Preston Brooks a Congressman from South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner at his desk because Preston thought he's impunged his family's honor. Sumner died a few months after the attack, but I don't ever remember seeing that Brooks was prosecuted or ever censored for it. It's hard to see, but the Senators in the background have varying expressions on their faces, what's clear however was that the code was to stay out of it; apparently nobody thought the honorable thing to do was to intercede.

Separating out black history has some legitimacy, but the intertwined threads of the American experience make the exercise of seperating difficult. Tonight I went over some of the treads in various discussions where my whiteness had become an issue. Looking for other threads where that had come up, I discovered they'd been deleted. I'm willing to stipulate that "I don't get it" when it comes to my own conciousness of race, but I also think that some of the disputes in these threads have to do with difficulties separating out racial identities when so many experiences are shared.

Why is it that America is such a violent place? The rates of violent crimes differ significantly geographically too. White people in the South kill each other at twice the rate that people in the North do www.amazon.com/gp/product...006-6669561
The conclusion that Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen make is that the main reason for the difference is a "Culture of Honor" where a person's mosts prized possession is honor; honor in the sense that every insult must be retaliated against.

Dick Cheney was only the second Vice President to shoot a man while in office. Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. I don't have a link, but even Abraham Lincoln escaped a duel by fancy footwork on his behalf, so the sensibilities of the culture of honor run across the geography of America in history.

Fox Butterfied's "All God's Children: The Bosket FAmily and the American Traditon of Violence" www.amazon.com/gp/product...006-6669561 traces the history of Willie Bosket considered by some to be the most dangerous inmate in the history of the New York Penal system back through his family's violent men to slavery. But rather than to point to the brutality of the slave system as a cause, Butterfield notes that in Edgefield, South Carolina white on white violence predates white on black violence www.pbs.org/newshour/ger...terfield.html Butterfield finds that a violent meme, that is a socially constructed idea that's passed along, infected the people in an area and has continued to be passed along for generations.

From my experience living in South Carolina, and particularly thinking about the circumstances of my brother's murder there, this notion of a "Culture of Honor" as a meme has resonance. I'm no authority, of course, but I found Nisbett and Cohen's specualtions about the sources of this meme, particularly their contention that it's based in settlement patterns of Scots Irish en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot...h_American not so convincing. Again it's only incidental, but Western Pennsylvania has been shaped by the colonial era migrations of Scots Irish too, yet the prevelance of a similar sense of honor dosen't map with their thesis.

It is rather a digression, but Butterfield tells the story of how Strom Thurman's father killed a man over a perceived affront to his honor--the fellow had called him "a damned dog, a scondrel and a liar." It certainly didn't hurt his career any, in fact in sympathy a southern patron in government had him appointed US Attorney for South Carolina--talk about "right thinking" individuals! My little research adventure tonight began by looking for information about Strom Thurman, who I think was an important player in creating Black History in the latter half of the 20th century. I was a little taken aback to discover not so many pages about him. Jesse Helms another Southern racist, perhaps from his long career in radion and public relations, seems to have more foresight about promoting his legacy www.jessehelmscenter.com/default.asp I think it a mistake to forget either of them too quickly; the havoc in their wake is significant.

The broad brush of the Scots Irish as a peculiarly violent people is, I think, a stereotype. I enjoy reading Joe Bageant and in this piece "Revenge of the Mutt People" www.joebageant.com/joe/2006...the_.html he takes the ball and runs with it. Bageant is keen to talk about "my" people with affection and discust. Many Americans find their Identities plural, but not all Americans can easily bring forth talk about "my" people as Bageant does.

I have an interest in Africa, and like most area of intersts, I'm quite ignorant. Something that I've noticed is that African people in America are quite prickly about the way that Americans so loosely talk about "Africans." Multiple times I've heard: "There are over fifty different countries in Africa!" I heard a friend from Ghana remark that he didn't strongly identify as a Ghanaian until coming to study here in the U.S. The close associations with identities which African have are largely a mystery to most Americans and the whole topic of "tribalism" is even more dangerous than talk about "Africans."

It's assumed that an identity as "black" conjures up a very descrite expereince. It does because expereinces of racial prejudice is so very common here. Therefore a "white" identity also presumes a corallary eperience. Americans often see things through filters of white and black. But this doesn't preclude our plural identies, for example black Americans often consider themselves Southerners even while living in other regions of the country. The idea of a "Southerner" is neither black nor white. Also black Africans living in the U.S. are sometimes perplexed by the tensions with American blacks.

American history reveals that ideas about violence spread culturally. Groups of people do come up with ideas all the time, and many of them like fashions are distinctly retro. It does seem difficult to predict what ideas will spread and individual's plans to change the culture are probably delusional. Nevertheless we've got some ability to compose our lives and to keep a degree of flexibility about our overarching worldviews. The culturally transmitted ideas that make Americans peculiarly more violent are ideas deserving attention. Composing our lives to avoid violence depend on ideas worth spreading.

Violence has shaped us as Americans. It's something woven into our experience of racial identity that perhaps in a perverse way shines a light on a shared heritage of a strange construciton of honor.