In the Moment: Confederate Relics and Racist Tropes and the Necessity of Context To History
The past month has certainly been a tumultuous one for the United States, as civil unrest continues to boil over nationwide about police brutality and systemic racism in the justice system. Please take note that I didn't refer to the unrest as being about "the death of George Floyd," a characterization I'm seeing all too often in reports about the topic. Something that I intend to take very seriously in my writings on here is the proper contextualization of current events, and it is extremely important to understand that protests did not spill into the streets of all 50 states and multiple countries around the world because ONE police officer killed ONE man. There is a bad faith element in commentaries on this historic moment to reduce it to that, because that element has a vested interest in discrediting this movement by attempting to make a pain and rage that spans generations into an overreaction to a specific, isolated event.
No, these protests are not about George Floyd specifically, but his unjustified death, caught on film, was a rare, galvanizing moment, one in which a powerful person was caught red-handed doing something heinously evil, while his colleagues casually watched, and nobody seemed able to justify it. These kinds of moments are exceedingly difficult to catch, and as such they are the sparks that cause wildfires.
I remember, almost six years ago now, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. I only live a little over an hour from Ferguson, and so it hit really close to home. Objectively, there was gray in Brown's case, whether we want to admit it or not, and that gray kept many people from getting on board with the movement there, as conflicting information came from witnesses and the police department, competing coroners and medical examiners, and Brown's character was called into question based on numerous things from his social media pictures to security footage of an altercation with a store owner to things as trivial as the fact he lived with his grandmother and not his parents. As a result of the murky facts, many people I encountered were unwilling to brand his death an injustice, and the reactions ranged from "it's sad that he's dead but he shouldn't have behaved the way he did" to "he was an animal that deserved to be gunned down in the streets." Black Lives Matter, the social movement that formed in the aftermath, became a divisive term, a lightning rod in American culture, over the next several years, a cruel irony considering the phrase was coined as a rebuttal to the idea that Brown's transgressions meant he, or any other flawed Black person, deserved to die at the hands of police. But as with George Floyd, Michael Brown's death didn't happen in a vacuum, and the people upset about the situation weren't just reacting to THAT situation, least of all the people of Ferguson, who, a subsequent Department of Justice investigation would reveal, had been living under the thumb of oppressive policing for many years already. Michael Brown was the straw that broke the camel's back, not a sudden anvil dropped on the city. In the weeks immediately following Brown's death, the city's police department reacted with extreme force to protests that ran the gamut from peaceful resistance to violent unrest--and the videos from the scene showed that it didn't matter much to the police which end of the spectrum the protests were on, as onlookers were tear-gassed in their own backyards and journalists were shot with rubber bullets. Eventually, then-Governor Jay Nixon sent the Missouri State Highway Patrol to relieve the Ferguson Police Department of their duties overseeing the protests, and lo and behold, the violence largely simmered down.
The DOJ report was damning, and yet, few people I've spoken to ever saw it or heard much about the results. A 2015 report in The Atlantic described some of the DOJ's discoveries of systemic abuses, like a police department that required officers to issue as many citations as possible, resulting in stops being made that "ha[d] little relation to public safety and a questionable basis in law," according to the DOJ, with individual stops routinely resulting in multiple citations; in one case 14 citations resulted from a single interaction. Then came the criminalization of being unable to pay:
"Jail time would be considered far too harsh a penalty for the great majority of these code violations, yet Ferguson’s municipal court routinely issues warrants for people to be arrested and incarcerated for failing to timely pay related fines and fees. Under state law, a failure to appear in municipal court on a traffic charge involving a moving violation results in a license suspension. Ferguson has made this penalty more onerous by only allowing the suspension to be lifted after payment of an owed fine is made in full."
