Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers.
I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.
I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.
A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost.
This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away. It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and intellectual, work-out.
As I've said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.
I've actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.
It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. It was not bad enought that my people had been enslaved, but the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of any moral high ground.
The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.
Nathan Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes, that dead serious countenance, the warrior's beard. His story is American--the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he's noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time.
Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry--too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest). To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK.
At the end of his book, McPherson has a section where the Confederacy, now desperate, considers raising regiments of black slaves to fight for them. For years, now, they've seen black soldiers--many of them their own ex-slaves--actively contributing to the South's demise. But faced with the prospect of doing the same, Lee and Davis are ensnared by the very lies that they've, until now, heartily embraced. Conceding that blacks could be soldiers, would be a tacit admission of their equality. As Southerner Howell Cobb puts it, "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." The South eventually raises two black regiments, but the Confederacy is defeated before any of them see action. And yet, in this section, you can see them trying to square the circle, trying to find another lie that will allow the lie of white supremacy to stand.
I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause.
The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or later, I think most of the South will be black like me.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Two years ago, I finally stopped to look at the artwork in the corner of my grocery store. Oh dear. It was General Lee with the troops and the proper Stars and Bars. Was the one on the opposite wall General Grant? No, it was Nathan Bedford Forrest. After some fairly calm words with the manager, who claimed to know nothing at all, that wall is now blank, but Mr. Lee rides on.
I think you're right about what's coming, but I'd bet on later, not sooner. And the wait will continue to be at terrible cost to the culture, economy, and soul of the whole region.
Fantastic post. I grew up in Texas, in a fairly liberal town, but happened to have a batshit-insane AP U.S. history teacher. I was taught the states' rights explanation of the civil war and the Dunning School version of Reconstruction. And although a lot of it seemed not quite right to me, I didn't have the tools to know any better. One of my clearest memories of that class is of a moment when she was going on about how cruel it was that the Yankees imposed such terrible punishments on the South during Reconstruction. (BTW, I'm white, and was born in the north but grew up in Texas from the time I was 7.) I raised my hand and said, "Um, but, I'm not saying that what the North did was right (again, at the time I didn't know any better), but don't you think that, when you rebel, you have to expect that there will be negative consequences for you if you lose?"
She glared at me for what felt like minutes and then spat out, "Well isn't that a NORTHERN perspective?" I honestly didn't know what to say to that. God she was horrid. I can only imagine how the black students in the class must have felt. Thankfully, I then went off to a good college where I was set straight on any number of subjects.
And speaking of Ida B. Wells, now I'm a historian, and what set me on this path, I think, was learning about her and her brilliant strategy of presenting the south's patterns of lynching as barbaric, and thus inverting and playing on their own fluffed-up self-conception as the height of civilization. She was really amazing.
I had a similar experience in my AP history class in Northern Virginia. My teacher was going on and on how "we" lost the War of Northern Agrression (this was back in 1986). I (a Jewlatto - Jewish Mom, Black Dad) reminded him that if "we" lost, then I wouldn't have been in his classroom and that in fact, "we" won.
That story is pretty incredible. I took AP US History in my high school (got a 5!) in Massachusetts and I recall we had to debate whether slavery had destroyed the black family in America during that time. That was the one big debate we had all year in class. I still have no idea why that debate was so important. When I ask myself today how slavery could ever be possibly good for black families the only thing I can come up with is diverse gene pools leading to the possibility of fewer genetically transmitted health conditions.
What year was that? Because the debate about the relationship of "the" black family (there's only one, did you know?) really exploded in the mid-1960s with the publication of the Moynihan report, and was extremely controversial. It was basically about whether or not there was something "pathological" (his word) about the black family that kept black people disproportionately mired in poverty. The report was really problematic (misreading of social science, etc), and it was also interpreted in ways he never intended it to be read (for instance, the accusation that he was blaming it on the black family and not on racial prejudice, which he definitely was not doing), so it turned into a decade-long shouting match.
This was in 2004, the argument wasn't about whether black families in the present day had been ruined by slavery, but whether black families of the Antebellum (sp?) era were totally destroyed by slavery.
Great piece of writing, TNC. Thanks.
And, by the way, so much for the idea of blog posts as tentative, hastily-written half-thoughts.
TNC,
A great post, with briliant insights into the psychology of peoples.
Can I nominate you for a Koufax award yet?
Agree with the above - really great piece.
I remember learning in high school in the Deep South about the connection between Blacks and Southerners as the two "problem people" of this country, the people who the rest of the country finds troublesome and would just prefer not to deal with. This post reminds me of that connection, also in that both cultures have such strong narratives, cohesion, and superior style, and yet ... the struggles.
I really liked this piece.
"but don't you think that, when you rebel, you have to expect that there will be negative consequences for you if you lose?"
Oh, Betsy, if someone had only brought up Nat Turner at that point...
Thank you for the post, TNC. This is something that Americans who are concerned for the country need to worry about-- how do disgruntled and defeated white Southerners (I'm one) rebuild meaning in their region and history without the pillars of white supremacy? The GOP has simply fed the myth, sometimes crassly and sometimes through genuine ignorance. Look at George W. Bush. The national media thought he was adored in the white South because he, unlike his father, was a real Southerner. That's wrong-- Southerners aren't that stupid. It was the fact that he WASN'T from the South, that he was a Connecticut Yankee who wanted to live in King Cotton's court, that he so desperately tried to become a Southerner, that endeared him to the white South. He was the foil to Clinton, who was a real, honest to God Southerner who wanted (so it seemed) to be MORE, to be a global figure, that pissed off so many conservative white Southerners.
The self-hatred for being both backward and ignorant goes really deep, and I'm not sure how it will be exorcised. The one good thing about defeat is the literature and art that thrives in its soil. Despite all the evangelical and white supremacist stonewalling, that kind of human expression may be what saves us white Southerners from others' ballots and our own bullets.
This is really interesting and something I hadnt considered--Bush's appeal to Southern vanity, contrasted with Clinton's efforts to transcend it.
There is an alternate view of this. Some White Southerners dismissed Bill Clinton as white trash. W, on the other hand, was born into money and privilege. That white trash thing looms large even today.
Thats how my Republican uncle broke it down to me: "They think he's low-down trash from a nobody family and they resent him for clawing his way to the top." But Gramsci's point is also interesting.
"how do disgruntled and defeated white Southerners (I'm one) rebuild meaning in their region and history without the pillars of white supremacy?"
Good question. How did the Germans do it after WWII? (Did the Germans do it?) (These are not meant to be rhetorical questions.)
You know who's actually very good on this -- on the south, I mean, not Germans -- Roy Blount, Jr.. Sure, he's a humorist, but so was Twain....
Instant thought: the Germans did the European Union.
Second thought: and 64 years later, the U.S. Army still has boots on the ground there.
Per your second thought: Those boots aren't there as an occupation force anymore. US (and British) armed forces operate support bases in germany for all 'old world' theatres of operation. (vs. the Soviet Bloc in the cold war, former Yugoslavia in the 90s, and the middle east conflicts since 2001.)
I love Roy Blount Jr. Going back further, I'd say Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner start to plow up the ground to plant something better. They present a tragic view that humanizes but never excuses the people involved.
Southern particularism for several hundred years was centered around white supremacy. This is a very different thing from post-war Germany, which merely had to account for a twelve year aberration. Obviously it's more complicated than that, in that Nazism had roots in German history beyond simply Hitler being able. But there was tons of German history to pick through that was not tainted by Nazism. This is much less true for the American South.
The Germans post WW1 reacted with support for the Nazi party... and the rest of Europe ignored the growing threat of the nazis because they felt bad for the depths of reparations they'd subjected Germany to after WW1.
I might suppose that if the north hadn't been as ruthless as they were in those reconstruction years, the US might've had it's own version of the Nazi Party grow to power. Even so, the KKK still stands, even if they're not so big on cross burnings and the like these days.
Reading TNC's posts, I have been increasingly interested on the Civil War History, of which I am mightily ignorant. Could anybody provide a list of serious, rigorous but still broad introduction to the subject books?
... I feel that I'm missing a huge part of what makes America America by being ignorant about this...
Hello Eduardo.
The Civil War and its era is the most important piece of American History to understand.
What led up to it, its prosecution and its aftermath are the keys to unlocking the mysteries of American psychology, history, pathos and ethos and ultimately the questions - What is America and What will America Be?
Some suggested readings:
Start with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and teh literature that describes their coming into being. Understanding the bargains struck by the States in order to ratify the Constitution and the inherrant vagaries that left room for interpretation is key to understanding why the split happened 85 years later.
The Civil War: A Narrative - Shelby Foote
Battle Cry Freedom - McPherson
Team of Rivals - Doris Kearns Goodwin
Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
A. Lincoln - Ronald C. White
Gettysburg - Stephen Sears
Also, watch Ken Burns' Civil War doc.
Thanks a lot, Phoenix. I have read both the DoI and the Constitution and have a basic understanding of the compromise that was struck back then.
The other books I haven't read. Will check them in Amazon with the reviews and will pick one to start...
Thanks again!
I mentioned this downthread, but wanted to put it here too. it's not about the Civil War per se, but I think it is critical to any understanding of the antebellum south (and, thus, the civil war):
Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson
Thanks, Betsy!
The Peculiar Institution - Kenneth Stampp
This is the book that in 1955 changed American historiography about slavery forever. Very dry style, but even more powerful because of it.
The Gathering Storm - David Potter
The best I've read on the political events leading up to the outbreak of the war.
Reconstruction - Eric Foner
Hands down, the best book on the aftermath of the Civil War.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow - C. Vann Woodward
Eduardo, Sorry I'm late.
Please read "Days of Defiance" by Maury Klein first. It is the best book I've read about the causes, problems and personalities leading up to the Civil War. I think you'll enjoy it and it is a good foundation for reading about the war itself.
I would strongly recommend Akhil Reed Amar's "America's Constitution: A Biography." It isn't specifically about the Civil War, and despite the title it isn't just about the constitution, either. However, the biggest meat of the book is analyzing the role slavery played in the original drafting of the Constitution, and how the consequences of those decisions then evolved throughout US history up through the Civil War. The analysis is fascinating; this book changed the way I understand American history.
"Could anybody provide a list of serious, rigorous but still broad introduction to the subject books?"
I think Bruce Catton's 'Centennial History of the Civil War' is an excellent place to start. His other books focused on the military aspect - fascinating by itself - but these focused on the political, economic and social topics.
Catton was an excellent historian who could write - I have found myself opening up his books at random just for the writing.
The Coming Fury
Terrible Swift Sword
Never Call Retreat
Good post on a good book. But one quibble--you write about "the South", when you really mean the white South. It's a trap we all fall into but it's deeply pernicious. (Same sort of trap as using "Americans" when we don't really include Native Americans.)
