is afraid of: that the Negro, who has done so much with no chance, might do so much more with an equal one that he might take the white man’s economy away from him, the Negro now the banker or the merchant or the planter and the white man the sharecropper or the tenant. That’s why the Negro can gain our country’s highest decoration for valor beyond all call of duty for saving or defending or preserving white lives on foreign battlefields, yet the Southern white man dares not let that Negro’s children learn their ABC’s in the same classroom with the children of the white lives he saved or defended.

More should read the entire, brief article:

Southern Harm, by William Faulkner | Harper's

Additional link:

The White Man's Fear of the Educated Negro

William Faulkner on Donald Trump

There is a fantastic, intelligent, rather low-key article over at Atlantic just now that I think nearly every adult a  American should read, I think.

Will America Earn the Right to Survive?

William Faulkner’s provocative question from 1955 echoes loudly in 2016.

This, below, isn't the point of the article--and it's a great point--but I love this author's comparison of one of Faulkner's characters compared to current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Faulkner had created in his fictional universe a minor Southern incarnation of Trump: Flem Snopes, an unscrupulous and voracious predator with “eyes the color of stagnant water”, who claws and lies his wily way to power, cheating and conning anyone naïve enough to think they can outsmart him. In Flem and his clan, Faulkner excoriated many of his fellow citizens who “know and believe in nothing but money and it doesn’t much matter how you get it.” He harbored no doubt about the harm people like the Snopes tribe could inflict if allowed to reign and proliferate, if their “stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and petty ends” were ever to prevail. Given the latest polls, such an electoral apocalypse seems increasingly unlikely, but the mere fact that Trump is even a viable candidate, would be terrifying to the author of "Absalom, Absalom."

It's a terrific, brief read. I'd argue it's nearly an important read, for all of us.