Phenotype is defined as genotype + environment, so you are a reflection of who you associate with and where you live.

Those men and women of the 1940s represent their parent's views of the early 1900s and their grandparent's views of the late 1800s.

Babylon Bee's Prophecy fulfilled.

pmart said:

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Having a grandfather who was a wwii vet and racist as hell (even against my own father's race at times) I think what surprises me the most is that they were asking those questions in the first place. However, I have seen lots of reports of the British being surprised by the level of segregation and prejudice of the US military, perhaps the surveyors were investigating the reaction from soldiers if they were to open things up more.
Thanks for sharing.

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No other country went through a similar Reconstruction, inversion of the social order and appropriation of property by the winning side except for one other country: South Africa, specifically the old Transvaal and the Orange Free State and British measures against the Boers were exactly what Sherman used plus putting civilians into concentration camps. And the outcomes afterward were very similar: Jim Crow and apartheid with trans-generational bitterness toward Yankees and the Brits.
The greatest generation grew up with Jim Crow and stereotypes, lynchings and racial strife in the cities and many white northerners held very similar racial views as white southerners.

Sapper Redux said:

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Quote:

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appropriation of property

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Property was specifically left in the hands of the planters to the detriment of freed slaves. And the violent postwar racist social order began before Congressional Reconstruction with things like the Black Codes. Trying to blame anyone other than former Confederates for segregation and the failure of freed blacks from gaining rights is obtuse. Likewise, the Boers were extremely racist and violent in that racism before the Boer War.

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That's your problem, Sapper. You are interpreting their struggles through a 21st century mindset. Yankee soldiers raped, murdered, pillaged and looted wherever they went in varying measures. If the Reconstruction effort was so benign, why was there such a backlash against it? Of course the northerners wanted plantations to continue: it fed the bottom line of revenue flows. The northern occupation government could have offered land to freed slaves on the western frontier, for instance, but that didn't happen. Why? Because they were perfectly happy to allow the continuation of plantation agriculture with black "free" labor.

To the Boers: they were attempting to escape British control in the 1830s and when they first penetrated to the interior of the eastern cape, they found a lot of unoccupied fertile land. Why? Because the Zulu movements into the area had killed 1-2 million inhabitants in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The first Voortrekkers had attempted a peaceful dialog with the Zulu chief Dingane, but he tortured and killed the envoys. They were no longer under any illusions of detente in those early years. Add that the British were follow on parasites to any Boer settlement of the lands and you may be able to gain insight regarding their siege mentality. British policy was de facto apartheid. Afrikaner apartheid was de jure because they did not want to live with black Africans who they considered violent and amoral by their standards.