day no. 16,859: somewhere north of racism

Acts 17:26

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.

All men descend from one blood line.

"Scientific racists, who asserted the biological inferiority of blacks, scoffed at the suggestion that they could progress to freedom, but the Southern divines despised the scientific racists." — Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan

The North assumed black men were descended from a different evolutionary stream than white men. The South rightly despised this notion as un-Biblical. The South sinned in calling their cousins second-class citizens. The North sinned in calling their brothers brutes. The South treated their brothers as beasts, but the North said the brothers were beasts, albeit beasts deserving better treatment. The North was like those of our day who treat their pets better than others treat their children. They demand ethical treatment of animals while mistreating their fellow man. The South was like those of our day who treat their children like pets. They take advantage of what they have instead of taking it with gratitude.

"The religiously orthodox Old South, in contradistinction to the religiously liberal Northeast, stood on its prejudice in favor of a literal reading of the Bible's account of the monogenesis of the human race and rejected scientific racism." — Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan

The South sinned in saying that black people should be treated different than other people. The North sinned in saying that black people were not people. The South said some men were more men than others while the North said some men could judge other men to be merely man-like. The North appealed to science. The South appealed to Scripture. The North did not read science any more rightly than the South did their Bibles, but the South could be rebuked by better exposition, whereas the North no longer heeded the Word.

"The North needed to repent of one kind of racism and the South needed to repent of another kind." — Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan

Strictly speaking, the North were the only racists. They were the ones insisting that black men were not of the same race as white men. They scientifically asserted that black men were not, strictly speaking, men in the same way that white men were. The South was guilty of ethnic animosity in assigning an inferior nature to black men, but the North was guilty of racial vanity in assigning an inferior evolution to blacks. In short, the North said whites were better than blacks and the South said white men were better than black men. The one was racist, stating that whites were a better class of creature than blacks. The other was ethnist, stating that one species of men were better men than others.

The South essentially touted the pedigree of the poodle over the pit bull while the North considered whites to be men and blacks to be dogs. That is racism in high form. That is the kind of racism that would find no hypocrisy in assuming the high road.