I was as much the fool as ole Brer Rabbit, obliging Tar Baby
but ultimately getting mired up in Brer Fox’s conniving trap. And that’s pretty much the situation anytime
a person honestly, respectfully, and peacefully reacts to the negative tripe currently
saturating social media regarding the great American jihad against all remnants
of the short-lived Confederate States.
There is no civilized debate.
There is no considerate dialogue.
There is nothing tolerated but vehement attack and a bullying demand for
either agreement, or utter silence. If
you think this is America, think again, for there is no room for differing
thought or personal opinion that counters the extremist mainstream thought of
purge & cleanse.
My “trap” was what I innocently assumed to be an honest,
forthright question from an African-American woman commenting on a respected
scholar’s recent post about the trend to wipe out all visual vestiges of memorial
to the Confederacy. She posed a valid, and
thought-provoking, question, “Why is it useful to honor those who fought to
ensure that my ancestors remained enslaved and brutalized? Why?”
I almost didn’t answer.
I was, frankly, afraid, not of offending her, for I bore no offense, but
rather I was afraid I actually had no fair answer. For all my fervent support in protecting the
venerated statues of Lee, Breckinridge, Davis, & Morgan, I’d never before
asked myself why the descendants of Southern slaves really should feel as I
did. Perhaps I was actually afraid that
in answering this question, I’d find an answer within myself that would shake my stance and
sway my defense. So, realizing that no
answer to her query only implied my devotions were actually biased, I began to
write in response.
I replied, “That is an
honest, and very valid, question. I'll take a stab at it, if you'll permit.
First off, let's
extract the term "brutalized" as it is subjective and applicable only
to specific historic situations. "Dehumanized" would be a better
choice, but this stems from the Euro-British traditions of chattel slavery that
we adopted here rather than created.
Now to your question. I'm not sure myself that a descendant of
Southern slaves necessarily should "honor" the institution of slavery,
or either side of conflict during the War and its participants. You should
honor your own people, but by doing so I think that requires an acceptance of
respect both for them and for the rest of their society, inclusive of their
masters. We forget that but for those first white Virginians of 1619, all
succeeding generations were born into a culture whose economy was based upon
slavery.
The soldiers of the
Confederacy were as well born into this society where state, church &
parents taught them to accept the institution as right and just, conveying upon
most a moral responsibility as master and caretaker of what they deemed, sadly,
a lesser race. They then marched off to war, first to protect home &
hearth, but yes, per their governments, to ultimately retain the economic norms
they all were born into. No, that doesn't support a reason to honor them, I
admit, but neither does it afford any of us a right to vilify them.
I think respect stems from a vision of unity, not
from viewing Southerners as separated by race. These men may not symbolize a
cohesive South, that much is true, but they were nonetheless champions of their
states and counties and communities, and they were the ancestors of perhaps
your friends, neighbors, or co-workers who inherited from those same soldiers their
tenacity, valor, and pride of community, not latent racist attitudes stemming
from admiration of their past that so many now wish to infer. That alone
warrants respect. Any soldier deserves
respect.
Another reason for
affording respect to these soldiers is the monumental legacy of slavery itself.
When you, or I, trivialize this legacy of some 13+ generations of enslaved
African-Americans as the collective existence of mere slaves or, even worse, as
just victims, we dishonor them. We are talking about men, women & children
who can never be fairly remembered merely for their vocation or bondage. They
overcame adversity and lived, generation after generation, with pride, spirit,
and above all, intense hope. They did not teach despair to their children, nor
did they leave their modern descendants with a legacy of bitterness. No, they
had respect for themselves, and what’s more they lived with respect for their
plight, and for the society that perpetuated it. They were demeaned socially,
relegated to the equal status of cattle or mules, yet harbored no personal hate
or perpetual despair for their lot in life or for the white men who fought in
the Confederacy that might have perpetuated their legal chattel status. Like it or not, black Southerners were as
proud of their sense of “place” and "home" as were their white counterparts. Subjugated as they were, slaves still found a
sense of family and connection in all but the cruelest of settings. The boys that left home had once been the
babies they nursed, or the children they had fished and hunted alongside. Though contemporary words rarely explained
it, even in the plantation setting we seem to demonize now through a higher
moral grasp, feelings of family and honor were still reciprocated between white
and black, and there was a degree of pride in the young men who gallantly left
to protect both of those primary concepts on behalf of all, regardless of race.
