Uncle Remus Never Sledgehammered a Statue

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.