Jeffrey Simpson in Inside Policy: Progress for Aboriginal peoples still haunted by the past – MLI
April 8, 2015
In some religious traditions, it is customary for a leading figure to deliver a sermon. Often, it revolves around a segment taken from a holy book. I take the liberty of borrowing from that tradition in citing the American author, the great William Faulkner, who wrote that “the past is never dead; it is not even past.”
Faulkner was a Southern American. Nowhere in the United States did/does the past weigh more heavily on – one might even say weigh down – society than the US South. The plantation economy. Slavery, the “peculiar institution.” The mythology of female virtue and gentlemanly gallantry. The Confederacy. The Civil War. Defeat after a dreadful struggle, followed by the dream palace memory of the cause aborted but kept alive in memorials throughout the South to “our glorious dead.” Always, there was the scar of race, so that negroes, as they were called for so long, became legally free but continued to be economically and politically bound. The Southern Way of Life meant that the “past” was “never dead” because it was “not even past.” It took a long, long time for the South to get over itself, to stop looking over its shoulder. Even today it sometimes seems as if some old habits are merely wrapped in new garb.