And never did these enslaved souls intend for
their memory, faint as it might now be, to serve as a catalyst for revenge
& spite. No, even when it wasn't returned, these people offered respect,
perhaps in a fuller, more Christ-like manner than their white owners may have.
For that reason, in honor of your own past, Black Southerners can and should
muster a degree of respect for these men who thought they were protecting both
races, deceived though they may have been by a social fallacy we ended only by
war & bloodshed. I'm not saying that respect for these monuments comes
easily, I know it can’t for you, but when it does, and it can, perhaps it will
at last be reciprocated fully.
The biggest mistake
we've made since the Civil Rights Movement has been the continued exclusion of
Blacks as mutual Southerners. We have never given them/you a reason to respect
the entirety of our joint past, for we can't quite yet see that we've an
intertwined culture. Change has always been slow, granted, but it happens. The
erection of monuments to Confederate war dead happened, mostly, decades after
the War once monies were raised. These were not visual attempts to subjugate
blacks, but we still won't admit that the subjugation took place throughout the
first half of the 20th century. And here's the big point, which you may not
accept right now, but if you ponder, I think you'll see reason in my statement.
Neither you, nor hardly any African-American descendent of slaves, visualizes
pillar & post or any semblance of an antebellum plantation when you see a
Confederate flag. Virtually no living Black Southerner retains a vestigial
filament of connectivity to slavery. I personally think you should, but that
isn't a common occurrence today. What you do carry is a harsh, living memory of
racial hate and atrocities silently sanctioned & condoned by America &
its governments as a whole, Federal down to state and local. You are not
offended by an historic banner, or any statue to a war 150 years ago. You don't
even see Robert E. Lee. You see Jim Crow, and that's the elephant in the room
we none wish to admit to.
********, my words may not be written with
sufficient time & preparation to so eloquently convey my answer as I might
wish, but I have attempted it honestly and with respect. You may choose to assume
me a racist CS flag waiver, and I can't modify that impression if that’s what
you still perceive, but I can further explain my position here on the fence
I've straddled for some time. My family was at Jamestown, and my ancestors
collaterally owned thousands of slaves. I've no shame or guilt in that. My
ancestors fought on both sides of the conflict, including our beloved General
Lee, my multiple cousin, and that makes me very proud. I take no pride, though,
in the American institution of slavery, and I acknowledge it a moral mistake of
the country's founders, but I still take pride in these statues, not as efforts
to continue slavery, but as symbols of a region of America like no other, where
black & white side by side, even in times of hate & distrust, but as
well in times of joy, contributed to a unique way of life we all should be able
to celebrate now. If 4 years of our military past is meant to fill us with shame
only because of slavery, then our entire regional & national identities
must as well, and I for one cannot agree to that. From 1609 until 2017, all
Southerners have experienced pain, loss, and humiliation at some point, but we
are by nature a resilient people. It is time now to leave off the sugar and swallow
the whole spoon of medicine, bitter or not, and respect the entirety of our
past, our common past, our mutual past, our unsegregated past. But yes, that
requires that I, that we, that all white Southerners, develop the same respect
for your stories as I would ask you now to show for mine.”
Well y’all, that was
received about as well as a Christmas fruitcake. Despite my convictions and my earnest desire
to share my vision of unity, I was met with preconceived negative conclusions. She denounced me as a white supremacist, a
racist, not reading my response in its entirety, but extracting words of
offense, just as she and so many others select images and banners of personal
subjective offense, unable to justify their rancor, unwilling to shed it.
