"I'm here honor my grandfather because he done what he did so we could do what we doing today" i'm sorry what? his grandfather fought against the country that is doing what we are doing today. and my black ass surely wouldn't be doing what i am doing today had his grandfather got his way.
followed by "I'm go call a spade a spade cause i'm a black redneck" did he even know what that term means?
I made it to the eight minute mark before i just couldn't take it anymore, maybe it got better later but all i heard was illogical emotional based babble. He may have been a great person but i cant debate feelings.
that is the second time you have failed to respond with anything other than a personal attack, you're not doing your "friend" proud (birds of a feather and all that)...
I think some sort of cultural relativity might be in play here.
It's hard for us to understand life in the South in the mid-1800s from anything other than what we've read in novels or history books.
This has the potential of being a bad analogy, but:
Perhaps you can think the situation similarly to liberals in big cities today. They clamor and clamor for more government because
it's all they know. They were born and raised in liberal strongholds. They were fed big-government from the day they were born. Then one day, perhaps they leave, say California. They sell their over-priced house, and move out to rural Texas. When they get to their new life in Texas, they realize taxes are lower and they can buy a house twice the size of their old one at half the price, but they also have less fire stations, less hospitals, less mass transit, less government services in general, etc.. Instantly they perceive something as being 'wrong', and proceed to tell everyone that they're doing things wrong. You gotta raise taxes! Create more services! Basically, it's a culture-shock. Maybe it's not really 'wrong', just 'different'. And of course, most people in Texas tell them to stop trying to turn Texas into California.
So maybe the black man who served in the confederate army wasn't thinking in terms of what is 'right or wrong'. All he knew was his life in the South. Maybe it was a life of slavery, but it was all he knew. It was his way of life, and he wanted to defend it. (as crazy as that sounds for us today)
There's also the theory that black slaves felt that in order to ever receive their freedom from their masters, they would have to prove themselves in battle. It was not totally without precedent. During the American War for Independence, similar offers were made to black slaves by both the British and the revolutionaries.
Supposing the South had won the war, and blacks refused to fight, it very likely would have slowed any progress towards freedom. White folks would have claimed that while they were getting their butts kicked and their homes burned, the black folks were just sitting around on their hands. However, if they had fought, and had, after the war, respected generals such as Robert E. Lee (who favored the idea of enlisting blacks) spoke on their behalf of their deeds during the war and being 'deserving' of freedom, it might have sped things along. *Might* have—as in, it was worth a shot.
This tradition still follows today—military service has always been a way for minorities to find acceptance. (That's not saying it's necessarily an ideal system). Another example would be the Tuskegee Airmen (Red-tails). At the onset of WWII, few people thought that a black man was intellectually capable of flying a fighter plane, but the white airmen in the bomber squadrons quickly changed their opinions on the matter after seeing black airmen performing in battle, protecting bomber squadrons from German fighters with unprecedented efficiency. Also, if you want U.S. citizenship today you can enlist and it becomes much easier (unfortunately today, that means an endless supply of fodder for imperialist wars, so, yeah, *not ideal*)
So no, I don't think blacks were 'screwed in the head' to have wanted to serve in the Confederate military. And I don't think they're 'undeserving' of being mentioned. It may seem crazy to us in today's world, but it was actually quite practical back then.