Of course, to take that point further, it's not the white South, either. It's a particular demographic of white southerners. I think and hope that most people understand what he means.
Another double post:
I have no wish to excuse any aspect of the South's atrocious history, but my disgust is tempered by this question:
Are you so sure that you, yourself, had you been alive in that place, at that time, wouldn't have done the same thing? Wouldn't have fought for the Confederacy or wanted to be Forrest?
-- This is obviously a question for white folks, but let's expand it a little. Are you really sure you wouldn't have tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib? -- Because the Stanford and Milgram experiments suggest that many of us would.
Are you so sure that you're not, right now, cheerfully doing something that our grandchildren will look upon with the same horror with which we contemplate, say, Jim Crow? Eating factory-grown chicken, say, or standing by while millions of Americans are condemned to live in hellish prisons, or -- well, there are lots of candidates: abortion (pro or con), immigration, poverty in its various forms. Again what are we doing now -- you and I, right now, doing voluntarily -- that future generations might condemn.
Again, my point is not to excuse anyone, or even to deflate our own self-righteousness. My point is, first, to suggest that if we want to know why evil occurs, we should start by taking a long hard look at our own souls; and second, to suggest that it rarely makes sense to indict an individual -- schoolteacher or Klansmen -- without at least contextualizing it within the forces of history and culture.
Faivel,
I agree with your point in the sense that I don't think it is productive to build a narrative of perfect victory and justice for the non-South, on the basis of the South's moral failure. There is devil and angel in all peoples and the North is no exception.
My disgust is more directed at the leadership of the Old South, the elected officials, the top educators, the wealthiest families, who refused to provide the leadership necessary to the take the South from where is was in the 1840s and 1850s, to where it could be. There was a deliberate political choice to remain backward and I think it is ok to pass judgement on that.
I think a lot of circumstance-specific morality exists on a continuum. Those who feel a stronger pull towards freedom, equality, justice, etc do more for those ends than those around them. In the 18th century the bold position was that all white men should be able to vote, instead of just white male landowners. After the Civil War it was that blacks should have the ability to make a living and not be lynched, even if they obviously weren't the equal of the white man. And yes, I know I'm vastly overgeneralizing things there.
The same thing surely exists today. My grandchildren may well look at Obama's saying gays don't have the right to get married and refusal to prosecute torturers the same way we look at our past racist leaders that still did some good. Who knows what moral stances may be commonplace in a few decades? It's really hard to deviate that much from societal standards without a strong group to tell you what you believe is right.
Yes, yes, 1000 times yes. This is a point Flannery O'Connor made many times, both in fiction and in conversation. She supported racial equality but she hated the condescending language Northerners used toward white Southerners. Her point was that if you take the racism seriously, don't reduce it to a set of evil racist people. Racism is more pernicious, snatching "good" people despite their best conscious intentions.
I agree that none of us can know how we would have acted in certain situations, but that is precisely why we have laws - so that it is clear that it is wrong to do stuff like lynching and torturing people. But we keep running into these situations where the law is clear, but we don't want to enforce it for whatever reason. So, to take the Abu Ghraib example, as much as I would like to say I would never torture someone, I really don't know what I would have done in the situation. But the really appalling thing is that the government was encouraging it and is now not really bothering to prosecute the people who put those policies into place.
(Which is to say - lynching is a terrible travesty, but I'm tempted to say that the state's de facto endorsement of lynching was actually the greater travesty, because it allowed future lynchings to occur).
I don't agree that your question is for whites alone. As a black female who is considered a "bonus buy" in corporate hiring, yet persists near the bottom in mobility, I have often asked myself the same question. Would I be a humanist to the degree that I am had I been born with white male privilege? Would any minority?
I believe that we all want to think the best of ourselves, but wouldn't it be easier to have shit thrown your way out of manifest destiny, and not because you had to earn it? And what would be the collective consciousness of such a group of people, even the dirt poor ones, who are only honorary white by epidermis.
Point taken, Melomadness. I guess it's no more of a stretch for you to imagine yourself a 19th century Southerner than it is for me. -- Well, maybe a little more of a stretch, but not enough to exclude (or excuse) you from the question.
Your second paragraph isn't entirely clear to me, though: can you restate it for me?
I agree and disagree. I agree entirely that it is more useful, especially in this day and age, to describe actions, thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, institutions, and statements as "racist" than to describe individual people as "racist" (generally speaking - there are obviously exceptions). Because we have all grown up breathing it, to greater or lesser degrees, and very few people can purge every hint of it from our brains. I also agree that thinking hard about the morality of our own actions is critical.
I agree about the absolute basic necessity of contextualizing any analysis in the history, culture, and circumstances of the time, and of any given individual. However, that cuts both ways - though it can explain why lots of people made the bad choices they did, it also is useful for figuring out what the outer bounds of the possible. The condemnation of slavery was in the world of ideas of the time, and Southern slaveholders were aware of it and the reasons behind it. There were some Southern abolitionists, if not a lot. So we can recognize that the world the Southern leaders lived in predisposed them to defend slavery, but also recognize that they did not HAVE to, that there were other paths they could have taken. The goal of this is not to condemn or absolve them, which would be pointless now. The goal is to recognize the interplay between broad historical context, individual circumstances, and the actions and decisions that people come to.
I also think it's important to be wary of moral equivalencies (and I know that you weren't promoting any such thing; I'm just reminded of it by the warning to be careful about judgment). The North and the South were not morally equal, although the North was certainly racist as hell.
Sorry if this is all over the place; it's a thorny subject.
No, I'm glad you jumped in. Which is not to say that I agree with you.
I wasn't so much trying to say that the North was as bad as the South; on the contrary, I rarely find it useful to think of nations as moral agents at all. And while there are better people and worse people, when you have a culture in which the great majority, at least of those in power, believes something we find atrocious, it's a mistake, I think, to conclude that what we're looking at is an aggregate of evil indivduals.
More importantly, consider this: certainly the idea of animal rights is in the world of idea right now. There are people who argue for it, people who practice it, people who fight for it. Me, I eat a lot of meat, and while I'm slightly uncomfortable with it, I don't worry about it very often. But that's why I used it as an example -- because the idea is out there. I just don't believe it.
But I'm willing to speculate about what kind of person I might be if, somewhere down the line, I turn out to be (morally) wrong.
This really is the reason why I began the post with my own personal journey. No, I can't be sure (were I white) that I would not have wanted to roll with Forrest. In fact, I even suspect the opposite. That's the point. But there comes a time of reckoning with the past. I think we're past that time.
Faivel, I'm not sure exactly what points we disagree on - I completely agree that we need to interrogate our own practices for those issues (it's one reason I don't eat meat, though there are tons of other things I do that are probably atrocious - I buy clothes made in sweatshops, I walk past homeless people on the street every day without helping them, etc.) while also being conscious that none of us can ever live perfectly moral lives, and that we have giant blind spots that people in the future will likely be astonished at.
I guess what we're talking about is the appropriateness and/or usefulness of passing moral judgment on historical figures. I don't think there's any easy answer to that. I think the best thing we can do is to be honest about what happened, all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
One book that I cannot recommend highly enough: Walter Johnson's Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. It does an amazing, incredible job of showing how the the moment of purchase/sale of a slave shaped and defined the southern psyche in this period. I think Johnson engages the points you raise better than I ever could, because he is examining the intersection of individual and society in this period, and he uses their own words to do so (letters, diaries, bills of sale, wills, etc.). Ta-Nehisi, I think if you read this book you will be blown away. Everyone I know who has read it has been. And unlike many history books, it's extremely well-written.
This strikes me as very significant, I was talking with a black civil rights attorney who has recently taken on the task of going to talk with some of these white Confederate historical societies to try and come to some mutual understanding of their collective history and he was telling me that he realized that they too were suffering from a kind of inherited/cultural shell-shock/denial over how badly they had been humiliated in their defeat and how they had never mourned these losses or come to grips with the enduring consequences, and one can see as you say a kind of over-compensation/mythmaking whether it's in white southerners dressing up like royal courts for mardi gras or rastafarians worshiping a corrupt Ethiopian tryant as God that unti we begin the hard work of coming to grips with reality that we will be lost in delusions of grandeur, I'm am heartened by this posting, as much as I understood and often admired parts of the black-to-Africa hip-hop culture that was coming into it's own when I was an undergrad at SUNY StonyBrook it was clearly out of touch with some important historical/political realites and in some ways cut off a lot of potentially liberating conversations/multi-cultural collective efforts, sorry if this is a bit fragmented but I hope in the spirit of half-formed but hopefully not half-baked thoughts it adds to the conversation.
Shalom Ta-Nehisi,
Your title for this post is the best I've ever seen by any blogger.
And borrowing from Faulkner sealed the deal.
B'shalom,
Jeff
Yep, the title is absolute win.
A fine post, TNC. I will get this book. May I suggest another? "Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery." It's a reminder that the slavery was an American institution, not just a Southern one.
I'll try to refrain form a wishy washy post about how good I think your writting here is. Only to say that, as usual, your post always gets me to thinking about myself, my past and dealing with history. I've always grown up with a sense of dealing with the losing perspective, I remember being a kid in 5th grade Texas History, sinking into my seat as the subject of The Alamo was discussed. Being the only mexican american in the class, I always felt bitter about that period. It wasn't until later in life, I learned that to an extent, the Texas revolution had a great deal to do with salvery as well. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1830, southern settlers moving into Texas had a problem with that, percieved an overeach of govt. by Santa Anna, didn't dig his fedarlist approach to things and the battle over my homeland, and how I would racially identify myself would ensue. I feel like I need to follow in your footsteps and re-read up on the that period, for me it would start with the Texas Revoltion and lead into the Civil War, I bet I would see things differently than I did when I was younger. I know just reading your recent post have already started the ball rolling on that...thanks
Fantastic post TNC, and wonderful example of how studying Civil War History can be useful for contemporary society (unlike the fetishized nostalgia weirdness that plays out in Civil War re-enactments).
But i do think your last paragraph perhaps exaggerates the ability of many (most?) individuals to accept reality and leave behind the myths of nobility. While you've come to accept the reality of African nations playing a key role in the slave trade and dismiss the idea that every ancestor of slaves is also descended from African royalty, that's hardly the case among many (most?) African-Americans. As someone who teaches at a liberal arts university in the South with an African-American population just under 30%, I come into frequent contact with these claims, black students who incorrectly assert (and i do mean assert, claims without any actual warrants) that Africa's current problems are a result of the continent's leaders being taken away by slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries, leaving only the weakest and dumbest behind.
And don't even get me started on the white students who cling (in every "inferiority complex" sense of that word) to the belief that poor Southern states were just fighting to defend their sovereignty (didn't you know? Northern states had slaves too!). No matter how often and substantively these claims are refuted, the students refuse to accept that their houses are built on sand. Funny enough, in both cases, the student is likely to interpret any rebuttal to their nonsense through a conspiratorial frame - they won't be duped!
