Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
I don't really understand your point? The tweet author came across the quotes in a book about the integration of the air force while researching a mutiny that occurred at the time and place of the quoted primary source. I don't see why I need to justify a strong reaction to horrible pervasive racism either.

It remains strange that your first reaction was that the source must be misrepresenting something.
My first reaction to the source, as an historian, is that it appears to be misrepresenting something. All secondary sources are written with a particular goal/thesis and it behoves me to ask why that is. The American army in WWII was and is a byword for institutional racism at all levels and there have been two films about the trials and successes of the Tuskegee Airmen specifically. Given that this was surely known to you it behoves me also to ask why you are posting this?

As to why it looks dodgy - I'll elaborate on my previous explanation. The final quote from an American airman is cut off mid-sentence and it's unclear whether his view of coloured airmen is actually positive or negative, but it's made to look negative by grouping it with the other quotes. If this is the sort of historiography the book employs then the book is manipulative and not to be trusted. You need to drill back to the original unit histories.

Interesting, but the substance that the blogger took toward the post was a modern analogy from the combination of the freedom and low-status of the churls, which is what I considered worthy of comment. The blogger didn't relate the lecturer as saying anything about Norman England; that makes sense given the lecture is described as being about Anglo-Saxon (early Medieval) England. Might you be barking up the wrong tree?
As I said, the negative connotations to "churl" are post-Norman. The word really just means "man" in the same way Adam does. Do you think there would have been so many Germanic Kings calls Karl if it was an insult as far back as Late Antiquity? If you want some orientation on this I suggest you look up the story of Thrall, Karl and Jarl which is a Norse legend about Heimdall that maps the social classes in Germanic society.

The point is that the example is faulty - there is no real correlation between the blogger's perception of the churl and the modern American - they've created a false equivalency. In so doing they've taken precisely the wrong lesson from history.