A buddy of mine is a vet of the Rhodesian Bush War.
I asked him about racism and the whole white supremacy thing about white rule.
What came from that was one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had about racism.
The Rhodesians didn't hate their blacks. Not like the KKK at all. But their attitudes were most certainly racist.
The feeling was that blacks were basically retarded. They weren't capable of learning more than a certain amount and could never equal a white with the same effort. The attitude was to treat them sort of like children.
It caused the whites to constantly underestimate both their own troops capabilities and their opponents.
Willard is from the USA and didn't bring that attitude with him. He also said his point of view was infectious since he gave his black dudes a lot more credit and thus his guys were accomplishing more. The difference between prejudice and bigotry is that a bigot will not surrender the bias even when confronted with facts to the contrary.
Interestingly he confirms something I'd read before. The intent was never white rule forever. Their position was (and is if you find a couple to talk to) that the natives were simply not ready to be handed the vote and that it would take years, likely a generation, to get them up to speed with the whole educated voter thing.
Primary sources are kinda neat.
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For that matter, most Southern whites didn't hate blacks. They'd grown up with blacks around, a lot of them had had black women helping raise them (think Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird) or blacks working around their houses...to them, blacks were just a natural part of the landscape. What they objected to was being forced to treat blacks as social and political equals.
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