This doesn't mean the truth shouldn't be stated over and over, or that some (many?) won't eventually give in and move on. But as you state, the power to "see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable."
Yes, LongTime, unlike your some of your Af-Am students, I have long been aware of the fact that had not Africans (and usually Africans of royal blood or tribal leaders, sold their slaves -- yes, there was slavery in Africa too -- or their captives of war to Europeans) that Africans were participants in the slave trade.
The brilliant scholar and activist Eric Williams details this history in his book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa." Williams argues that had there not been a robust market for African bodies that Africans would not have had anyone to sell other Africans to on such a large scale.
As I am sure most of you already know, in North America, there were a very small number of free blacks who owned slaves themselves. A great book that deals with this particular piece of history is "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones. It is fiction, but still it beautifully and realistically explores the subject of a free black man's ownership of black slaves.
pls forgive my mangled grammar. I try to do the best that I can sneaking in my comments, on the sly, at work.
All, please forgive my mangled grammar. Most times, when I re-read my posts, I cringe. Usually, I am writing my comments, on the sly, at work, so am always in a rush, hoping my boss is not peeking over my shoulder. Even with the typos and grammar errors, I hope, that I am bringing something of value to the discussion here.
I actually think the truth is far more liberating once you question the idea that only "Kings Queens and Nobles" are desirable as ancestors, or that they are inherently grand and good and not oppressive or self-serving.
That truth being that we descended from rice farmers, cattle and goat herders, priests, scholars, devout Muslims, shamans and herbalists, griots, architects, teachers of children, etc.
The desire to associate one's history with great kings and queens is so 19th / early 20th century, isnt it? Understandable for that time, but outdated now.
Storm, your second point is key to me--yes Africans were complicit in selling off other Africans; many African societies had trouble dealing with outsiders conceptually...what of their lineage, their genealogy? Without it, were they non-persons in that community or nation? Who was it ok for them to mate with and marry? Was the shame of their defeat a lifelong scar on their status? How to integrate them into the village or state, if at all?
And then there was the classic indifference of the African Kings and Queens on high of the fates of the little people--prisoners of war, condemned lawbreakers, undesirables--who they sold into slavery for their own gain.
As this all pre-dated a lot of the spirit of African unity that colonialism and slavery has forged over the centuries, and it certainly pre-dated nationalism, IOW, they often took the easy way out and sold them off to European slave traders for military and financial gain, basically.
Its important to note some key exceptions, including King Nzinga and King Garcia of the Kongo, in calling for restraint or abolishment of slave-trading.
In any case, pointing out the complicity of Africans in the slave trade is to me at this point no more controversial than pointing out the complicity of "N---gaz" on the block in drug dealing. Same mentality at work.
Oh! I lost myself in my own longwindedness.
Storm, the point being that those who create the demand market for drug dealing are as complicit in the destruction and suffering (often their own!) as the suppliers. On demand alone, Europe is indefensibly guilty.
Juba, I am not think we are in disagreement. However, I can understand the pov of Eric Williams as well -- if Europe was not so needy for slaves then who would the Africans have sold them to -- and the point here is -- on such a large scale?
Also regarding the quote of yours I highlighted above, Williams also explains in his brilliant book that the notiion of slavery in Africa was a much difference instiitution than it was in the Americas. In Africa, for instance, an African captive of war or slave, could eventually be incorporated into the community of the village. That slave, over time, could earn his/her freedom and become a valued member of the tribe -- slaves could even be adopted and marry into the tribe. (Think of "Things Fall Apart" by Chinu Achebe, which provides an excellent example of the treatment of captives of war.) Moreover, I have read that Native Americans practiced a similar form of slavery or capitivity; often, European captives were, over time, integrated in the tribe, re-named, and allowed to live as a free and protected member of the community. An African slave in the Americas was doomed to a lifetime of chattle slavery -- with the exception of the lucky few who were able to purchase their freedom or escaped.
Fantastic post.
"Battle Cry of Freedom" won the Pulitzer, as I recall, and was heralded at the time as the definitive work on the subject of a generation, every bit the equal of Bruce Catton's work in the 1960s. I personally think it's much better, and believe McPherson's work has stood up very well over the last couple of decades.
You also wrote:
> The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it,
> simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over
> slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty
> of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.
Dead-on, as usual. If you ever doubt that the Confederacy was, at its core, about slavery, go back and read its constitution. Most of the differences with the U.S. Constitution are relatively minor, but infused all through it, paragraph after paragraph, are protections of the institution of slavery. It is, more than anything else, about protecting slavery as an institution.
For anyone who believes, as I do, that a nation's constitution is a fundamental document that defines as nation's principles and ideals (however poorly it may live up to those in actual practice), these is only one inescapable conclusion: the Confederacy was about protecting, preserving and perpetuating the institution of slavery -- first, last and always.
I had the honor of taking African and African-American history courses at a 'traditionally black college'. I was almost the only white student in class. It was 69-70 so I'm sure scholarship has advanced. But it was a moving experience to have the realization dawn on those of us in the classes that what we shared was a vast tragic panorama without clear heroes, no King Arthur and no Lancelot. That economics with it's gravitational influence made the Southern Cotton economy based on chattel slavery a briefly profitable system. That myth and faith and traditions blessed the transient past by cloaking it in a pose of timeless virtue. That, White and Black, we had to deal with the aftermath of that immense tragedy.
Out of that sorrowful event there comes realizations and humanity like this post, truly a beautiful essay, Mr Coates. I salute you.
And the sappiest thing about that panorama is that it actually makes me feel more upbeat about humanity as a whole. I feel a weird affection for the whole species when I think about history in that way. Great description.
Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost.
This is such an incredible idea that's so difficult to come to grips with. We're raised on movies and epic tales. If you're on the side of the angels but don't win... well then you were fucking robbed. But of all things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has put it better than anything I've seen, when Spike gets sick of the gang dithering over whether they owe a vengeful Native American spirit an apology:
"You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story."
How do you accept the bare truth of this without tacitly endorsing the worldview? I don't want people to go around thinking it's kill or be killed. I think the world really is shifting in that respect. But there's no way to understand the past without understanding that this is how it was, and maybe if people can see their ancestors within that context, they won't feel quite the same need to create myths of nobility about them.
For the record, I love Guns Germs and Steel but I think its commentaries on North and West Africa, and how it handled the political / social concept of race was one of the weakest if not the weakest parts of an outstanding book.
From calling anyone but Bantu descendants "White" or "Non-Black" (including Arabs, Berbers, Khoi-San, etc.) to struggling to explain how Europe was able to make such in-roads into Africa without addressing the divide-and-conquer games, the conflicting approaches to prisoners of war and their status once conquered...I mean, his macro-view and clinical approach to technology, disease and social structure worked great up to a point, but at some point, he needed some more history (as opposed to antropology, biology etc.) to contextualize his approaches to Africa, China, etc.
A great book but maybe one with a few unavoidable holes here and there?
Agreed Juba. I was not very enamored with the book, to be honest. The macro-level story is fineas far as it goes - resources determine options and caonstrain, even portend outcomes, but the devils of human history really are in the details. The way the author dealt with the social, especially race, especially in China and North Africa was underwhelming in the extreme.
To be honest, it's been so long since I read it that I can't remember specific criticisms, but I'd imagine your points are correct. Diamond took some flak if I recall for his treatment of race issues in Africa, and it probably was unavoidable, since he probably didn't want to get into socio-political treatments of history on a micro-level for fear of detracting from the premise of the book. Though that hardly stopped the book from becoming a socio-political football itself.
I have read a lot of books on the Civil War and agree with thephoenixnyc, his list of reading is excellent.
Just saying slavery, for it or against it was the cause of the Civil War is simplistic. As everything in life there are nuances to it.
The South was intimidated by the growth of the industrial North. They felt as if they were being pushed into being "junior partners". There whole economic system was agrarian in nature. And the power of that economy was based on the free and renewable labor...slaves.
I'm sure there were many southerners knew how wrong slavery was but didn't know another way to live.
Incredibly insightful post. Thanks.
It seems that everyone wants to mythologize their ancestors in a positive light. I recently got into genealogy and found out that despite over 150 years of family lore to the contrary, the first person in this country from my father's side of the family was not an upstanding godly puritan fellow who came over on the Mayflower, but a different guy with the same last name who came over a few years later, and got expelled from the colony after spending some time in prison for arson and, apparently, public nudity. (As it turns out, I share this ancestor with President Obama... truth is SO, SO much better than fiction). In any case, it seems that the "myth of the glorious ancestors" is generally harmless silliness unless it takes over reality and starts directing public policy. I don't see much harm in the daughters of the Confederacy all getting together one saturday a month to pretend they'd all be Scarlett O'Haras if it weren't for the war of northern aggression... it's when they start voting accordingly that's the issue.
It seems that everyone wants to mythologize their ancestors in a positive light.
I have long delighted in telling my children that the first of our line in this country was an indentured servant in Mass Colony in 1670, fleeing a warrant for his arrest in Scotland.
The first part we know is true - but after that all we know is when he died, his wife's name and their children. We do not know why he came here or what he left behind in Scotland.
Most of us came here in steerage, that's a fact.
I don't think it's correct to say "I had simply lost", either. You might argue, for example, that black American culture is by far the most influential culture in the world today; that African-Americans (though this is a sticky argument, I know) are better off in almost all respects than many if not most of their African cousins; that the Leader of the Free World and the Planet's Richest Economy is one of you guys. In short, you might argue that you had simply won.
But I wouldn't quite say that, either. I'd say there's nothing simple about it.
That's why it's "I." It's not an objective fact to be argued. It's a subjective judgment about how it feels. Someone else may "feel" differently. Also:
Even with a qualifier, this should never be said. It is deeply unserious, and borderline disrespectful of people whose remains are on the floor of the Atlantic. The equivalent is citing the strength of Israel as evidence that the Holocaust wasn't so bad. More to the point, whereas I'm making a subjective judgment of how I feel. This i a categorical judgment of millions.
Of course, I accede to your first point. The second I knew was dodgy, but hoped wasn't as out-of-bounds as you say it is. Also, I didn't just qualify it; I explicitly said it was an argument I wouldn't make. But still...I don't mean to be sophistical.
If I translate it into my own ethnicity, Israel would have nothing to do with it. It would read something like, "Don't say 'Jews simply lost during the Shoah. It makes just as much sense to say Jews won. After all, you have it better in the US than your counterparts in Eastern Europe do at home, and after all, some Jews at least have moved into the highest echelons of American power."
Would I find this offensive, or deeply unserious? Ehhh...maybe, probably, sort of, depending on who said it, in what tone of voice, and in what context. The latter being important because you brought the issue up in a Guns, Germs and Steel context, which is very, very broad. So much so that morality in general is more or less moot, and the survival and thriving of the groups are all that count. In that context, I don't know that the argument about blacks or Jews eventually thriving in the New World is unspeakable.
