Two of my favorite political columnists, Andrew O’Hehir and Jamelle Bouie, have pieces out that cut to the heart of the discussions people need to be having in the aftermath of Charlottesville and the president's sordid response to the white riots there. O'Hehir confronts head-on the hideous valorization of the Confederate cause that, to our great sorrow, we have all been reminded still haunts and sabotages our country through the present day. He recounts the clarity of Ulysses S. Grant’s vision of the Civil War and its aftermath, noting that Grant “saw the slaveholding aristocracy that drove the South into secession as an indefensible criminal regime, rooted in treason and an immoral economy where human beings were 'bought and sold like cattle.'" O’Hehir goes on to outline the stupefying situation we now face, in which the Confederacy has come to be seen by millions as a glorious era, with all the massive social damage such a false sense of history entails. He writes:
As if by dark magic, a disgraceful episode that very nearly doomed the entire American project to failure — and was driven by the greed and cruelty of a tiny elite caste — is now widely understood as a profound and mystical expression of the American spirit. Or, more bluntly, as a sacred covenant of whiteness.
By refusing to face the true legacy of slavery and its aftermath, and embracing an entire universe of “alternative facts” about the Civil War, the Confederacy and race relations, a large portion of white America has in effect enslaved itself to a false sense of history and a false racial consciousness. We can see the resulting confusion and dysfunction all around us: In the “diseases of despair” and self-defeating politics of the now-infamous white working class. In the appalling street theater of Charlottesville, a new low in our nation’s 21st-century decline.
While Trump blathers on about how Confederate statues are "beautiful" and part of a history we should cherish, it’s becoming clearer than ever that a president as divisive and hateful as Donald Trump could only be elected if U.S. citizens, particularly white Americans, have either learned a false history or have too little grasp of our true one.
It’s also becoming increasingly obvious that white folks are reaching a reckoning time as to whether they continue down this road, with all the newly-escalating racial hatred on their side that it has unleashed, or whether they open their eyes to the full story of our country. Such is the argument that Jamelle Bouie makes in a column this week entitled “White Americans Have to Make a Choice.” Contemplating the writing of historian Lerone Bennett Jr. and writer James Baldwin, Bouie revisits the idea that the U.S. doesn’t have a race problem so much as it has a white person problem, and writes of the “myth of innocence” that so many white Americans embrace, and which was fully exploited by Donald Trump in his ascent to the presidency.
Addressing the larger issues that intersect around the fight over Confederate monuments, Bouie gets to the central question for white Americans, and for the survival of this country more generally:
Indeed, if Confederate statues represent the effort to erase history, then this push to remove them is a request to recover and reckon with it. It’s a demand that those white Americans abandon the comforting fictions of unity and progress and confront the past and present in all of its ugliness. And it’s a call for white Americans to broaden their moral imaginations and consider the impact these monuments make on their fellow citizens, to understand what it means to reify the symbols of a slaveholder’s rebellion. To answer any of this is to answer that question of the era: Who is America for?
Bouie describes the fight to redefine our memory of the Civil War and its white supremacist aftermath as an uphill battle, but after Charlottesville, it seems that there’s no choice but to keep fighting it. In his closing, he makes a great point that addresses the argument that those troubled by monuments to the Confederacy are simply agitators upset with a settled history:
It presumes that these monuments were never controversial and that the narratives they represent were never contested. They were. They always have been. And the reason we have this fight is because for more than a century, too many white Americans were content with narratives built on exclusion and erasure. The question now is whether they’re still content, whether they still believe this is a white country, or whether they’re ready to share this country, and its story, with others.
I'll end by offering a parallel question: White Americans need to be asking themselves whether it's preferable to share this country with non-whites, or whether it's somehow more comfortable to share it with the freak-show bigots who showed up in Charlottesville, and who will continue to thrive so long as we've got a commander in chief who acts as their apologist, and as long as enough people look the other way. If these people don't fill you with horror and loathing, don't ignite your contempt for all we're learning about the deranged history too many have told themselves about race in America, then it's time to take a closer look at your basic value system.
