All white people are racists...or "white fragility" ??

[Rhondazvous]

Lee was a "lower-case-letter" abolitionist, in that he thought it was morally reprehensible, but not an upper-case Abolitionist, as in, part of organized opposition to the practice. Nevertheless, he made his opposition known, which was no small thing for a professional military officer from the Deep South.

Okay... you asked for it!

We are originally French peasants who fled the fighting around La Rochelle on the central-west Atlantic coast of France, in 1604, and formed one of the first communities on the east coast, at the same time Jamestown was being founded. "Cajun" comes from an Americanized pronunciation of "L'Acadienne" (lah-kah-djinn), meaning "an Acadian", from Acadia (Anglicized), or as we called it, Acadie. We had peaceful and prosperous cordial relations with the native tribe, so "Acadie" was our adoption of the Mi'kmaq natives' name for the area where we settled, starting in 1604, in what would become the Canadian province of Nova Scotia after the Brits took it over (mainly for its excellent naval harbor at Halifax). We lived there as peaceful farmers and ranchers, going back and forth between French and British rulership (and wanting nothing to do with either... we left feudal France for a reason!) despite assimilation attempts by both nations, until the Seven Years War began to brew up, in 1755. The Brits tried one last time to get us to violate our policy of peaceful neutrality, and then tricked us into coming in for a vote at each town's church, where they locked the doors and then deported each town's population onto prison ships, where disease in the squalid living conditions killed many of us, and the rickety old prison ships would often sink in the passage to whatever distant colony they tried shipping us off to.

We call this Le Grand Dérangement. As a result, thousands died; thousands more were deported and scattered, destroying a community that had persisted in peace for 150 years. Finally, a leader among us (whom I can count as my direct ancestor) Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, managed to round up most of the groups that had managed to stay together, and got permission from Spain (who then owned Louisiana) for us to settle in that colony. When the Spanish tried to get/force us to fight against the British-Americans, we retreated into the swamplands we call the Bayous, and forged our unique culture into a new one (most "Cajun" foods come about from our use of French cooking techniques with Native American recipes and spices). We managed to resist assimilation, and remained Catholic, poor, and dedicated to the principles of peace and the equality of all peoples.

The Creoles, on the other hand, vary in race, and are frequently of mixed racial heritage (in fact, the word creole means "a mixture"), being made up of the various cultures that blended in the French colonial islands of the Caribbean, and who were the predominant landowners in the busy port of New Orleans, Louisiana, especially after they took it over from the Spanish. Their culture wound up being very similar to the Cajun culture, in Louisiana, but it has more Afro-Caribbean roots than ours does, and both the cuisine and their version of French reflects the difference. It is considered deeply insulting to call a Cajun a Creole because of the divide between their landowning wealth and our refugee poverty, stemming back to the way we felt they treated us upon arrival in Louisiana. Ironically, the roles were somewhat reversed after the United States purchased Louisiana, and suddenly the dark-skinned Creoles were largely stripped of their wealth and social position. We Cajuns had no part in that, and wanted no part, and so we became even more isolated, as much as we could... even in 1972, when my mother introduced my father to her father, he referred to my dad as "The American".

My particular family went even further than the rest of the Cajuns did, in reaction to the racist society they felt imposed on their idealism, and moved past the swamps into the marshy flatlands of southwestern Louisiana, where they live to this day, near Lake Arthur, Crowley, Jennings, and Lake Charles. Other than myself, my mother is the "northernmost" of the family, a profesor at LSU-Alexandria, in the dead center of the state.

If you are interested in learning more about our history, click here. Or here.

Edited to Add: The Wiki article gets a few things wrong, such as the reason it was called Acadie, claiming it's related to the Greek "Arcadia". But it's still a decent summary, and I'm sure everyone here has GoogleFu skills at least as good as my own.

What a fascinating history. For people to go through so much and still have a sense of “We.”

That’s interesting that the Creoles did not treat the Cajuns well. I guess it’s true that power corrupts because those in power know their power is tenuous. I was reading in “Spirits of the Passage” how North Africans enslaved European sailors who got lost in the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone on this planet has been the slave of someone at some point in history. Even the English were reduced to serfdom by William the Conqueror.

The root of “reparations” is “repair.” I come to a place like AF and I see people working towards repairing our world. But the larger society? Well, like Fred Pohl said, “Those who know, don’t count and those who count, don’t care.”