Confeder-H8 History Month: Introduction

Earlier this month there was a rather lengthy dumpster fire on my Facebook timeline stemming from my link to and article about the celebration of Confederate History Month in a particular location, and my introduction thereto, which said:

 “Just to illustrate how far we haven't come... The fact that any level of government is willing to countenance this kind of ahistorical nonsense is not only disgusting, but criminal. Let me be crystal clear - any and all tolerance of or advocacy for "Confederate Heritage" is morally indistinguishable from Holocaust denial or outright neo-Naziism. Period.” 

The reaction, something to which I suppose I ought to be accustomed by now, was Confederacy sympathizers rushing forward to show off their rebel flag tattoos and double down on the utter nonsense they were taught, that the Southern cause was a noble fight against tyranny, based in States’ Rights and a “complex of economic issues” rather than the perpetuation of slavery.

Yes, it is true that I am not making any allowances for the fact that many Americans are simply taught a narrative that consists of lies. Here’s why: making those allowances only sets up the perpetuation of the situation. It is necessary to doing justice that the truth be laid out boldly and openly, without compromise or waffling, that nobody be allowed to take refuge in the mythology of White Supremacy that so permeates our culture. This rebuttal needs to be presented not as polite debate, but as a bucket of ice-water thrown hard to wash away the cruft of lies that has been allowed to obscure the unpleasantness of the truth.

A couple of days ago, I credited a certain “free exchange of ideas” as having led not only to a failure to address the Holocaust, but also a failure to convey anything but Confederate propaganda through our educational system. I cannot recant that opinion. With the history of Slavery, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and the years of Lynch-mob Jim Crow oppression that followed in particular, I think it is demonstrable that, contra the cliche that “the winners write the history” the post-Reconstruction “Gentlemen’s Agreement” to focus on reconciliation of North and South and its concomitant resurgence of White Supremacy allowed and encouraged the losers of the war to win the peace and, most important, to control the narrative that would be taught to succeeding generations. It is that narrative that this series is designed to counter.

By way of introduction to this series - Textbook Racism: How scholars sustained white supremacy, by Donald Yacovone, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “It would appear that despite the monumental outburst of scholarship produced since the mid-1960s, the way we teach history remains as lifeless as John Brown’s body. But as Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University, observed in the introduction to ‘Teaching Hard History’: ‘Slavery isn’t in the past. It’s in the headlines.’ History is far from a dead thing. ‘We carry it within us,’ James Baldwin memorably remarked. We ‘are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frame of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.’”