After it had lingered on my desk amongst other stacks of paper I finally got organized and finished reading Natalie's 85-page senior essay on Paul Green's The Lost Colony and its relationship to white supremacy. My initial inclination was to slightly poo poo it because nobody takes those plays seriously, everybody knows they are kitsch and so on.
Yet by the end she had me. We do need to take the coding embedded even in seeming cultural dreck seriously, and the simultaneous denigration of most of the natives in the play along with the selective ennobling of the good ones who learn English and helpful to the settlers, the portrayal of stoic manifest destiny amongst the doomed white denizens of Croatoan, the romantic cult around Virginia Dare and its latter day elevation by white nationalists, and lastly the construction of a regional tourist industry around all of this, it's all pretty questionable. And Natalie did a good job in the questioning of it all.
At the same time we have to have a sense of measure in charging the past with the crime of happening in the past, before we reached perfect enlightenment and figured everything out.
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