If I'm going to write about what happened in the sixties and early seventies, I feel like I need to be able to at least understand and articulate the opposing viewpoint, even if I don't agree with it.
In Mississippi, most of the argument in favor of segregation came from the Citizens Council, and most of that came from Bill Simmons. There's such a vast gulf between the things the guy said and wrote and my personal experience with him that I struggle to rationalize it all, and yet it's all true.
No one sets out to be a villain. Everybody believes they're working for the greater good. Medgar Evers thought he was working for the greater good. Bryan De La Beckwith thought he was working for the greater good. Obviously, they weren't both correct. Either that or the actual greater good isn't something we can understand.
Most of what Bill Simmons wrote, I attribute to what Stephen Jay Gould called "biological determinism," or what I call "really bad anthropology." What really helped me with all this was Richard Dawkins' theory on "The Selfish Gene," where he introduced the idea of the "meme" as a unit of cultural evolution to help the gene maximize inclusive fitness.
There's an awful lot more to the word "meme" than funny pictures of cats or animated gifs from 90's sitcoms. "Meme," as Dawkins intended it, could be the key to everything. Once you infest yourself with a certain set of memes, then everything Bill Simmons ever wrote and everything Bryan De La Beckwith did starts to become understandable. They're serving not truth but a meme, and that meme serves some level of genetic inclusive fitness.
The wrongness of what these men said and did was the result of the selfish gene and the memes it spun to protect its agenda.
George Lucas simplifies the story so that red light sabers mean bad and light colors mean good, and that makes a great story, but there's more to it than that.
I'm starting these stories with the idea that everybody in the are trying to do what's right, but there's a big difference in what they all consider "right" to be. Everybody is working to serve the memes they start with, but everybody starts with different memes.
It's possible that the same flaws in my brain that make it difficult to read or speak also give me a way to see these things differently. Either way, every time I turn on the television, I see where an old enemy of my culture has returned. Understanding them is vitally important.
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