That said, (a) it's not for me to decide, about African Americans, anyway, (b) the equivalence between blacks and Jews is, to say the least, imperfect, (c) I certainly could have expressed myself more clearly, (d) I should have known that the point, as I advanced it, was stupid and inflammatory. So: my apologies.
The heart of the problem is the broad declaration. I do not argue as a matter of indisputable--or even disputable--fact that blacks won or loss. The point, again, is about a personal feeling. Feelings are highly, highly subjective.
Also, you've got nothing to apologize. My words were a little sharper than they should have been. I'm not offended by your post.
[I can't seem to reply to your post immediately below this one, so I'm replying to my own]
Ah, good, then: I'm new here, and didn't want to get off on such a wrong foot.
But -- allow me to be tenacious -- now that I think about it, I'm not so convinced of the status you claim for personal feelings. Surely to say of something that it's a feeling is not to say that it admits of no discussion. I mean, I've had plenty of feelings that a good argument, or someone else's feelings, led me not to feel anymore.
This is all rather meta-, and off-topic, and admittedly pushing it a bit. I'm just wondering what exactly the force of "this is a feeling, and thus highly subjective" is, vis-a-vis an exchange like this one.
Yes, it merits discussion. But it's a lot different to say "this is how it feels to me" and "this is how it is." To say "we won" or "we lost" is more the latter than the former.
Regarding the false comfort of myths, see also: Christianity.
More seriously, see also: "The Talking Book" by Allen Callahan, where he explores how African-Americans appropriated the Bible to reconstruct myths, keep some kind of sanity, and enable their struggles. He shows how African-American Christianity had built within it a critical, skeptical view toward the myths of the powerful, so even those who were atheists (James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, et al.) wielded its prophetic language to attack both oppressive Christian beliefs and institutions while also decrying false idols in mainstream America (including the magical pony of perfected communism). In other words, the book complicates simplistic myths about religion as either 1) delusively comforting or 2) socially liberating.
Sterling Stuckey of the great book SLAVE CULTURE also has a lot of material on how African-Americans reconstructed Biblical myths as an enabler of their sanity and morale in struggling against slavery.
Beautiful.
Good stuff TNC, very important topic. Keep going in this vein, you're the only person I have seen discussing these things, which IMO are intrinsic to the American self image.
The one small thing I would add is that I think everyone goes through what you described with your eventual understanding of your real history vs. mythical history. My family was German and I have always been proud of that, and when I was in my teens I started nosing around a little more and instead of finding grand Tuetonic knights or kings in the family tree I found the German version of migrant laborers, clear up to my grandfather's generation who lived in a tent when he was first married and picked apples all throughout the depression and its aftermath.
Not exactly the "nobility" I was searching for.
It takes time to come to terms with your family history and the fact that while we Americans vocally disparage the idea of aristocracy, we all still desperately wish we were a part of it. It's something that I believe nearly all people the world round have in common: The idea that we want to belong to something bigger than ourselves, to be FROM somewhere. It's powerful and potent and the white south has its own highly publicized version of this, but it's an intrinsic part of humanity, a common thread that touches us all.
By exploring the white southern version of this, you are also exploring one of the bedrock motivators of humankind.
I've been thinking about these very issues lately. There's a controversy going on where I live in central Texas about whether a small cemetery should fly the Confederate flag (along with the U.S. and Texas flags) to "honor" the soldiers laid there. The defenders repeat the "heritage, not hate" line, coupled with the myths of "states' rights" and "brave soldiers fighting for their beliefs."
Which means one reason it’s useful to think about/read about/discuss these issues is because they’re clearly still with us.
I also wanted to add one aspect of modern-day mythologies: The sense that "my family didn't own slaves." I know this one well, having spent most of my life relieved, glad, and, yes, proud that my Tar-Heel family had been too poor to ever own slaves. In fact, I've never met anyone who admitted to being from a family that owned slaves (read about them, yes, but never met them).
But then a distant family member did extensive genealogical research, and there it was--in the 18th century--my ancestors owned slaves. Something happened along the way-- many generations of small-town, hard-scrabble ancestors stayed in central North Carolina--but the fortune got lost somehow, long ago.
And yet, how it hurt to know that my family had once owned other human beings. It's humbling to realize what one's own blood could do. Even if it were 200 years ago.
And so the myths continue: Heritage, nobility, not-my-family, fealty to the dream of Southern chivalry. As TNC rightly states, these myths temporarily assuage the pain that comes from truth, from being losers in so many senses of the word.
But in the long run they are so much more harmful than the truth.
It's no secret that plenty of folks in my family owned slaves. I think people who know their family's history (which includes just about everybody in the south) will admit it if you ask, they just don't like to broadcast it because they don't want to come off as being proud of it or something.
Ta-Nehisi, it's been a real pleasure for this Goldblog and Dish reader to discover you. You're blogging at a very high level, and the unusually high quality of your commenting community (no pander, just fact) is a testament to it.
It's worth noting how common a "myth of victimization" is among peoples around the world. In the U.S., in that other great crime of the country's morally mongrel (rather than simply noble) creation, Patricia Nelson Limerick - see, for instance, The Legacy of Conquest - traced the myth from American Western settlers' myth of their victimization by "savage" Indians to the same Westerners' myth of victimization, in their local and state's rights, by the federal government. And these are people, as a whole, who have to be viewed as winners by just about any measure.
Great post, TNC.
"I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause."
I've commented on this before, but as a white northerner who lived for a time in Virginia as a kid, and who's been a Civil War buff for a long time, this topic resonates.
I sort of bought into the "lost cause" mythology for a long time, at least a little, not really understanding the foundation of sand upon which it was constructed. It was only a few years ago, on a trip to Wilmington, NC, that it dawned on me that all of the economy of the old South -- every nail, paving brick and item eaten by the so-called gracious southern aristocracy -- was made by, or grown by, or transported by slaves. Walking down the old street of historic homes was what did it, I guess. That, and the barely suppressed pride in the old days by one of our tour guides that seemed a thin coat of laquer over what even she seemed to realize was a history of pain, suffering, injustice and utter hypocricy.
I'd also urge everyone who can to make a visit to the new visitor center at the Gettysburg battlefield. The historical displays are more focused on putting the battle and the war into a more realistic context, including frank material about the quite open justification for slavery by southerners for no other reason than simple economic benefit to the master class. They didn't make any bones about it at all, and didn't see anything wrong with it. I hear the echoes of that sort of mentality today still, in some elements of those who identify as conservatives. But going through that visitor center and listening to the voices (reading historical documents, articles in newspapers of the time, and personal letters, etc.) was quite effective in stripping away any romantic notions of what the fight was really all about.
This post/thread reminds me of 2 different, but great, American thinkers - James Cone, esp. in an interview he did with Bill Moyers when he talks about the fact that we have got to come to grips as Americans with the "lynching tree", and until we do, we won't get out of this mess we find ourselves in. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/profile.html
Also Walker Percy (whose family has been mentioned in other discussions here about white southern exceptionalism). He has a trio of books (The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome - I think it is those three - read them several years ago and may be mis-remembering the titles) that I think grapple with the legacy of slavery from his white southern perspective (he was born in 1916). At one point I think he says that God gave us an opportunity in this land - to start something entirely new for humanity (ignoring the price the native peoples paid for that opportunity) but with slavery and its effects, we blew it and I got the impression that he had little hope that we could ever redeem ourselves. I've always been interested to hear an African American perspective on these books.
From Love in the Ruins:
"What a bad joke: God saying: here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the apple of my eye; because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish Event even though you were nowhere bear it and had to hear the news of it from strangers. But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you because you had already passed the big one. One little test: here’s a helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him. That’s all.
One little test: you flunk!
God, was it always the nigger business, now, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683, and hasn’t it always been that ever since the first tough God-believing Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man, the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because once he was violated all he had to do was wait because sooner or later the first would wake up and know he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that."
Thanks for posting this.
The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color.
Chafing at the constraints of whiteness isn't Graham's only problem. He's no different from Ted Haggard or Larry Craig(both pre-demise).
Thanks, TNC. Your posts keep me sane and thoughtful--this one especially.
I remember vividly when my 6th grade social studies teacher (in progressive Austin, Texas, in the 1980s!) explained that the Civil War was really a matter of states' rights. Slavery was a side issue--and a dying institution with the arrival of the cotton gin, she said. It would have been peacefully phased out soon enough, she argued, without any need for war. She also dwelled on Sherman's violent march to the sea.
As a young, white southerner, I was relieved to hear there was another explanation, that some bit of inherited culpability was lifted from me. And I was indignant thinking about all the destruction Sherman left in his wake.
Thankfully, I love to read and have never been bound by geography, so this canard revealed itself soon enough. But I think about the generations of white southerners who have been fed this same version of history, and cling to it without question, nursing their wounded pride with righteous feelings of having been wronged.
Years later, for example, an aunt told me wistfully how "we" would never live so well again as before the Civil War. In addition to feeling shock and disgust at what she'd implied, I realized another southern canard: this myth of past grandeur. "Our" people--most of whom didn't even immigrate until after the war--were dirt poor. We were free from bondage, thanks to our skin color. But what did we gain from slavery but shame and strife?
"consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color."
You know, on a moral and spiritual level Graham, Buchanan, et al are proving there's actually some ironic truth in that dichotomy. Not saying that oppression equals nobility, but the supposed virtues of "whiteness" or blindered assumptions of it as the "normative" condition too often "constrain" folks from moving in a more noble direction.
I get what you're saying, but I think you're giving them too much credit. Plenty of people have their privilege and have not been constrained to be giant douchebags. ;)
You wrote: "It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful."
This reminded me of the following quote from Trainspotting, spoken by Obiwan Kenobi, I mean, Ewen MacGregor, (who plays, and is, a Scot)
"Some people hate the English, I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even find a decent culture to be colonized by. We are ruled by effete arseholes."
Thanks, Ta-Nehisi, for a thoughtful and thought-provoking post. You wrote that you imagine it's painful for some folks to face up to the facts of people like Nathan Forrest, slavery, and The Lost Cause because of the temptation to see oneself as the victim. I would humbly add that one shouldn't underestimate people's capacity for self-deception and holding two contradictory views. I don't say this to pick on white Southerners; let's face it, we all do it sometimes. But that's why it's necessary for people like you and your diverse commenting community to call out people like Rusty DePass and Sherri Goforth when they parade their ignorance, and then issue unconvincing apologies for it.
I remember reading a review of the show "Eastbound and Down", one of my absolute favorite shows on TV, and the writer at first thought the show was trying to be satirical naming the middle school in the series was named after Jefferson Davis. He thought it was a play on Southern racism to have children (both black and white) attending an institution named after a traitor to the United States, but he did some research and discovered there are many schools named after Davis in the South. How odd is it going to be to live in a country where we have schools named after Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and maybe Obama, but also Jefferson Davis?