One woman who had been assigned a $151 ticket wound up paying $550 and spending six days in jail over the course of seven years spurring from this one ticket, and STILL OWED $541 at the time of the DOJ report. Ferguson's police department and municipal courts had a heck of a racket going on. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the pattern of harassment and brutality that was discovered, from a man cooling off in his car after a game of basketball being accused of pedophilia for hanging out at the park, to a boy being attacked by a police dog while trespassing on an abandoned property. By the way, the report found that EVERY reported instance of police dogs biting a suspect described a Black victim. Ferguson's 94% non-Black police department was enforcing a Jim Crow-era version of justice on the 67% Black St. Louis suburb. This should have been headline news, and it should have raised questions about where else this was happening, especially in light of the FBI's 2006 bulletin on its discovery that white supremacists were making a concerted effort to infiltrate law enforcement nationwide. And yet, that hadn't been big news either, although this past week 27 members of Congress led by Representative Norma Torres (D-CA) called for the FBI to make the full report public.
And if ALL OF THAT isn't enough to convince you Black Lives Matter was bigger than Michael Brown, consider that just 4 days before Brown's death, John Crawford was gunned down in an Ohio Wal-Mart after a shopper called police and reported that he was brandishing a firearm, when in reality he was grocery shopping and picked up a BB gun for purchase. Police lied about the encounter, claiming Crawford hadn't responded to verbal commands, but Wal-Mart's security cameras caught the encounter, showing that the officer opened fire on sight. To add insult to injury, The Guardian reported that police confronted his girlfriend, Tasha Thomas, shortly after the incident, threatening her with jail time and accusing her of being on drugs when she cried during questioning--she hadn't been aware of Crawford's death at the time they confronted her. By the way, Thomas died in a car accident the month after The Guardian report hit the news.
So, as you can see, context is extremely important. Brown's death sparked a wave of protests that overshadowed the much-less-gray Crawford shooting, because of the pattern of behavior by the police in Ferguson. Understanding this type of injustice is central to understanding the nature of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I've only covered highlighted events in one small suburb over a period of a few years. One can imagine how long it would take to detail injustice over a greater time period and geographic range. Incidentally, neither Brown's nor Crawford's killers were indicted.
Which brings us back to today. I'm just one person, and so my assessment of the barometer of this moment is largely anecdotal, but I've seen a shift in many people's attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement. People who once opposed it have begun to get on board, people who were once silent have begun to speak out. Pew reports that 67% of Americans now express support for the movement, and 76% believe racism is a problem, up 26 points from 2015. People are beginning to better understand the context of the movement and that is leading to broader support of its goals. As tangible evidence of this shift, we are also seeing cultural dominoes fall in the form of removal of symbols, brands, popular culture, and monuments with negative racial connotations.
On the more minor end of the spectrum, the 2000s sitcoms Scrubs and 30 Rock saw episodes of their show featuring white characters in blackface removed from their streaming homes. Blackface, of course, is a term describing makeup worn by a white actor to make them appear as if they are Black, and its problematic history stems from the minstrel show, a form of 19th- and 20th-century entertainment that often showed white actors dressed as Black caricatures, and occasionally Black actors playing the roles themselves, often portraying Black people as buffoonish, lazy, stupid, and ugly. I haven't seen the 30 Rock episodes in question, but I have seen every Scrubs episode, and while I wouldn't say the episodes did anything to explicitly mock Black people (in fact, one portrayed the character in blackface as a clueless and tone-deaf idiot who gets deservedly and comically beaten up by a group of Black people, while the others fall into somewhat more neutral "what-if-I-was-Black" fantasy sequences), this was the right move for this cultural moment.
Also notable, Aunt Jemima pancake syrup announced its intention to rebrand. Owned by Quaker Oats as a subsidiary of PepsiCo, Aunt Jemima has been a staple in American grocery stores for over a century, and its original advertisements depict a Black woman portrayed as a "mammy": a trope that depicts Black women as mindlessly devoted to serving white families, especially as maids and nannies, that also had ties to minstrel shows. The trope sought to depict a Black woman's "place" as in the service of white people, with slavery not-at-all-subtly referenced as an idyllic time for "Mammy." The first model to portray Aunt Jemima was chosen because she was overweight and seen as unattractive, an intentional depiction, and had been born into slavery herself. Although many recent reports have attempted to erase the harmful connotations of Aunt Jemima (again, a name taken from a popular minstrel show trope, and arguably akin to the "Uncle Tom" trope) and attempt to frame the rebranding as an erasure of a successful Black woman, the model, Nancy Green, continued to work as a maid until her death at the age of 76, not exactly painting the picture of someone who enjoyed financial comfort. Her successor, Agnes Moodey, was even more overweight and even darker skinned, again to feed into the trope of Black women as unattractive, as these physical traits were, and still are by many, seen as undesirable; and as without ambitions that didn't involve servitude to whites. Yes, the brand is recognizable as is, and while most people in 2020 probably don't actively view Aunt Jemima through this negative lens (indeed, most people are probably unaware of the history), this is again the right move for this cultural moment.
