One anon excerpted the following from novelist and antebellum Southern romantic Thomas Dixon, Jr., whose work inspired D.W. Griffith's infamous motion picture, "Birth of a Nation":
"Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the continent of Africa rich beyond the poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a White man showed him its light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never built a harness, cart or sled.
A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber, he never carved a block, sawed a foot of lumber or built a house save of broken sticks and mud.
With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for 4,000 years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizons calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed of a sail. He lived as his fathers lived - stole his food, worked his wife, sold his children, ate his brother, content to drink, sing, to dance, and sport as the ape.
And this creature, half child, half animal, the creature of impulse, whim and conceit, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw; a being who left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger - they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people ... Merciful God ... it surpasses human belief."
What you just read here is 1)elevation of white self-esteem at the expense of people of color and 2)justification for the enslavement and continuing mistreatment of people of color, most notably Africans and black Americans. It's a cavalcade of sociopathic behavior that leads individuals to turn ordinary human beings into tea cozies and lampshades. When applied on a national scale, you get events such as the Holocaust, Australia's systematic elimination and marginalization of Aborigines and the liquidation of Darfurians and other dark people of color from Sudan and other North African nations. But nowhere is the insanity more visible than within the United States.
You can take a look at how conservative-minded and even "progressive" white Americans have flipped out and lost their minds over the Oval Office's current resident. Electing a "P.O.C." as president caused many people to lose their shit and devote their time and energy to denigrating and discrediting a man who has so far done his best to elevate Americans out of their current fuck-up without fucking up or getting assassinated. Extraordinary color arousal led to the formation of the Tea Party and its capture of the GOP. The end result of that moment of abject insanity will most likely result in millions of die-hard conservatives being conflicted by their undying hatred of the "Marxist Socialist Kenyan Usurper" and their utter dislike of magic Mormon Mitt Romney as a presidential choice.
A fallback to a tired tome from a tired Ku Klux Klan admirer deserved a response:
Interesting how the glorification of the antebellum American South always came with some denigration or castigation of blacks as an inferior species. Black inferiority was also useful for justifying slave ownership. After all, where would those poor Negros be without white guidance via ownership?
One reason for constantly and consistently deeming one group of people inferior to another is to deliberately keep them at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole, especially if you're aiming to maintain them as an easily accessible pool of manual labor. Just as one would breed horses and cattle, the wealthier plantation owners and other scions of the Old South bred Negros. Keeping them demonized and disliked was a ploy to keep poor whites from sympathizing and uniting with them and everyone else from realizing they were just as human as their fellow whites. Manufacturing the myth of the Negro as a slow-witted and slue-footed creature did wonders to cement negative opinion of them in the minds of passive individuals, nevermind if Negros were often the hardest working men and women in the entire country, by default.
Just as conservative-minded Americans are persuaded by Wall Street into cutting their own throats in the name of austerity and tax cuts, descendents of the Old South have graciously eaten bowl after bowl of shit representing the supposed inferiority of the Negro. It helps keep lesser minds preoccupied with their hatred of the other tribe and it helps the wealthy and well-connected maintain their prestige, wealth and power.
The so-called inherent superiority of "whiteness" was required to keep the "peculiar institution" afloat and keep fellow whites united with their betters and separated from their "lessers." When the abolition movement and northern industrialization threatened that institution, succession became the Old South's ticket to continued national psychopathy. The Civil War could had put that superiority theory to bed for good, but the desire for brotherly bygones and the need for a new social punching bag brought about the continuation of that flawed theory.
Sadly, the incessant need to marginalize blacks to subconsciously prevent some sort of karmic retribution from coming into fruition guarantees the continued propagation of supposed black inferiority throughout the American landscape.