There are many many schools throughout the South named for Confederate heroes. Not surprising really, the mythology established the parameters of the culture for a century.
As the culture shifted, Virginia resisted Martin Luther King Day for years. They finally grafted it on to Lee-Jackson Day (For Robert E. and Stonewall, not an actual school day off in my memory) to form Lee-Jackson-King Day for a few years before dropping the L-J. Multiple realities live on all the time.
Too fucking good!
TNC,
I don't know if you're familiar with Natasha Trethewey's poetry, but you ought to give it a look if you aren't. Her book Native Guard won the Pulitzer for Poetry a couple of years ago, and was deserving of the honor. That book is (in part) about growing up as a mixed-race girl in Mississippi, but also about the Mississippi Native Guard, a group of black Union soldiers who were killed in a battle near Biloxi, and who were subsequently denied by their Union commander. Really moving stuff.
Speaking to a couple of commenters who reference family histories, I'd recommend this movie, "Moving Midway". For the Netflix subscribers among us, the URL is: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Moving_Midway/70101274?trkid=496751
From the blurb: "Film critic Godfrey Cheshire examines the impact of the Southern plantation on American culture as he documents his cousin Charlie's attempt to move Midway Plantation -- the family's 155-year-old North Carolina mansion -- to a new location. Cheshire's thoughtful meditation on the changing South also features extensive interviews with Dr. Robert Hinton, an African American professor of history, whose grandfather was born into slavery at Midway."
Riveting.
Nathan Bedford Forrest is arguably the greatest fighting man that has lived in the US. He was nothing short of brilliant. Also very dashing.
His brilliance was based, in my opinion, on his tunnel vision - his ability to simply keep his focus, keep things simplify and ignore all those "complications". You know, the messy stuff like worrying about whether you're going to die, or get your men killed, or whether it was actually moral to hold and trade slaves.
No, he could keep it simple and pursue his goals ruthlessly. In some contexts, that's a good thing, a very good thing. It's something we praise in business circles even today.
My current self, however, is very wary of getting too mixed up with figures like Forrest: charismatic, ambitious, and ruthlessly focused. They seem like trouble to me, regardless of how aligned our goals seem to be. I prefer the workaday sorts: Grant, Sherman, Longstreet, Omar Bradley, though I probably would have liked Lee, who didn't?
The kinds of guys that would have worried me are JEB Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Phil Sheridan perhaps, and of course, Forrest.
By the way, I recommend Ride With The Devil as a civil war film to watch, and the Turner production "Gettysburg".
Sharks are similarly focused and ruthless, yet nature sees fit to make them.
That's the kind of philosophical "why???" that I dont expect to have answered.
As good as guy as Job was, God (allegedly) told him "Can you make whales or stars or a revolving Earth? No? Mind your own business then."
This is all very difficult for me to digest. I really can't understand why the younger Ta-Nehisi cared about his African roots and was soothed by the perception of his ancestors as deposed nobles or why many Southerners revel in a war that they both lost and were unquestionably the bad guys.
I have some understanding of my roots. My mom's side of the family came from a little village in Ireland, that I visited when I was a teenager, and my dad's side is from eastern Germany. I really have no idea what the professions were of those immigrants and assume that they were people of no great import, otherwise they wouldn't have packed up and left.
But what does it matter? My identity has little to do with them. It has no bearing on me as a person.
Incorporating your ancestors into your self-esteem/self-perception strikes me as nonsensical and provincial.
Because values and identity and tradition--culinary practices, spiritual belief, burial traditions--are usually transmitted via families.
Try this line on for size:
"Incorporating your parents into your self-esteem/self-perception strikes me as nonsensical and provincial."
When you consider your parents owe at least a measure of who they were, how they lived and what they believed from THEIR parents, who owe at least a measure of who they were, how they lived and what they believed from THEIR parents, who owe at least a measure of who they were, how they lived and what they believed from THEIR parents, who...etc.
Dont you think your nonsensical / provincial feelings are a little myopic?
People buy into the "self-made person" hype of America WAY too much.
It's not that my ancestors affect my sense of self-esteem (as an aside, I find the concept of esteem for one's self pretty bizarre) but that part of who I am as a person--yes, my self-perception--is the self I was taught to be.
I'm sure not all families spoke so achingly of their ancestral homes, and perhaps it was in part because we were the ones who had left and who traveled often and far. But in my family we were openly taught Southern Nobility lore--proud Southerners we were--but we were also taught to be proud that we had been too poor to own slaves and thus were immune from that aspect of reality.
But it wasn't true.
Personal reality, of course, is a constantly shifting sand dune--if one is honest. Read, learn, rehink, re-examine, change. Some changes are harder than others, some things harder to see because they're so ingrained as truth. And when they're revealed to be not true, the sand shifts, as does the footing.
Just out of curiosity, where does your self-perception come from?
Because people use history to make sense of the present, that's why. None of us spring, fully formed, from our own heads or from American soil. And the history of slavery and civil war is, arguably, the one that still whispers the loudest to us in the present day. Without reckoning with the truth of that, there's no way to make sense of current politics. And most especially when people feel they aren't part of the dominant group in society, it is an almost universal response to try to figure out why. And the "why" always points backward in time.
MOREOVER, when you are part of a group that has been repeatedly and recently smeared as genetically inferior, as black people have been, it is a natural self-defense mechanism to look to your genetic ancestors and say, no, they were not inferior, and thus I am not intrinsically inferior.
This kind of myopia (going back to Juba's word) strikes me as a kind of white privilege. You can go about your life without thinking about who you are, where you came from, how dark or light-colored your skin is . . .. But there are plenty of people who are reminded every day, via multiple interactions, where they came from and who their ancestors are.
Colin, here's my take.
Ta-Nehisi's father was a Black Panther, historian (reader/publisher) who raised his son to take great pride in his race to shield him from the hostile, negative identity of a black man that the dominant culture presented to a young black child coming of age in Crack Era Baltimore. In addition to instilling in him a deep respect for books and learning, his father Paul built him up as best he could knowing that TNC was going face a society dangerous to black men -- which is the world that he himself knew. Paul Coates took TNC part of the way and our blogger host is reading, thinking and discovering on his own what he should keep from his formative years and what he should discard. It's brave. It's also great that he's doing it publicly.
But it starts from where his own history brought him. It can't start from some other fake place that he wants. It sounds like, Colin, you didn't grow up with a similar experience. Your idea of identity distinct from race, family, tribe, nation, etc., is wonderfully attractive. But is it real, authentic? Doesn't it ignore too much of the real world? I wish we could safely ignore the past and just look ahead, taking things as they are, removed from the history that brought about the present circumstances. But that, I think, leads to danger.
Colin,
I don't mean to come off as harsh, but what you said struck a nerve. Here's why: not having to care about your ancestors, and not having to incorporate them into your self-image, is a relative luxury in this country, and it's only afforded to you if you come from a group that's not currently stigmatized, or 'different', or whatever you want to call it. If you do come from a stigmatized group, or even a group that's not 'the norm' (passably white and Christian, more or less middle class, etc etc), you get told in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways that this marker of difference is who you are. It defines you whether you like it or not, and I've met very few people who can resist being defined this way. So the urge to believe that these people who define you - your ancestors - were great, noble, etc is powerful.
That you can find "incorporating your ancestors into your self-esteem/self-perception" nonsensical and provincial is a testament to how far your people, particularly Irish people, have come in this country.
For full disclosure, I come from a group (Jews) that was a lot more 'different' in my parents' generation, but these days I do have the luxury to form my identity based on my ancestors only to the extent that I care to (or that Hebrew School and family stories have managed to get through to me). But I try to at least recognize that this is a luxury, one even my grandparents didn't have.
Very interesting discussion!
I definitely find my self-perception linked to the known history of my ancestors. Its more like a feeling of a continuum of personal history. I think about what my great grandmother's life was like in rural MN, coming 'off the boat' from Norway -even though she was moving into a fairly homogeneous society, it was still a big change. I think about how my life is so different, more free in almost every context... How I shouldn't take things for granted... I honor the hard work that our ancestors did to get us all here today. I can't imagine not having some kind of pride in where your family is from, whether rich or poor. I feel very fortunate that my late Aunt and my Dad did a lot of geneology research which I find fascinating. My post-Depression era father taught me to have pride in their hard work -that nobility of making things turn out OK in the long term, even though they were mostly poor farmers all.
One perhaps not relevant aside: When I was 10 (late '70's), we moved from rural North Dakota to Chicago, near Skokie. The first thing that my new neighbor kids asked is if I were Jewish. Of course at the time being the naive/sheltered PK (pastor's kid) I said YES, because I knew Jesus was a Jew, so I must be too! I had only known two "kinds" of people up until that point, those that went to the Lutheran church and those that went to the Congregational church. I guess I must have thought Jewish was just another kind of "original" church. It wasn't a big deal, I can't say I felt like a "minority" but it was the only time in my life where I knew I wasn't OF the local big-city-ness or religious culture. I can't help but think that because of that experience my two closest friends at that time were a Korean girl and another newly-arrived Iranian girl.
The very language you use to define your self perception is a product of the culture you claim should have no impact. You cannot escape it. Feeling that you don't have to be imprisoned by it is an American value, a product of this culture. And a positive - I'm not slamming your orientation toward the future rather than the past, but deeper awareness brings greater power.
I recall, hazily, reading years ago that at some post civil-war confederate reunion, the speaker was blathering on about the defense of chivalry, and Bedford Forrest got up and said "If we weren't fighting to keep my slaves and everyone else's slaves, then I don't know what that war was about". So, at least according to this story, Forrest didn't buy the nobility myth.
I'm in the process of reading Nevins' first book on the period Ordeal of the Union. I know it's probably a little dated but I wanted to see what an earlier generation, much closer to Jim Crow and prior to title 9, had to say about this period in American history. Capitol Men et al. listed here will probably follow.
Every once in a while in reading these older histories I come across something that is so reflective on the current state of today’s society that it bears repeating. In this particular excerpt Nevins is talking about the Seneca Falls Convention and how abolitionist sentiment was bound up with prison reform, equal rights for women, and temperance. When discussing efforts of people like Elizabeth Blackwell, and the corresponding attitudes of 19th century American society towards these early feminists he says something so absolutely striking in its clarity that it bears directly upon what TNC says in his post about nobility and cosmic justice. Nevins writes:
In spirit, I think that the above quote really speaks to the idea of how a person’s idealization of reality can play a major part in supporting a framework that perpetuates a vindictive social system that may, for a time, ensure the dominance of a particular group, but in reality holds everyone back from achieving the full measure of their potential.