Then, on the more important, and as such more controversial, end of the spectrum, is the Elephant In the Room Since 1865: Confederate relics. In most places in the United States, especially rural places, you'd probably be hard-pressed to find someone who has never seen a Confederate flag planted on someone's lawn or flying from the back of a pickup truck. That isn't what we're talking about here. However you may feel about the Confederate flag, it needs to be abundantly clear that nobody is trying to make it illegal to have one. As always, context is important. What we have in the former Confederate states, and in isolated cases, even states that have no Confederate history whatsoever, is an abundance of statues, commemorations, and monuments to the Confederate States of America. Make no mistake: the Confederacy was formed almost solely to preserve the right to hold Black people as slaves. Each and every Confederate state's articles of secession from the United States, as well as the Confederacy's constitution, are abundantly, unambiguously clear about that point. And in each of these states, the so-called "Confederate flag" exists in a position of exaltation, often seen flying from government property, while military installations are named for Confederate leaders and statues of Confederate political and military figures stand in positions of honor throughout the South. There's a lot to unpack here.
In reality, the flag we are all familiar with today, a red field crossed by blue bars in the shape of an X, adorned by 13 white stars, is the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Confederate Army. While I could write an entire article on the contradictions that embodied General Lee, there is plenty of that already out there for you to sift through. Maybe I'll come back to it sometime. But the point is, that flag was never the flag of the Confederate States of America, but of a specific Army under the CSA. What is important is why this flag made a resurgence: the mythology attached to the "Lost Cause of the South," a movement that arose as early as the late 19th-century that sought to sanitize the Confederacy's ambitions, cloaking the nation's patently evil motives behind circular logic such as that the Confederate states seceded to defend their right to secede, while skating around WHY they wanted to secede in the first place. Lost Causers adopted the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia as an emblem of these noble (and completely false or at least beside the point) ambitions of the CSA. By the 1910s, the flag had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan who flew it exclusively, meaning its racist connotations were apparent a century ago, and the gray area surrounding it today is mostly a result of intentional muddying of the waters around America's Civil War discourse. While this may not have been the original intent behind the flag's resurgence (it was flown at the 1913 50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg), this doesn't change the original intentions of the Confederate States of America nor those of the white supremacists that co-opted it afterward. Penalize me for invoking Godwin's Law, but the swastika originating as a symbol of good luck in many Eastern religions doesn't change the fact that it was co-opted by a regime that carried out one of the worst genocides and instigated the bloodiest war in world history. Context matters.
Then, there are the monuments to people of the Confederacy. Before we unpack when and why some of the monuments were built, let me provide a short list of some of who we are talking about here. Monuments exist and places are named after people like Henry L. Benning, who once claimed that "pestilence and famine" were preferable to Black people achieving freedom; Braxton Bragg, described by one modern historian as a "bumbler" derided for his role in "los[ing] the West"; Leonidas Polk, described in his own time as "unfit for executing the plans of others" and by one modern historian as an "incompetent general" who even Bragg thought was a fool; George Pickett, who fled to Canada to escape prosecution for executing 22 prisoners of war, who, I remind you, were American soldiers; John Bell Hood, who referred to Black people as an "inferior race" who whites elevated from "barbarism"; and countless others with similar reputations as white supremacists, cowards, traitors, and bunglers. These are hardly men who fit the profile of the genuine war heroes military installations are generally named for, and are united by one common trait: their efforts to destroy the United States and make subjugation of the Black race a natural law on the continent of North America. And all of this is to say nothing of monuments built to other controversial figures less central to the Civil War, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan. To be entirely fair, figures like Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who spent his post-Civil War life fighting for Black civil rights and suffrage, are also honored, and even figures like Lee are much more nuanced than they may seem at first glance, but the context of when and why the monuments were built factors into the controversy. And hey, even Lee opposed the building of Confederate monuments and even his descendants would prefer to see them taken down.
