Unshared history
by Tom Sullivan
Amidst the analysis of the violence in Charlottesville and the debate over removing Confederate monuments, Slate's Jamelle Bouie reviews their place in whites' sanitizing Confederate treason in defense of slavery as noble and heroic, transforming the slaveholder's revolt into the War of Northern Aggression:
Their origin is in the myth-making of the Jim Crow South as symbols of white supremacy over a “redeemed” South and building blocks in a narrative of national innocence meant to unify a divided white polity. In the myth, a figure like Robert E. Lee is transformed from the disgraced general of a brutal effort to expand an empire of bondage to the glorious figure represented in monuments like the one in Charlottesville, a valiant leader in a fight for independence. A man worthy of honor.Etcetera, etcetera. So goes the carefully rewritten history memorialized in town squares across the South. The sitting president built his campaign, Bouie writes, on telling supporters they too were the victims of aggression by "immigrants, Muslims, and black protesters" who forced them through the oppression of political correctness "to apologize for America’s presumed greatness." Now the liberal blackguards want to remove the monuments to white superiority erected to paper over America's original sin and the rebellion that tore it asunder.
A few days before the chaos in Charlottesville, the editorial board of the Daily Progress—the city’s daily newspaper—gave its view of the turmoil around the statue of Robert E. Lee. In an unsigned piece, it blamed the upheaval on local leaders who questioned the memorial and called for its removal, labeling one such figure—the only black representative on city council—an “agitator” who is “largely responsible for the conflagration that continues to escalate.” Other voices made similar points, slamming “identity politics” for the actions of white nationalists.Confining Who is America for? to race would be wrong as well. Preachers in churches both mega and not find in their Bibles verses they can shape to justify whatever prejudices or vices to which they are bred and/or prone. It was ever so. So too can would-be rulers of other men uncover in America's founding documents proof enough to justify enormous concentrations of wealth (theirs) and impoverishment for those too unworthy, unproductive, or generically "impure" to merit inclusion in America's political governance and economic bounty.
But this is wrong. It presumes that these monuments were never controversial and that the narratives they represent were never contested. They were. They always have been. And the reason we have this fight is because for more than a century, too many white Americans were content with narratives built on exclusion and erasure. The question now is whether they’re still content, whether they still believe this is a white country, or whether they’re ready to share this country, and its story, with others.