A Thought About American History and the creation of myths

There is a current in American history of exploitation, discrimination and disenfranchisement of weaker groups by stronger groups. That current includes slavery imposed on African Americans and driving Native Americans into reservations in a small and undesirable portion of their original lands. It includes discrimination against blacks, Irish, Italians, eastern Europeans, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims, and the disenfranchisement of women.

There is a counter-current of opposition to exploitation, discrimination and disenfranchisement of those groups. Most importantly, that opposition has been in the form of millions of people seeking to better themselves through education, work, saving, investment and good living. Millions of people from minorities facing prejudice have served in the American military, many sacrificing their lives for the country in which their families faced such prejudice.

The counter-current also involved organization to secure rights, including the trade unions, the NAACP, and the women's suffrage movement. In a few cases such as the abolition movement, the Civil Rights Movement and the ACLU, people who themselves would not benefit themselves aided in the securing civil rights for others.

I am posting this because I have been thinking of the facility with which the empowered groups create mythologies to justify their behavior. I have been reading about the post Civil War Period (The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox by Stephen Budiansky and Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon). During slavery, there had been a widely believed myth among whites that slavery if not good for the slaves was the only way in which blacks and whites could live successfully together. With Emancipation, the southern whites adjusted that mythology. They created myths of Northern carpetbaggers, evil former slaves, and righteous night riders, even coming to believe that they were forced to a campaign of murder and brutal intimidation of blacks by Northern policies which failed to understand the nature of African Americans. Eventually they created myths of idyllic antebellum southern society with paternalistic plantation owners and happy slaves. The Ku Klux Klan was in the southern myth turned into a knightly crusade protecting white women rather than a brutal group of thugs seeking white power via the disenfranchisement of blacks.

As I think about knowledge for development, I wonder how to prevent the creation of myths which hinder development. In the postbellum south, it might have been possible to move ahead educating the former slaves and their children, introducing small farm systems and work-for-pay systems. Instead, supported by their evolving myths, the white power structure instituted systems of debt peonage, share-cropping, oppressive labor contracts, and intimidation that effectively replaced slavery with forced labor from a black underclass.

I suspect that modern development is similarly hindered by dysfunctional mythologies. It is perhaps easy to understand how societies adapt existing myths to account for new conditions, but difficult to understand how the myths can be more successfully replaced by functional understanding of reality or even by less destructive myths.