Now to the when and why. According to the American Historical Association, the erection of many of these monuments during the Jim Crow era were "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South" and "were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life." A second wave of Confederate monuments coincided with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, with the timing clearly not coincidental. This context is crucial to understanding the systematic exaltation of enemies of the United States who not only fought for an evil cause, but often weren't even good at fighting and ultimately lost the fight. The only reason there could be for honoring the losers in a moral battle in such a disproportionate way is sympathy for their cause, and this is the exact reason why putting these people on the pedestals they currently enjoy is so problematic. It's worth noting that Black civil rights activists have been protesting these monuments since at least the Civil Rights era, and that it is not a new phenomenon for people to find them offensive; rather, it's that they're just now starting to be listened to on a wider scale. And after decades and even generations of begging your government that ostensibly represents you to stop honoring the people who would put you in chains for the color of your skin, it's quite easy to see why eventually people reach the point where they stop asking nicely. And this pressure is working: in recent weeks, we've seen city governments across the nation move to remove certain controversial monuments, Congress has voted in favor of renaming certain forts, and even Mississippi, a state which due to a "filing error" ratified the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution which outlawed slavery in 2013, has voted with a 2/3 majority in its state legislation to move toward adopting a new state flag, as their current one is an adaptation of the Confederate flag. These are the right moves for this cultural moment.
There is a real concern that I think some people genuinely and sincerely have that an "erasure of history" is taking place. Doom-and-gloom proclamations are being made that we are living in George Orwell's 1984, and comparisons to book-burning by the Nazis are made (Godwin again). And I want to make it clear that, while I believe Confederate monuments were very often erected with malicious intent and as a general rule have no place on public property, I do believe they have a very real historical value, with the proper context. A Confederate monument in a museum about the Civil Rights movement or the Civil War contains the context and nuance necessary to understanding the history of the Civil War, the history of the individual memorialized, and the history of when and why they were memorialized, all of which are necessary for the monument to serve as any kind of historic reminder. Even a plaque on the current site of the monument would be an improvement. Even the history of evil people is important, but the catch is that we cannot be venerating these people by preserving their likeness, and a monument built to a man with no explanation of who he was creates the impression to the uninformed that the man must have been great. Germany is full of Holocaust memorials, but not-so-surprisingly light on monuments to Adolf Hitler. Americans cheered when Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. The Soviet Union spent years "destalinizing" the country after the death of Josef Stalin. And yet, without me providing you with any real background information on the historical figures mentioned in this paragraph, I'm quite sure you know who Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Saddam Hussein were and what they did. History is not erased because a historical marker disappears, but a historical marker can do much to cloud and confuse our actual understanding of history without the proper context.
In spite of all the fervor around the erasure of history, a bit of nuance is all most of us are asking for. Yet, in an environment where any whisper of social progress is often met with a sledgehammer, it's small wonder that marginalized people eventually show up with a hammer of their own. If we truly want to preserve history, we as a nation must stop cloaking it in lies designed to preserve our belief in our exceptionalism, and own up to the bad and the ugly as much as we emphasize the good. We must stop sweeping the lived experience of some of our people under the rug. Jim Crow wasn't that long ago, and as we're seeing, we still have a long way to go to equality, and we won't get there by prioritizing the preservation of an incomplete and dishonest "history" over the real fears, pain, and anger of our fellow citizens who have not been treated fairly. We must make a real effort to seek justice and equality for all Americans and see that their stories are told too.
All it takes is a little context.
P.S. Black Lives Matter. All lives CAN'T matter until Black lives do.
