In one of my history classes I was required to read the book There Goes My Everything by Jason Sokol. Even though it was assigned reading I found it greatly interesting because of the unique subject matter. The subject of the book was the history of the civil rights movement from the white southern perspective, a perspective that is often misrepresented in history. Rather than the southern experience being very "black and white," (pardon the cliche) the experience of white southerners was very diverse and had many different perspectives. Also, the book allowed me to gain some interesting insights into why some southerners were so against desegregation. To some degree there was a lot of sinful desire to keep blacks under subordinate oppression, but on the other hand southerners knew that if blacks were given more rights, the entire economy and cultural makeup of the south would change dramatically. To some degree, many southerners were afraid of change and just not willing to give up their ways of life.
I think the most impactful aspect of the book was a portion at the end of the book that spoke of "white liberation" being a result of the Civil Rights movement. This concept came from the idea that even though many white southerners thought that they were in power and in control, they too were in a type of slavery, enslaved to their warped world view and forced lifestyles of oppression. When civil rights came and completely changed the social landscape of the South, it not only liberated blacks from a system of oppression, but it also liberated whites from a vicious cycle of oppressive ideologies and unequal ideals. In essence, whites gained their freedom from oppressive sin because of what they lost in the civil rights struggle. This also got me thinking about how that can happen to us in many other ways, when we think that our actions are only enslaving others when we are also enslaving ourselves. This thought process and idea was very important to me and I had never heard the civil rights struggle presented in that way.
As I contemplated the overall emphasis of this book, I realized that this is a new trend in historical writing and that we can probably expect to see more historical writing of this nature in the future. As we continue to move into a postmodern age, we are realizing more and more that there are more angles to stories than we originally thought, leading us to explore more and more angles and allowing us to see bigger and bigger pictures in the past and in the present.