And nothing I might have said would have been accepted, for
she couldn’t get past the color of my skin.
Her question was nothing but an entrapment, a Tar Baby, daring someone, especially a
white person defending our monuments, to answer, but what I was too naïve to
suspect was just how much this woman (and so many of her ilk) was seething
behind the computer screen and her apparently innocent and sincere post. Yes indeed.
I was pretty much like Brer Rabbit.
I had no chance of placating or provoking thought, for years of residual
anger dictated her opinions and distorted any image of true empathy. (And if anyone wants to assume I’m creating a
derogatory racist allusion by appreciating classic Southern literature I read
to my children that preserves and perpetuates Southern African-American folk
lore, then please crawl back into your hole, vipers!)
Well Miss ********, as my children, ages 9 & 6 like to
say, “you don’t know my life!” And
neither do you know my heart. You can
call me a lot of things, cracker if it makes you feel good, but not racist. Do I have biases? Hell yes!
We all do, but I work every day to assess & deal with the unjust
ones. I’m not there yet, and neither are
you, quite clearly, but that doesn’t give you liberty to assess my
character.
For what it’s worth, and I know
that isn’t much to this crowd, I’ve researched and studied for some 20+ years
to bring light to our local African-American community. I live in the “Cradle of Emancipation” where
two components of the National Parks System glorify the humble birth of
Lincoln, yet they refuse to acknowledge the presence of slavery and its impact
upon the Emancipator. I’ve struggled with
this disparity for years, but can neither budge the Federal Government to abide
by its own directives, nor convince my local citizenry to write a single letter
of support for the interpretation of its own ancient Black community. I’ve delved into our past to bring back names
and identities to long-forgotten “slaves”, including those who would eventually dwell in the
fabled log cabin birthplace of Lincoln, only to have that scholarship scoffed
at and rejected. My dear friend, my
brother, Gordon Earl Thomas and I tried in vain to make Juneteenth a community
celebration, but it wasn’t wanted. I’ve
pleaded for a memorial to the Black veterans of the Civil War, the men who
literally fought for theirs and their families’ freedom, but to no avail. I resurrected their names, and in great
solemnity had them read aloud by Kentucky’s first African-American Lieutenant
Governor, but only a scant handful, white or black, cared enough to be present
to hear. I have tried to bring back the
dead, seeking their graves, wanting to give our African-American community back
a sacred place in the ancient church yards like the whites still have, to know
and feel where they are rooted, to remind them we all started out together, only
to find that the recollection of those once enslaved has pretty much faded, not
replaced by images of terror and…brutality like yours, but with apathetic
acceptance of a lesser lot in life in which a rich past has no bearing upon
current lives, the legacy of slavery nearly forgotten, traded off for a peaceful
coexistence at the expense of any collective memory. I’ve asked for markers and monuments, public parks
and street names, but ended up a lone voice, a white Don Quixote taking up a
black lance that brands me a fool most days, crazy others, yet never respected
as an historian because I seek the telling of a mutual story that no one is
ready to hear or read.
Yes Ma’am, all that said, I am surely a racist, a white
supremacist, worthy of your ire, to be spat at electronically, sneered at and
ridiculed, just like all your white friends who type their attacks and spit
their own venom, they having absolutely no legitimate empathy for your past or
those noble ancestors you use rather than revere in the name of a shared
self-proclaimed offense. You so aptly
justify my passions and endeavors, reminding me of a wasted devotion all these
years, and a wasted effort now to show you, a stranger, my heart-felt respect. But because it wasn’t offered out of guilt
and shame, in embarrassment for my race and my ancestry, it wasn’t worthy of
your consideration.
So please, all of you, laugh at this fool. Damn my ancestors to Hell for their
corruption and racial hate that is apparently my only legacy from them. Trample my monuments, distort my past, deny
me my heroes, but always know what cowardly bullies you all are. You are all truly the bigots and supremacists
of thought and morality, abusing the charge of race, and denying your
birthright of pride and dignity, for that is what you wish to strip from
others.