No, these protests are not about George Floyd specifically, but his unjustified death, caught on film, was a rare, galvanizing moment, one in which a powerful person was caught red-handed doing something heinously evil, while his colleagues casually watched, and nobody seemed able to justify it. These kinds of moments are exceedingly difficult to catch, and as such they are the sparks that cause wildfires.
I remember, almost six years ago now, when Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. I only live a little over an hour from Ferguson, and so it hit really close to home. Objectively, there was gray in Brown's case, whether we want to admit it or not, and that gray kept many people from getting on board with the movement there, as conflicting information came from witnesses and the police department, competing coroners and medical examiners, and Brown's character was called into question based on numerous things from his social media pictures to security footage of an altercation with a store owner to things as trivial as the fact he lived with his grandmother and not his parents. As a result of the murky facts, many people I encountered were unwilling to brand his death an injustice, and the reactions ranged from "it's sad that he's dead but he shouldn't have behaved the way he did" to "he was an animal that deserved to be gunned down in the streets." Black Lives Matter, the social movement that formed in the aftermath, became a divisive term, a lightning rod in American culture, over the next several years, a cruel irony considering the phrase was coined as a rebuttal to the idea that Brown's transgressions meant he, or any other flawed Black person, deserved to die at the hands of police. But as with George Floyd, Michael Brown's death didn't happen in a vacuum, and the people upset about the situation weren't just reacting to THAT situation, least of all the people of Ferguson, who, a subsequent Department of Justice investigation would reveal, had been living under the thumb of oppressive policing for many years already. Michael Brown was the straw that broke the camel's back, not a sudden anvil dropped on the city. In the weeks immediately following Brown's death, the city's police department reacted with extreme force to protests that ran the gamut from peaceful resistance to violent unrest--and the videos from the scene showed that it didn't matter much to the police which end of the spectrum the protests were on, as onlookers were tear-gassed in their own backyards and journalists were shot with rubber bullets. Eventually, then-Governor Jay Nixon sent the Missouri State Highway Patrol to relieve the Ferguson Police Department of their duties overseeing the protests, and lo and behold, the violence largely simmered down.
Ferguson protester Edward Crawford throws a tear gas canister back at police in a now-iconic image. Tragically, Crawford died in 2017 under circumstances clouded with suspicion.
The DOJ report was damning, and yet, few people I've spoken to ever saw it or heard much about the results. A 2015 report in The Atlantic described some of the DOJ's discoveries of systemic abuses, like a police department that required officers to issue as many citations as possible, resulting in stops being made that "ha[d] little relation to public safety and a questionable basis in law," according to the DOJ, with individual stops routinely resulting in multiple citations; in one case 14 citations resulted from a single interaction. Then came the criminalization of being unable to pay:
"Jail time would be considered far too harsh a penalty for the great majority of these code violations, yet Ferguson’s municipal court routinely issues warrants for people to be arrested and incarcerated for failing to timely pay related fines and fees. Under state law, a failure to appear in municipal court on a traffic charge involving a moving violation results in a license suspension. Ferguson has made this penalty more onerous by only allowing the suspension to be lifted after payment of an owed fine is made in full."
One woman who had been assigned a $151 ticket wound up paying $550 and spending six days in jail over the course of seven years spurring from this one ticket, and STILL OWED $541 at the time of the DOJ report. Ferguson's police department and municipal courts had a heck of a racket going on. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the pattern of harassment and brutality that was discovered, from a man cooling off in his car after a game of basketball being accused of pedophilia for hanging out at the park, to a boy being attacked by a police dog while trespassing on an abandoned property. By the way, the report found that EVERY reported instance of police dogs biting a suspect described a Black victim. Ferguson's 94% non-Black police department was enforcing a Jim Crow-era version of justice on the 67% Black St. Louis suburb. This should have been headline news, and it should have raised questions about where else this was happening, especially in light of the FBI's 2006 bulletin on its discovery that white supremacists were making a concerted effort to infiltrate law enforcement nationwide. And yet, that hadn't been big news either, although this past week 27 members of Congress led by Representative Norma Torres (D-CA) called for the FBI to make the full report public.