On a much deeper level, there seems to be a disconnect, inherent in the human condition, between our ideals and reality. Sometimes, as TNC so eloquently pointed out, the ideal of reality plays an integral part in re-enforcing both a worldview and a corresponding reality that perpetuates inequality. However sometimes reality itself is so oppressive that people are forced to create an ideal within themselves that when properly actualized broadens, deepens, and extends the realm of human freedom.
I don’t know for sure but I would say that this is part of the reason that makes life, and history, so fascinating. I can’t speak for the rest of everyone but in reading this post personally, I am left with a question, “At what point do we accept the world as it is in the hope that the existing social order will play a part in the quest for societal justice, and at what point do we start breaking eggs?”
Reminds me of another one of my favorite history books (and I'm not even a historian of the south but there have just been so many great books on the subject!): Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, by Nancy MacLean. Looks at the intersections of racial and patriarchal dominance in the Klan of the 1920s.
Thanks I will check this out. Looking at history through a female lens is something I've only recently come to, and sometimes it feels like I've been transported to a place where nothing makes any sense, but it's been an imense process of personal growth.
Sorn, that does my heart good. :D As a feminist historian, it is lovely to have a reminder that our work matters to people, at least in the aggregate.
Ta-Nehisi, a quick, easy, read. Interesting as well.
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
by Tony Horwitz
Interesting that non-historical characters were chosen as exemplary of "Western" heroes...
The author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was Walter Rodney, not Eric Williams. Williams' famous thesis recounts the importance of enslaved Africans (particular in terms of profits made on the slave trade and the labor of slaves themselves) to the occurrence of the Industrial Revolution in England. (Elements of the thesis have been challenged, but subsequent scholarship has shown differently how the whole of the Atlantic slave trade was integral to the revolution.)
Not entirely a myth--the earliest victims of the Atlantic Slave Trade were kidnapped by Europeans, and occasional raiding by whites occurred here and there. Small groups of settlers who were children of European and African unions, and who would've described themselves as white, also were slave-raiders, particularly in the areas where Portuguese settled.
Kidnapping wasn't impossible, just not cost-effective. (The diseases that felled most Europeans in Africa were probably malaria and yellow fever. The sleeping sickness spread by tsetse flies was more dangerous to four-footed critters.)
well put. it's amazing the ignorance, both passive and active, down in this part of the country. the huge park where most of the LGBT parades and events happen in Dallas is "Robert E Lee Park". it just goes over the heads of most folks down here.
After the war Confederate General James Longstreet basically said that during the War he never heard any of the "State's Rights" arguments and that it was all about slavery.
Longstreet later was reviled in the South because he served his good friend, President US Grant, in a variety of positions and had the temerity to criticize some of the decisions of the "sainted" Robert E Lee.
The "States Rights" "lost cause" crap is just that crap.
The Civil War was clearly about slavery and white supremacy.
Untrue Irishpirate.
The war may have ended up being fought for the abolition of slavery. But it wasn't the sole cause or even the goal at the beginning.
President Lincoln only issued the Emanicipation Proclamation when he felt that abolition would help the Union cause. That wasn't until the war was already almost two years old. The proclamation was issued January 1, 1863.
As late as August of 1862 Lincoln wrote a letter to Harper's Weekly that stated, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."
Lincoln's (and many Americans) sole cause for starting the war was to save the Union.
Further, The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that if the Confederacy did not cease its rebellion, then all the slaves in Confederate-held territory would be freed.
It excluded slaves in the loyal Border States of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri, and in Southern areas controlled by the Union military on that date (Tennessee and parts of Louisiana and Virginia).
Therefore, it would affect only slaveowners in disloyal areas. The policy was aimed at inducing the Confederacy to surrender rather than lose its slaves.
There is evidence the Emancipation Proclamation was issued more to weaken the Secessionist states ability to fight, not so much to free all the slaves.
Youve punched holes in the argument that "The Civil War was fought to free the slaves." The problem is, thats not the argument being discussed here. The argument is "The Civil War was fought over slavery."
Youve done little to nothing to dismiss that argument, Im afraid.
"The Civil War was clearly about slavery and white supremacy."
This was the statement I was replying to. I believe it's simplistic and to general to state that.
So is your statement "The Civil War was fought over slavery."
Slavery was a major cause of the war. But it was not fought over slavery.
It evolved to that. And there is evidence that is was more to weaken the secessionist cause than to actually free all the slaves.
In the annual presidential message to Congress of December 1, 1862, a month before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lincoln proposed three constitutional amendments related to slavery: 1) federal compensation to states voluntarily abolishing slavery by 1900; 2) federal compensation to slave-owners; and, 3) federal funds for the voluntary colonization of American blacks abroad.
Lincoln not only wasn't looking to free the slaves at this time he wanted to colonize the slaves! This was a year into the war.
How do you sustain the war was fought over slavery when a year into the President was trying to establish a colony so that freed slaves could move there?
Because what you see are attempts by Lincoln to placate the South, most of which was convinced that Lincoln was dead-set on freeing the slaves no matter what--just as right-wing hardcore conservatives today are convinced Obama is dead-set on turning us into a socialist nation, no matter what centrist bones he tries to toss at them.
How you do you sustain that slavery wasnt the central issue of the Civil War when immediately upon his election seven Southern states--South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas--immediately seceded from the Union following his election and formed the Confederate States of America?
Not to mention you've obstinately ignored direct quotes in this very thread by key actors on the Confederate side that yes, this war was fought over slavery?
The war did not evolve to being fought over slavery, you have it backwards, sir. Slavery evolved to the eruption of a civil war due to the compromise attempt to usher in alternating slave and free states into the Union so as to placate both the North, with its economic interests being served by industrialization, and the South, with its economic interests being served by an agrarian slave economy.
The South was resisting being dragged into a future of free labor and industrialization kicking and screaming, and in the end only a war would vent the pressure and anger and anxiety that dominated the US in the mid-19th century.
Whats simplistic and general is the attempt to debunk slavery as the central cause in the Civil War by pointing out Lincoln's moral indifference to slavery.
Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. The south seceded because they feared Lincoln would outlaw slavery. It is virtually irrelevant what Lincoln said on the subject.
If you're pointing a gun at me and say don't worry I'm not going to shoot that really matters little if I perceive that you intend to fire.
The south seceded because of a fear of losing slavery and their whole concept of white superiority.
mjnewt0n, to me, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' Cornerstone Speech in March 1861 is dispositive.
Stephens said: "The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the 'storm came and the wind blew.'
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
That is what the Confederacy believed -- not the Lost Cause mythology it created later. That is why it seceded. And that is what caused the war. Lincoln may have preferred compromise to emancipation; the North may have been economically complicit -- all that may be true, but Stephens told the truth that mattered most.
Slavery was at the center of the war. In the end, all of the sorrow and bloodshed was justified by the freedom of Black Americans. It was and is a just cause for the terrible conflict to have been fought and for the hundreds of thousands of Americans lives that were lost.
The point I was trying to make was that the war was begun for a variety of reasons. The issue of slavery the biggest. And the easiest to grasp. But not the sole reason at the outset. In fact, the leader of the union was still not trying to fight the war based on slavery as much as two years in.
There were many divisions between the sections of the country. Maybe some of those divisions still exist.
Slavery is long gone. But the experiences of Black Americans (and all non-white Americans) is still not equal or acceptable in all cases. Sometimes it seems like we have made hardly any progress at all. Ask Sherri Goforth.
This is where I was trying to steer the conversation to in my blundering way.
Sometimes when I look at the recent Presidential election maps they bear too way much similarity to the maps of the Civil War Secession states.
What an interesting and beautifully written post.
It brings home to me, though, how extremely individual these kinds of political/moral evolutions are. Something about the metaphorical equivalence of Nathan Bedford Forrest and you (or perhaps more acurately, a certain kind of black ideological disposition that you used to buy in to) really bothers me.
Perhaps my discomfort with this analogy is the rearing of a long-time, perennial, and mostly inarticulate beef I have with nationalism of any kind. Even when I was young, it disturbed me. I used to say it was because nationalists were so often hypocrites (and misogynist, but I digress), but that's not quite right and I think this post has made me see what it really is that always tore me up about the ideology. It is this: any worldview which ignores or promotes human suffering, the suffering of the Other who deserves it, of course- seems wrong to me. Because if you can be made to believe that another human deserves your vengance, deserves your wrath, deserves your violence, you can be made to not only accept atrocities, but spontaneously entertain and creatively commit them.
I'm not a pacifist and do not categorically reject violence as a tool or vengence as a motivation (though never a just one), but the acknowledgement of what (perceived) necessity may sometimes demand is not the same as an endorsement. What we give up by comissioin of the acts is too great.
This is an insight that clicked with me when I read Fanon. He wrote of people who removed the boot of colonialists from their neck. People who believed they had every right to wrest their freedom any way they could. Perhaps, this is also what Mr. Forrest believed. And they, like him, did everything in their power: murder, torture, betrayal, rape, every kind of brutal insanity that one can imagine. It was necessary for them, because they could no longer live as it was. And in creating their new world, they daily renounced their humanity. According to anon's account it was awful in every way. Damaging beyond imagining. Fanon knew this and supported the revolution - supported it knowing that it was in no way "good." What created such necessity for Mr. Forrest? I believe he felt it, but why? The reasons matter because it had to be worth more to him and to history than what his comission of heinous acts wrought. Otherwise a serial killer and a soldier are morally equivalent: victims who kill.
I do not believe it is the case that there is no way to ascertain the difference between the better and worse cause, that there is no rubric to gage the bounds of justice. You are very kind to Mr. Forrest in your reading here. And to Southerners in denial, as well. Even to Lindsey Graham and his experience of whiteness as constraining. But I think you too quickly draw a line between their experience and yours - or perhaps, I should say, the kind of black experience that you're talking about insofar as I have witnessed it in others. And, I think perhaps you too swiftly dismiss the notion that nobility can come from oppression. I think you are absolutely right that nobility is not inherent in oppression, but the choices that one must face, the decisions that one must make about how to live in a place/time that confronts them and theirs with no right to be, can make nobility a starker and more relevant concept in the lives of the oppressed. The source of that nobility is not their status as victim, but the way they respond to it. Not that they fight, but that they wonder whether they should. Not that they are steely-eyed and brave, but that they have considered what history will reveal if they are wrong.
These mythologies are so many and contain layers upon layers as you show very beautifully. But I still don't see anything I respond to in Mr. Forrest's eyes.
I don't quite get the idea that I'm kind to him. I called the founder of the greatest purveyor of domestic terrorism in this country's history. That, and the Fort Pillow massacre, really speak for themselves, no?
Another thing, most of the people reading here are liberals, like myself. I approach these posts as a conversation with myself, and a conversation with my ideological partners--not as a debate with, say, Lindsay Graham. We all agree that his swipe at Sotomayor was fundamentally ludicrous--I'm pretty sure, I actually wrote that.
