“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Martin Luther King.
What I am hearing from many people that are (1) male, and/or (2) white, and, (3) in the upper-middle class, and, (4) by all outward appearances, are good and decent people, is that the political climate is infuriating to them because they are tired of being labeled racist, sexist, and/or bigoted, because of who they voted for [the GOP], because they are outraged that “outsiders” are pressuring “them” to remove monuments dedicated to the Confederacy, or, so fed up that the only response is “quit blaming me, it's not my problem,” or, “I’m over it.”
In the wake of Charlottesville, we are seeing an outpouring of condemnation of people who embrace the Hitler’s Third Reich, Neo Nazi ideology and other forms of organized white supremacy. Many of these same people in the paragraph above have sometimes loudly, and sometimes quietly, given voice to condemn these hateful groups of people. This is not surprising; condemning Nazis is easy (unless of course you are President Trump).
Condemning our own past is not quite so easy to do. Indeed, this condemnation is more difficult for many of my fellow citizens that share my demographic (i.e. items 1-4 above), is confronting the institution, symbols, and mythology that underscore and promote unorganized and organized white supremacy that were made part of our country’s history. The continued reverence and celebration of the Confederate States of America is horribly misplaced; but the notion that everyone shares this misplaced belief is a terrible person is not helpful in reaching the goal of reconciliation. Our ancestors created these myths, supported the whitewashing of history, and created this system. The decision that white men need to make now - are you going to continue to buy-in to this con-job?
I do believe, in part (maybe foolishly) that white Southerners’ reluctance to accept our past is the direct result of a lack of knowledge about our past. Please be clear, this is not an excuse, but an explanation. The South is populated, in large part, by people of Anglo-Saxon ancestry that has a deeply ingrained tribal/clan oriented culture. In other words, the reluctance to acknowledge the sins of our forbears is because such an action violates our ingrained trait to put family first and to never violate the notion of loyalty to our clan. If you, the reader think, this is not true, consider the times you have heard Southerners says, “I don’t agree with what the Confederacy fought for, but I admire the fact they fought and died for something they believed in.” (More on that misplaced idea in a bit). I have heard words similar to that statement from many people: men, women, young people, elderly; but, those people are always white, and almost always people who come from privileged means.
From my own personal experience, the “education” of the “Old South” is not taught in a way that is openly hateful at the onset. The lessons of the “Old South” are taught in a way that never addresses the ugly institution of slavery, subjugation, and equating human beings as property. The lesson of the “Old South” is taught in the “wholesome” manner of learning one’s family history and celebrating the cause of fighting the oppressive federal government. Consider the phrase “The War of Northern Aggression” - get my drift about the spin yet? Instead, the issue of the Civil War is spun as an issue of constitutional “States Rights.” However, I have never spoken to a fellow Southerner that can identify a State’s right other than regulating the commercial trade of slavery (or the sins that followed in the form of Jim Crow segregation). There may be other States’ rights that existed, but none were mentioned in the various declarations of secession that formed the basis for armed conflict.
The “Old South” lessons start at an early age, and involve grandparents and parents driving children to Civil War battlefield memorials, and/or decorating the graves of family members that fought and/or died in the human tragedy that has permanently scarred our country’s history. This happened to me and my sister. Throughout the southeastern United States, statues and memorials stand that commemorate the fallen dead of the Confederate Army, sometimes both the Confederate and Union armies, but with no acknowledgement that these memorials serve to promote the subtle message, that in the Old South, the war was fought to maintain an economic system’s free labor force. Few white men talk about that part, but I also believe some don’t know that is what our forbears intended.
The first step is acknowledging that (1) our ancestors owned slaves, (2) fought to preserve slavery, and then (3) set up the Jim Crow system, and that points (1), (2) and (3) are morally wrong, and blaming the times that our ancestors lived in is not an acceptable excuse. Our acknowledgment of their sins, and our willingness to not excuse those sins is not a betrayal of family loyalty, or the memory of the fallen. This acknowledgment is simply showing a rudimentary understanding of right and wrong. It's okay to acknowledge that those forebears died for something we now know is wrong.
I am at peace with saying those people in my own family, that I have never met, and never knew, fought to preserve a socio-economic system and business model (that required controlling another person by placing him or her in chains, then calling those people property, breaking up their families, and physically torturing, raping and abusing those people) that I explicitly know is wrong. I am at peace with explicitly stating that those forebears did something wrong and will not make excuses for them.
The time for mythology is over. And more importantly, it is time for middle class white Americans, of which I am a part of, to understand that we should be part of the solution and disavow this mythology. The danger of middle-class, white males passively commemorating the Confederacy, by maintaining these monuments of reverence to bad people, by adhering to the Southern “spin” creating during Reconstruction, and by remaining silent and keeping our heads down during these conflicting times, is that it gives the NeoNazi/Confederate/White Supremacists living in our midst some belief that you are a person simply waiting to join their cause. Who do you want to stand with - the guy who thinks Hitler had good ideas or the men whose ancestors came from different continent than your own ancestors?
I think this answer is easy; but clearly, disavowing the immoral behavior of our ancestors is something being wrestled with. I hope this makes at least a few readers engage in some discernment to at least reconsider their point of view. And if you see a new point of view, don’t be silent.