And if ALL OF THAT isn't enough to convince you Black Lives Matter was bigger than Michael Brown, consider that just 4 days before Brown's death, John Crawford was gunned down in an Ohio Wal-Mart after a shopper called police and reported that he was brandishing a firearm, when in reality he was grocery shopping and picked up a BB gun for purchase. Police lied about the encounter, claiming Crawford hadn't responded to verbal commands, but Wal-Mart's security cameras caught the encounter, showing that the officer opened fire on sight. To add insult to injury, The Guardian reported that police confronted his girlfriend, Tasha Thomas, shortly after the incident, threatening her with jail time and accusing her of being on drugs when she cried during questioning--she hadn't been aware of Crawford's death at the time they confronted her. By the way, Thomas died in a car accident the month after The Guardian report hit the news.
So, as you can see, context is extremely important. Brown's death sparked a wave of protests that overshadowed the much-less-gray Crawford shooting, because of the pattern of behavior by the police in Ferguson. Understanding this type of injustice is central to understanding the nature of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I've only covered highlighted events in one small suburb over a period of a few years. One can imagine how long it would take to detail injustice over a greater time period and geographic range. Incidentally, neither Brown's nor Crawford's killers were indicted.
Which brings us back to today. I'm just one person, and so my assessment of the barometer of this moment is largely anecdotal, but I've seen a shift in many people's attitudes toward the Black Lives Matter movement. People who once opposed it have begun to get on board, people who were once silent have begun to speak out. Pew reports that 67% of Americans now express support for the movement, and 76% believe racism is a problem, up 26 points from 2015. People are beginning to better understand the context of the movement and that is leading to broader support of its goals. As tangible evidence of this shift, we are also seeing cultural dominoes fall in the form of removal of symbols, brands, popular culture, and monuments with negative racial connotations.
On the more minor end of the spectrum, the 2000s sitcoms Scrubs and 30 Rock saw episodes of their show featuring white characters in blackface removed from their streaming homes. Blackface, of course, is a term describing makeup worn by a white actor to make them appear as if they are Black, and its problematic history stems from the minstrel show, a form of 19th- and 20th-century entertainment that often showed white actors dressed as Black caricatures, and occasionally Black actors playing the roles themselves, often portraying Black people as buffoonish, lazy, stupid, and ugly. I haven't seen the 30 Rock episodes in question, but I have seen every Scrubs episode, and while I wouldn't say the episodes did anything to explicitly mock Black people (in fact, one portrayed the character in blackface as a clueless and tone-deaf idiot who gets deservedly and comically beaten up by a group of Black people, while the others fall into somewhat more neutral "what-if-I-was-Black" fantasy sequences), this was the right move for this cultural moment.
Zach Braff's Scrubs character, JD Dorian, is a daydreamer prone to absurd fantasies, and is seen here imagining himself, with his crush Elliot, as Black. His best friend Turk (Donald Faison) told him to imagine Elliot with JD, with her boyfriend, and with Turk, and in all three sequences Elliot is with JD but in the third JD is Black.
Also notable, Aunt Jemima pancake syrup announced its intention to rebrand. Owned by Quaker Oats as a subsidiary of PepsiCo, Aunt Jemima has been a staple in American grocery stores for over a century, and its original advertisements depict a Black woman portrayed as a "mammy": a trope that depicts Black women as mindlessly devoted to serving white families, especially as maids and nannies, that also had ties to minstrel shows. The trope sought to depict a Black woman's "place" as in the service of white people, with slavery not-at-all-subtly referenced as an idyllic time for "Mammy." The first model to portray Aunt Jemima was chosen because she was overweight and seen as unattractive, an intentional depiction, and had been born into slavery herself. Although many recent reports have attempted to erase the harmful connotations of Aunt Jemima (again, a name taken from a popular minstrel show trope, and arguably akin to the "Uncle Tom" trope) and attempt to frame the rebranding as an erasure of a successful Black woman, the model, Nancy Green, continued to work as a maid until her death at the age of 76, not exactly painting the picture of someone who enjoyed financial comfort. Her successor, Agnes Moodey, was even more overweight and even darker skinned, again to feed into the trope of Black women as unattractive, as these physical traits were, and still are by many, seen as undesirable; and as without ambitions that didn't involve servitude to whites. Yes, the brand is recognizable as is, and while most people in 2020 probably don't actively view Aunt Jemima through this negative lens (indeed, most people are probably unaware of the history), this is again the right move for this cultural moment.