But once we're agreed that Forrest was a butcher, once we agree that Graham is a sanctimonious prick, what then? Where do we go from there? Do we keep looking for more ways to get at these cats? Perhaps. I think I do my share of that.
But there is another way--trying to figure out what's going in their heads. The only way I know how to do that is to begin with the basic supposition that these guys are as human as me. Once I've got that, I try to look at my own experience and find things that might mirror there's. This approach has limits, no doubt. But finding that place of essential humanity, those feeling that link us all, I think, is at least partially useful.
Don't look at this as the final verdict on the white South. Look at like another approach to trying to figure out what exactly what's in the heads of people who are a world away from me.
Fair enough. We're just two different black people. Much of my life is trying to figure out how and why I ended up here. This post is not the answer. But it draws me closer, I think.
If you haven't read "Absalom, Absalom" by Faulker, you should. It deals with a lot of these issues in fairly dramatic and spectacular ways.
'Faulkner'...fail
Somehow I was included in the recipient list for a round of anti-Obama e-mail messages last year. I'm pretty sure everyone on that list was a Southerner and that I was the only Black person. When I received the first e-mail, I wrote back to the sender and corrected the misperceptions and lies in the e-mail. I copied the entire group. Several people wrote to tell me that it was rude of me to copy the entire group since none of them knew me. One person did write to say she appreciated receiving another side of the story about Obama.
There was a sense in that group that God simply would not let a Black man win the presidency. When he did win, that was proof that God has withdrawn His blessings from America.
How do you reconcile the knowledge (not belief, but knowledge) that the White race is superior in a world where the First Family is Black? You can claim you are un-presidented. You can distribute racist cartoons and/or repeat racist jokes. You can hope that his real birth certificate surfaces. You can dismiss those who voted for and support him as kool-aid drinking, socialist-loving nitwits. You can criticize his every decision and statement. You can do all these things but at the end of the day, he is still the president of your country. It's fascinating to watch some of the "heritage, not hate" crowd try to make sense of America circa 2009. Bottom rail on top now, indeed.
Funny, you were rude for emailing people you did not know.
Yet the sender wasnt rude for cc:ing instead of bcc:ing their addresses.
And of course no one in the chain was rude for spreading misperceptions, lies and character assassination about a candidate for POTUS.
People floor me sometimes.
Question for the group -- WHEN did this business about finding nobility in high-status ancestors get started? I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and it most definitely wasn't the thing to do then. The opposite was the norm. Family stories were all about how awful life was in the past and how hard life was for our ancestors. The stories were all about war, the Depression, influenza epidemics carrying relatives off, doing hard physical labor outdoors in all weather... and that's just the early 20th century, and things that had happened to people who were still alive. The implication was that things before that were just about the same, except with even fewer resources.
The point to the story wasn't just to wallow in it, though, but to emphasize that everybody was tough and worked really hard and look how much better things are now. COLOR television, and two phones, and college instead of the farm or factory. So stop complaining, kid (parents would say), and wash the dishes. And then go do your math homework. And be glad you have the polio vaccine and don't have to work in a textile mill.
Of course there was some self-esteem building and deliberate ennobling of the elders in all that. But it ennobled working class elders, not ruling class elders. And I'm wondering if it fell out of fashion with the deindustrialization that began in the 70s, and with the gradual hollowing out of working class life.
"But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom."
TNC - I've seen you mention this a few times before, and I apologize for my ignorance if I'm totally missing something here. But didn't Brazil get a larger portion of the African slave trade than North America? Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil) has the raw numbers as 3 million, or 35.4% of the total number of slaves taken. They have British North America only getting 6.45% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade). And Brazil still had slavery after the US civil war. Did they free their slaves more often (more like indentured servitude), or was something else at work?
Not that it matters much - that's like saying you have a better record than both the Nationals and the Orioles.
I'm pulling this from the Blight lectures I've been listening to. He says that in terms of slave population, at the start of the War, the list basically was--1.) Russia 2.) America 3.) Brazil. It may be true that Brazil imported more slaves. But it could also be true that by 1860--almost a half century after the trade was banned--the South had more actual slaves. It's also worth noting that the slave-holding South expanded in the 19th century to include Louisiana and Texas.
One other point. I'm not firm on this, but I recall Blight noting that the actual demography of slavery differed in America--a lot more women, and thus a lot more families. By the 1850s most slaves were the children of slaves. I'm not too solid on what Brazil's slave pop looked like at that point, comparatively.
There's a crucial and ironic point about the contrast between the U.S. and Brazil. We outloawed the overseas slave trade around 1800, with the result that now, or very few slaves were imported after that date.
Nb... discussioins of the economics of slavery are basically revolting.. but they are an important element in understanding the ideology surrounding American slavery.
The 'upside' to U.S. system was that slaves in the United States tended to be treated better than in the Caribbean islands (or in Brozil, one suspects): the reason being that a slave's 'value' as a piece of capital was sharply increased by 'protectionism:' And so, in general, they had a higher life expectancy, etc. Further, one of the dirty secrets of the U.S. slave system was what could term, euphemistically, 'the economics of plantation sexuality' -- probably a euphemism disguising economic incentives for rape, incest, and sexual predation.
The 'downside' to the U.S. system was the ideological and psychological distortion inherent in treating slaves as self-reproducing capital stocks.
And, it's not as if we didn't find our own sources of cheap, 'expendable' labor to build the canals and railroads.
Brilliant.
Great post. However, I want to add something that I think is important. The people who buy into the myth of Southern nobility are sometimes prodded by an inexplicable Northerner scorn. The South IS backwards-it lags behind the country in nearly every category, except ass size. But even my effete college liberal white hackles are raised when some schmuck from New York or Boston questioningly wonders "Do they wear shoes in Tennessee (where I'm from)? Do you hate black people?" There is a profound ignorance and unwillingness to confront myths in the North too; the myth of moral superiority, the myth that "the North" is substantially different from the South (it's not, get away from the city once and a while, there are boonies and rednecks in every state). The North, with its massive ghettos, has somehow airbrushed every racist act in their past, leaving the South with the guilt for what was, for many years, a national institution.
I think when confronted by this, white Southerners eagerly embrace their own myths as a defensive measure. And it's also easy to be guilt-free; just move North of the Mason Dixon line, and no one will demand on you to "own up" for Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Try "Rednecks" by Randy Newman.
I don't disagree with this, as much as I don't know that it's really my place to discuss. Mostly because it hasn't been my experience. I think this is a distinctly white and Northern perspective. My family is from the Eastern shore of Maryland--very Southern, and very rural. My partner's family are from Chicago, by way of Tennessee and Mississippi. So what you're getting here isn't a critique by someone with no connections to the place he's critiquing.
Moreoever, this business of being prodded into mythology only goes so far. Black people in Alabama served as government test subjects for syphilis. Our whole experience has been one big prodding toward mythology. But it's important to note that this kind of mythology ultimately hurts its adherents. The real victims of the embrace of Forrest aren't white Northerners or black Southerners--it's the whites who embrace him.
If your standing on a ledge, you can't cite the people down below are chanting, as a credible reason for jumping. We have to take our lives into our own hands. We do not come to understanding as a favor to anyone else. We do it for the most selfish reasons--self-preservation. I don't try to understand Forrest as a favor to white Southerners. I do it for my own intellectual growth. It makes me stronger. I will not cut off my hands just to see the disgusted look on these people's faces.
You're right TNC. The people who still emulate Forrest or see any redeeming qualities in him have their own burden to bear. I just wonder about your opinion which is better, the hard, institutionalized racism of the South or the pervasive soft racism of the North. I keep thinking of Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and his own journey (as well as his ultimate solution: GTFO of the USA).
But now thinking about it for a while, you're right to call out the South, collectively, for we can't defend "our culture" without first admitting that the cornerstone of that entire culture was "at least I'm not a nigger." I think that's why historians and many other people are still fascinated by the South and the cognitive dissonance that still hangs over the entire region like a cloud.
Thanks Ta-Nehisi, my first visit to your work. A wonderful piece. I've commented a couple of times to commenters, but you've raised lots of thoughts and memories (I'm 59, white) that I hope contribute to this discussion.
I remember the time when "Negroes" per the term of the day claimed white ancestry to elevate status. A 60ish female hospital patient told me in the '70s - "they can't have all those students come in here and bother me, I'm the granddaughter of a Dutch sea captain." This gets to the winner/loser mentality - having part of the winners within her made her feel less of a loser. African-American friends have talked about the old (I think old) caste system based on skin color. These emotions seem to me to be based on an older consciousness in which notions of African nobility weren't actively internalized as you did. Slavery was the reference point.
I knew an African American man in his 60s in the early 70s whose grandmother had been dead a few years, but she was born a slave and liberated when she was 6. He grew up within 5 miles of the central VA farm on which his people had been slaves, and lived in the city about 25 miles away as an adult. As remote as Forrest and Reconstruction seem sometimes, I heard second-hand stories of those days in my young adulthood from a man who grew up with a former slave. The caste system was relevant here. My friend was too proper to connect the dots overtly, but his family worked in the house, not in the fields, and the implication was clear. His commitment to education and culture was based on his family's ethos, borne from their experience and bona fides gained from achievement in the inside of white civilization.
Your disillusionment that other Africans sold their brethren into slavery would I think have been alien to these older folks. While proud of who they were and of their families and friends, the good things in life and being deserving of respect seemed to involve having qualities gleaned from white culture, not black. Was it this deep internalization of defeat and humiliation that spawned the African nobility myth in the same way that the Civil War spawned the Noble Cause myth?
Just saw a great foreign (Filipino) film called Baler in which the male lead, a colonial soldier for Spain immediately prior to the Phillipine Revolution, is half-Spanish and half-Pinoy.
He takes great pride in his Spanishness for similar reasons, I think.
Damn, what a beautiful post. Thank you.
TNC, I too would like to thank you for your wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking post, for your work in general -- and, maybe most of all, for attracting this amazingly thoughtful and intelligent community. Their dialogue is a rare oasis amongst Internet communities, and a tribute to you.
i find it most interesting that the whites in power Congress in the South today are anti union, anti government. the use of any means to divide and conquer that has come to signify the Republican party, the white power establishment. these powerful people use whatever means they can to maximize their ability to control the society we live in.
poor whites in the south felt/feel aggreived by the poverty that engulfed the south after the war and continued for generations. fighting also against the black man who was thereby thrown into the economic landscape. the battle for survival in a forgotten, neglected hinterland which didn't change until the rise of the Sun Belt, the 70's.
some things change and it will take a long time before the South ever comes close to adapting to the new society that is now America. the best we can do is to continually point out the lies and never let the past be forgotten.
born and raised in New Orleans, i can say that the South is a really strange place. the good ole boy network is still going strong. with the Republican Southern Strategy, from George Wallace on, this has sharpened the separate society that smoldered under the surface for years.
i am so glad to see so many different races of people in America, not just blacks and whites, but also asians and latins and every other kind of skin color. this will help ameliorate the hurt as long as we don't retreat into our groups once again.
what amazes me most is the unspoken hatred between blacks and white. and the ease at which this is rekindled by hurt-filled people using skin color as excuses for personal reasons. a national dialogue like what you have here is part of the solution. there also must a national dialogue by able proponents using calm and reasoned discussions.
i have never understood the degree to which slavery separated this society, rendered it apart and exposed the pain of our county's history. it seems to be far more complex the more i learn about how and why and it's effect upon the present.
