The Washington Post has a fascinating story about the increased discussions of slavery at tours of plantations like Monticello and other historical sites. The movement towards greater openness and confrontation with the harshest facets of the American past has increased attendance at some locations, particularly among African-Americans, but has triggered others — predominantly white people — to make complaints about the emphasis on slavery. While there’s a dark gut-level amusement in visitors posting their ignorance and bigotry for all to mock on Trip Advisor, the willingness of historians and curators to insist on the primacy of the enslaved in any discussion of plantations is a victory for our common humanity and shared history. The present-day transformation of one of America’s two major political parties into a white people’s party, along with the centrality of racism and bigotry to our current president’s electoral appeal, are evidence enough that the insane attitudes of dehumanization alive in North America since the 16th century continue today in mutated but recognizable form.
It’s not a shocker to say that someone like Donald Trump could rise to the highest office in the land because this country has failed in many ways to fully confront its racist past, which of course has translated into a racist present. Talking about history inevitably involves value judgments that lead us to focus on certain aspects more than others. In this light, the long-time policy of downplaying or ignoring the fact that there was slavery at slave plantations has been a distortion of history rooted in the prejudices of the now.
The short-sightedness of not fully engaging the darkness of the American story as well as the light (setting aside the very real political and power dynamics that have kept the story of slavery as a backdrop rather than a central feature of plantation histories) means that many white people end up over-identifying with the white slaveholders of the American past, missing or rejecting the opportunity to make a morally imaginative connection with American slaves: to imagine themselves in their place, to understand that despite this identification they never would have been in their place, and to do the hard work that true American citizenship demands of sorting through these tensions and paradoxes. The ultimate point is not to assume a mantle of guilt, as some of the troubled white visitors think must be the point of a more three-dimensional history, but to understand that being fully American necessarily involves empathy, stepping outside yourself, imagining yourself as someone wholly unlike you, and being empowered to see how the conflicts of the past flood into the present; not some distant settled archaeology, but a torrent that carries us along, whether or not we wish to be aware of it.
Some of those visitors who object to the more honest plantation tours complain about “politicization” of history, but it’s a closed mind that doesn’t see that true politicization comes in the form of suppressing the most salient facts of our shared past: a politicization that, in this area, might better be named “white supremacy.” I’m reminded of something that became glaringly obvious two or so years ago, at the time of the white riot in Charlottesville and the increased awareness of how cities and towns across the South are blighted by monuments to Confederate “heroism” — monuments largely put up not in the direct aftermath of the war, but as a visible means of consolidating the defeat of Reconstruction and the institution of what would turn out to be nearly a century of Jim Crow racial apartheid. Some suggested that the statues be replaced with African-American heroes, such as soldiers who fought for the Union, or those like Harriet Tubman who resisted slavery by other means. The idea that that Americans of any skin color could identify with them as our heroic ancestors feels so radical, and so right to me: a case of telling a truer story about our past that could help re-orient collective ideas about patriotism and our fellow Americans in the present.
I also don’t understand the attitude of plantation visitors like the Thomas Jefferson admirer whose disappointed review stated that “to have the tour guide essentially make constant reference to what a bad person he really was just ruined it for me.” If you are a Jefferson fan who refuses to deal with the man’s hideous racial views, then are you really a fan, or just a worshipper of an incomplete caricature of a person? It’s naive bordering on fantastical to want your heroes to be pure, or to refuse to acknowledge their complexities. To more fully grasp the past doesn’t mean being trapped by it; it also holds the key to liberation, or at least, however fitfully, progress. The alternative is to believe in a myth that serves no one well.