A totally-not-racially-insensitive 1940s Aunt Jemima ad.
Then, on the more important, and as such more controversial, end of the spectrum, is the Elephant In the Room Since 1865: Confederate relics. In most places in the United States, especially rural places, you'd probably be hard-pressed to find someone who has never seen a Confederate flag planted on someone's lawn or flying from the back of a pickup truck. That isn't what we're talking about here. However you may feel about the Confederate flag, it needs to be abundantly clear that nobody is trying to make it illegal to have one. As always, context is important. What we have in the former Confederate states, and in isolated cases, even states that have no Confederate history whatsoever, is an abundance of statues, commemorations, and monuments to the Confederate States of America. Make no mistake: the Confederacy was formed almost solely to preserve the right to hold Black people as slaves. Each and every Confederate state's articles of secession from the United States, as well as the Confederacy's constitution, are abundantly, unambiguously clear about that point. And in each of these states, the so-called "Confederate flag" exists in a position of exaltation, often seen flying from government property, while military installations are named for Confederate leaders and statues of Confederate political and military figures stand in positions of honor throughout the South. There's a lot to unpack here.
In reality, the flag we are all familiar with today, a red field crossed by blue bars in the shape of an X, adorned by 13 white stars, is the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Confederate Army. While I could write an entire article on the contradictions that embodied General Lee, there is plenty of that already out there for you to sift through. Maybe I'll come back to it sometime. But the point is, that flag was never the flag of the Confederate States of America, but of a specific Army under the CSA. What is important is why this flag made a resurgence: the mythology attached to the "Lost Cause of the South," a movement that arose as early as the late 19th-century that sought to sanitize the Confederacy's ambitions, cloaking the nation's patently evil motives behind circular logic such as that the Confederate states seceded to defend their right to secede, while skating around WHY they wanted to secede in the first place. Lost Causers adopted the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia as an emblem of these noble (and completely false or at least beside the point) ambitions of the CSA. By the 1910s, the flag had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan who flew it exclusively, meaning its racist connotations were apparent a century ago, and the gray area surrounding it today is mostly a result of intentional muddying of the waters around America's Civil War discourse. While this may not have been the original intent behind the flag's resurgence (it was flown at the 1913 50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg), this doesn't change the original intentions of the Confederate States of America nor those of the white supremacists that co-opted it afterward. Penalize me for invoking Godwin's Law, but the swastika originating as a symbol of good luck in many Eastern religions doesn't change the fact that it was co-opted by a regime that carried out one of the worst genocides and instigated the bloodiest war in world history. Context matters.
The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia
Then, there are the monuments to people of the Confederacy. Before we unpack when and why some of the monuments were built, let me provide a short list of some of who we are talking about here. Monuments exist and places are named after people like Henry L. Benning, who once claimed that "pestilence and famine" were preferable to Black people achieving freedom; Braxton Bragg, described by one modern historian as a "bumbler" derided for his role in "los[ing] the West"; Leonidas Polk, described in his own time as "unfit for executing the plans of others" and by one modern historian as an "incompetent general" who even Bragg thought was a fool; George Pickett, who fled to Canada to escape prosecution for executing 22 prisoners of war, who, I remind you, were American soldiers; John Bell Hood, who referred to Black people as an "inferior race" who whites elevated from "barbarism"; and countless others with similar reputations as white supremacists, cowards, traitors, and bunglers. These are hardly men who fit the profile of the genuine war heroes military installations are generally named for, and are united by one common trait: their efforts to destroy the United States and make subjugation of the Black race a natural law on the continent of North America. And all of this is to say nothing of monuments built to other controversial figures less central to the Civil War, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan. To be entirely fair, figures like Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who spent his post-Civil War life fighting for Black civil rights and suffrage, are also honored, and even figures like Lee are much more nuanced than they may seem at first glance, but the context of when and why the monuments were built factors into the controversy. And hey, even Lee opposed the building of Confederate monuments and even his descendants would prefer to see them taken down.