Being an architecture buff, coming from New Orleans with such a wonderful stock of architectural gems that are rotting away, before and after Katrina, i have heard of some architectural gems rotting in the Carribean islands because they "represent the slave owners history."
i can understand this antipathy in one sense, and appalled at the same time. we are who we are. a cumulative result of our history. to throw some parts away because they are "tainted" diminishes the whole being we have become. we are the sum of our parts, good and bad.
thanks for having such a space for such possible conversations.
Clinton also, though, resolutely disavowed any notions of Southerness that had to do with Southern pride over the War. He gave interviews to journalists in which he revealed that the poor people of his area never owned slaves, didn't have any interest in slaves, and in fact had fielded a regiment for the Union.
Clinton also professed that Grant was one of his favorite presidents and historical figures - a misunderstood great general. For Southerners raised on Lee ... I mean, really...
TNC, thank you! I continue to be so grateful for your writing, and, though you make noises about stopping and heading out west and getting out of your head for a while, I do want to simply say how much I appreciate what you're doing and hope you'll keep it up, simply for my own sake.
And then, in reply to the above re: Clinton - as someone with Arkansas roots, I wanted to mention that his views make a lot of sense in the specific context of that place. I have both Union and Confederate ancestors who lived in the state during the war. I don't think that's unusual. That he might disavow Southern pride is, I think, a testament to the ambivalent heritage of a lot of white people there.
What has long astounded me is that in the beginning the south was afraid the north would burn their cities and free the slaves. By the end of the war the south was burning its own cities and freeing its slaves (if they would fight in the army). Isn't it a comment on the all-engrossing desire for victory that at the end the south was willing to sacrifice the very things that they had started fighting to preserve?
I agree with much of this article accept racial equality. I submit my more revisionist view. Had I lived in the south in the beginning of the slave trade I would have raised a guerrilla army of the White poor working class to drive the slavers out.
We would have seen to it that slave ships were forcably turned around on the threat of being sunk off shore.
Any northern bank that helped finance the capitalist plantation system would have been targeted.Any rich would be plantation owner would have been given an offer he or she could not refuse.In short the south would have been populated by White European farmers like the north.
Their would have been no slavery since their would have been no black people in the country.So you see theirs always another point of view by a true Racist.Those that you call racist were really only racist for the money. Tom Metzger
Great post. I wonder what the diarist, or any of the commenters here, make of the Nathan Forest connection to "Forest Gump" in which the Tom Hanks character is depicted as the descendent of a line of noble patriotic southern combatants that began with NBF.
Growing up in Nashville (the KKK was inaugurated in the ruins of a Union fort where I used to play) I was sensitive to the NBF citation.
I always felt that "Forest Gump" used the Hanks portrayal of benign imbecility to mask a violent rightist message, a kind of celluloid prototype of what we got with W. for real.
You sound like an intelligent man. Most intellectuals discount historical facts to embellish popular culture. Is there a difference between owning a slave and buying & selling one? Grant owned slaves and did not set them free until after the war, Lee set his slaves free at the beginning.
Forrest was tried by the Northern military and there is no record of any court’s decision affirming black troops were massacred at Fort Pillow. All charges were dropped. But I suppose you believe Southerners were wrong during the war and Northerners were wrong after the war. A stance held by most blacks to justify their oppression.
Yes, he was the first wizard of the 19th century Klan. Formed to protect defenseless defended Southerners from armed free slaves shortly after the war but disbanded by 1872. How do I know? There is a record in Congress of Forrest testifying that the klan must be disbanded because it had served its purpose and gotten out of hand, totally different from the 20th Century klan who hates anyone of color and Jews. The early klan disappeared, the new Klan began in 1920. So I am one of many who deny Forrest’s role in a Ft. Pillow massacre and the 20th Century KKK.
Today intellectuals and progressives speak of skin color like the racist of the 1920’s. Stop using perceived inferiority or professed superiority for political gain based on the amount of pigment in the skin.
I am sorry to see this. You should read some books on the Klan in the 19th century, by some actual historians. You should consider that there's more to be gained from questioning yourself, then from invective at other people.
You are lost, and don't either do not know it, or don't care to know it. It's really sad.
But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom.
No way - Russian serfdom was far kinder than Southern slavery. Serfs could earn their own money, could escape serfdom and have their descendants advance in Russian society, didn't see their families broken up, were not racially stigmatized, etc. etc. No comparison really.
However, what is often ignored is that in reality Britain, France, Belgium and Germany (especially Belgium) were just as immoral as the South in the 19th century. It's just instead of importing African slaves to the homeland, the European powers realized it was much easier to export the work to Africa, where you could brutalize the Blacks as much as you liked without pesky abolitionists looking over our shoulder. It's not necessarily excusing American slavery to say that American Blacks are "lucky" to have been brought to the US, it's a condemnation of the incredible evils the Europeans inflicted on Africa in the 19th century, evils that history has to a large extent whitewashed.
The quote, very specifically, says "scale." Not brutality. We're talking about quantity--not quality. Follow the comment thread, you'll see that the discussion is around sheer numbers--not who had it worse.
great post and discussion. i have another question: how does the arab slave trade always get a free ride in these discussions? the whole process was much more complex, and ancient, than just europeans kidnapping or incenting africans to kidnap other africans. the arabs and arabized africans were involved from way back. and much had to do with national/tribal/religious rivalries, islam was always pushing down south, trying to stamp out "animists"...the fall of Oyo in Nigeria had much to do with this dynamic i believe... still to this day tribes and subgroups in the area hate each other, kill each other. as people do all over the world.
i'd like to read more about jews looking at their own pompous mythology. and i'm a jew btw, proud to be, whatever that means. so much of the most recent scholarship has suggested that the israel of the 2 millenia BCE was pretty much a bit player in the history of the ancient near east, and jerusalem a pathetic little outpost on dry rocky land. no massive armies or glorious kingdoms, in perspective, they wrote some great stories about what was probably pretty mundane, and got some great marketing help on the story later.
either way i'm still proud, but more of our cultural and scientific achievements, our music and poetry and food and (some of our) ethics than of some great golden past.
Very thought-provoking post, TNC. As an African-American and Nigerian, I can only imagine how painful the process of understanding a truer history can be for descendants of slaves. Since, as you say, the notion of a Brotha/Sistahood that transcends the nuances of class and power is a self-sustaining one, providing a narrative that simplifies as it bolsters self-esteem.
Just to add two points. First: the revelation that Africans sold Africans should be coupled with an understanding of wider economic structures being put in place by slave-trading non-Africans (even with disease as an impediment). Second: one could use that coupled insight to more honestly examine a similar dynamic in various neighborhoods in the US. A good deal of "black-on-black" exploitation & violence is attributable to slavery, Jim Crow and other crippling traditions of discrimination. But not all of it. And as African-Americans we don't yet do a good enough job of being attentive to the ways class and power continue to be powerful shapers of leaders' interests & decisions, at times more powerful than ethnic or regional affiliation.
This is a wonderful post and many of the comments have insight. But in my view, it goes too easy on the South, where I now live. Nathan Bedford Forrest was a brilliant guy fighting for evil. He embraced the evil whether we in the South like it or not. He founded the Ku Klux Klan. He killed black soldiers trying to surrender. He not only owned an ideology of hate, he acted brutally on it and initially set up an organization that lived on it, even beyond his personal stomach for it, perhaps.
But monuments to a man who founded the Ku Klux Klan (of which there are many here) illustrate the continuing, willful blindness to reality that exists both here in the South and in the North. Well, they say, we are simply recognizing a great leader and general. Hmmm. Should we create monuments to Tojo? To the butchers of Bataan? To Himmler? What about Pol Pot? I can almost understand a generic "confederate park" honoring bravery among the line soldiers and leaders -- almost. But honoring Forrest is a travesty because it ignores the reality of the situation and what it symbolizes.
Frankly, the idea that we are in some way "noble" or "evil" simply because of some sort of collective historical credit or guilt bothers me. We are, to a some degree, products of our environment. But we are more today. We are strong people with our own lives and choices. We are responsible for what is, not our great grandparents. And we have allowed the confederate flag to be flown -- flown as protest against integration. We continue to allow monuments to be named after men who fought and organized evil causes. We continue to hold the sins of the fathers against the daughters. We make our own choices. If there is injustice today, it is because we allow it. If we oppress in the name of righteousness and historical (not current) grievance, it is not payback, it is not "cosmic justice", it is simply our injustice.
Mao was an amazing general. His skill in guerilla warfare was nothing short of astounding.
To follow you sift through rich layers of meaning, counter-meaning, reflections and inversions as you do in this post... it is an intense source of pleasure, a mix of surprise with a kind of unyielding sadness. Thank you.
I just finished reading Aeschylus's The Oresteia and I find so many themes in those plays explored here again, literally word for word. To mythologize: we are living in a kind of Oresteian age, bent under an unspeakably sorrowful inheritance. Our forefathers, committing acts of moral recklessness from which spring the evils of the age, burden their progeny with limited, twisted understanding that engenders vengeance upon vengeance. It is not until all the lines of karma cross and intensify in the children, reach a psychological maturation and breaking-point, that justice is redefined, and a new order is brought into being. (Though, at the end, the play features the direct intervention and adjudication of the Greek gods, which is where my parallelism falls on its face… )
But, generally, as in the play, so with us. We are all under the respective curses of our houses. In the play transcending the curse meant coming to an understanding of that sorrow, the weight of which submitted the survivors to their humanity. But that reckoning waits for everyone, heirs of winners or losers regardless, where we must account for the pride and vanity of our forefathers, and the myths that made their foolishness, their evils, possible. We are both their victims and their collective inheritors. For those that do not accept the accounting, the ghosts of the past never transform into guiding spirits, and they and their children are doomed to ignorance and bloodshed. Or, in our somewhat less bloodthirsty, more apathetic and individualized era, to bitterness and delusion. Which admittedly are equally capable of maiming and killing as any weapon.
As TNC commented above, we do not come to understanding as a favor to anyone else. We must, each of us, suffer into truth for our own deepening. It is truly an individual act of self-preservation to set the record straight - to avoid being driven senseless by curses, lies, ghosts, bloody inheritances, and chains. Though I disagree that the time of reckoning with the past, is past – I think these kinds of reckonings take an abominably long time, the fruits of which are not ours to enjoy. But personal explorations like these are a giant step in the right direction.