Actually, this is a pretty compelling argument for leaving this one up
Now to the when and why. According to the American Historical Association, the erection of many of these monuments during the Jim Crow era were "part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South" and "were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life." A second wave of Confederate monuments coincided with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, with the timing clearly not coincidental. This context is crucial to understanding the systematic exaltation of enemies of the United States who not only fought for an evil cause, but often weren't even good at fighting and ultimately lost the fight. The only reason there could be for honoring the losers in a moral battle in such a disproportionate way is sympathy for their cause, and this is the exact reason why putting these people on the pedestals they currently enjoy is so problematic. It's worth noting that Black civil rights activists have been protesting these monuments since at least the Civil Rights era, and that it is not a new phenomenon for people to find them offensive; rather, it's that they're just now starting to be listened to on a wider scale. And after decades and even generations of begging your government that ostensibly represents you to stop honoring the people who would put you in chains for the color of your skin, it's quite easy to see why eventually people reach the point where they stop asking nicely. And this pressure is working: in recent weeks, we've seen city governments across the nation move to remove certain controversial monuments, Congress has voted in favor of renaming certain forts, and even Mississippi, a state which due to a "filing error" ratified the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution which outlawed slavery in 2013, has voted with a 2/3 majority in its state legislation to move toward adopting a new state flag, as their current one is an adaptation of the Confederate flag. These are the right moves for this cultural moment.
There is a real concern that I think some people genuinely and sincerely have that an "erasure of history" is taking place. Doom-and-gloom proclamations are being made that we are living in George Orwell's 1984, and comparisons to book-burning by the Nazis are made (Godwin again). And I want to make it clear that, while I believe Confederate monuments were very often erected with malicious intent and as a general rule have no place on public property, I do believe they have a very real historical value, with the proper context. A Confederate monument in a museum about the Civil Rights movement or the Civil War contains the context and nuance necessary to understanding the history of the Civil War, the history of the individual memorialized, and the history of when and why they were memorialized, all of which are necessary for the monument to serve as any kind of historic reminder. Even a plaque on the current site of the monument would be an improvement. Even the history of evil people is important, but the catch is that we cannot be venerating these people by preserving their likeness, and a monument built to a man with no explanation of who he was creates the impression to the uninformed that the man must have been great. Germany is full of Holocaust memorials, but not-so-surprisingly light on monuments to Adolf Hitler. Americans cheered when Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. The Soviet Union spent years "destalinizing" the country after the death of Josef Stalin. And yet, without me providing you with any real background information on the historical figures mentioned in this paragraph, I'm quite sure you know who Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Saddam Hussein were and what they did. History is not erased because a historical marker disappears, but a historical marker can do much to cloud and confuse our actual understanding of history without the proper context.
The statue of Saddam Hussein at Firdos Square in Baghdad is toppled as American troops look on.
In spite of all the fervor around the erasure of history, a bit of nuance is all most of us are asking for. Yet, in an environment where any whisper of social progress is often met with a sledgehammer, it's small wonder that marginalized people eventually show up with a hammer of their own. If we truly want to preserve history, we as a nation must stop cloaking it in lies designed to preserve our belief in our exceptionalism, and own up to the bad and the ugly as much as we emphasize the good. We must stop sweeping the lived experience of some of our people under the rug. Jim Crow wasn't that long ago, and as we're seeing, we still have a long way to go to equality, and we won't get there by prioritizing the preservation of an incomplete and dishonest "history" over the real fears, pain, and anger of our fellow citizens who have not been treated fairly. We must make a real effort to seek justice and equality for all Americans and see that their stories are told too.
All it takes is a little context.
P.S. Black Lives Matter. All lives CAN'T matter until Black lives do.
Comments
Post a Comment