Confronting Ignornace About Slavery And Southern Heritage -- Responding To Regressives

Greetings and Salutations, Y'all!

Its been quite a while since I've had the opportunity to do one of these Responding to Regressives pieces her on this blog.

Actually, the fact of the matter is I don't really do them very often because they tend to get a bit repetitive. Some pseudo-intellectual writes a really moronic piece trashing Confederate heritage or Southern identity, and I drop a few truth pipe bombs on their ignorance -- which usually tends to be the same tired anti-Southern heritage talking points packaged in different rhetoric, but amounting to the same thing.

This time is not really different, but I feel the need to respond to this one. Largely because it deals with the misconception of how the Southern of slavery is largely viewed by those who honor Soutehrn heritage as a whole, and Confederate heritage in particular. The original article can be found here. My own takes on the article will be highlighted as we read through it.

Oh and before I go on, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Brian Hackett from the Black Confederates In The Civil War facebook page for providing this article for my personal review.

Now without further ado, here we go once into the fray once again.

Confronting Confederate heritage is key to understanding white supremacy 

If we hold up the heritage of a white supremacist society, even if we do so in denial of what that heritage really is, in the end, we reap only hatred, violence, fear, and our own spiritual impoverishment, as is testified to by the entirety of this country’s history.

Wow, already an interesting tagline -- well, not really, but it pretty much sets the stage for the rest of this incoherent rant.

Many white Southerners insist that the Confederate flag they fly so proudly is not a symbol of hate, but a remembrance of, and pride in their heritage.

A small nitpick here, but I'm not really big on his use of a comas.

Unfortunately, Southern heritage, whatever anyone wishes it to be, is almost wholly the heritage of a society defined by slavery, a slaveowners’ society.  Every day for nearly two and a half centuries, slaveowners, their overseers, slave traders, and even some poor whites, murdered, tortured and brutalized tens of thousands of human beings.

Not not really wholly defined by slavery, I mean more that just slavery was happening for 250 years in the American Southland -- I mean there was that whole pesky American Revolutionary War thing in the late 1700s. 

Every day, in this past symbolized by the Confederate flag, slave traders (like Tennessee’s still honored Nathan Bedford Forrest) ripped children out from their mothers’ arms, selling them away from each other. Might it be possible for whites to go about their daily business untroubled amid thousands of Black women and men inconsolably grieving for their lost children, and those children, weeping and wailing for their lost mothers and fathers? 

The Confederate flag (and by that I'm assuming he means the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag as opposed to the three Confederate National banners) could not have flown over "every day, in this past" since the banner only came into existence in November of 1861. I know math isn't my strong point, but pretty certain that the 3 years and five months it saw official service could not mean it was displayed "every day, in this past".
Now then, if the author of this piece is attempting to maintain his argument that the flag is representative of that collective past rather than simply the years of its service as a war banner, then he's being very disingenuous here.

As for his other point, I assume he didn't live all those years in the past. As such he can't know what whites at that time actually thought of those practices. Anything there is speculation without the ability to look back in time and into the souls of every human being living in the past -- which the author so far has made no claim to possess.

Heritage to some, hatred for many

Well you know what they say about opinions and certain orifices.....

How do you suppose our Confederate ancestors spiritually handled this mass of grief and pain played out in front of their eyes every day? How could they remain untouched by such terrible and continuous suffering? White Southerners could survive in this slave-owner society only by closing their hearts and willing themselves not to see, not to hear.

Probably because, with the exception of the 1% of people who had the wealth in that time, most Southerners and Americans were very poor and had to tend to the daily task of staying ahead for themselves and their family's sakes.
A sad fact of existence that no human society has yet to overcome, even in the current century. Every single day many of us are confronted with social, economic and political injustices; yet most of us tend to overlook them because we're more concerned with daily survival and the need to stay ahead least we too get overwhelmed by those same factors.
Today its still easier for many of us to look past the homeless people on the streets than it is to stop and offer help. Easier to look past injustices and not get involved, especially if those action might end up causing disruption in your own life.
Unfortunately that's a sad little character flaw called human nature.

And so, generation after generation of white Southerners hardened their hearts that they might not hear the cries of these millions of human beings.

Uh, I just said that.

Even unto the present generation. 

Many of our Southern ancestors directly participated in the daily horrors of slavery: they bought, and sold, hunted, beat, and murdered human beings.

A fact nobody disputes, or celebrates -- especially people who honor Southern identity and Confederate heritage.

And beyond this, they raped Black women, thousands and thousands of Black women, with complete impunity, for more than two centuries. The masters, their sons and nephews, their brothers and uncles and cousins, all shared in the sexual assault on Black women, even violating Black children.  The overseers joined in too, and, as opportunity permitted, the poor whites partook of this slaveowner’s envied privilege.

And here begin this particular author's somewhat perverted (and very disturbing) fantasies involving sex and rape culture. A word of warning folks, this won't be pretty for here on in.

What Mary Boykin Chestnut wrote in her diary

Well, more likely a watered-down version of what she wrote in her diary....which is a good book and one I highly recommend for any Civil War collection.

Indeed, no white Southerner could escape this sexually lawless society unscathed. Read the Civil War Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Chesnut was wife to a prominent South Carolina Senator and slaveowner.  “Like the patriarchs of old,” Chesnut acknowledged, “our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children — and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.” 

How did our plantation mistress, wife to the slaveowner, react when she saw little brown babies “exactly” resembling her white children? Is it any wonder that she always demanded that her husband sell off these, his own children, lest the sight of these brown babies continually recall to her her husband’s infidelities? Is it any wonder that our gracious plantation mistress sought outlet for her anger not by confronting her rapist husband, but by acting still more cruelly towards her husband’s victim, the violated Black woman?

The sad truth is that this is largely true of the large plantation homes and some of the owners. Again a fact acknowledged by history and most people today, but what this has to do specifically with the Confederate flag and its brief relevance to the institution of slavery is still not explained. Just more disturbing obsession with sex and rape violence.

And the poor non-slaveholding whites? Our slave-owning society made of these poor whites an impoverished, diseased, and degraded people. Any good Southern agricultural land would always come to be owned by the slaveowner, leaving the poor white Southerner relegated to the infertile waste lands, lands on which he could not sustain his family.

And the slaveowner certainly had no need to hire the poor white’s labor – if the slaveowner needed a barn built, or needed his horses shoed, or needed his dinner cooked, his slaves did the work.

Yeah and that kind of goes back to the point I made about human nature. People at the top staying on the top and others being held back and having to get by as best as they can. People like, oh say, my own Confederate ancestor who was one of those poor white Southerners with a family and a small plot of land who lived hand-to-mouth till his death. Whose family sometimes worked fields much like those same slaves this author mentions, and would continue to do so in the decades following the war as one of millions of white and black sharecroppers struggling to survive.
But let's not let little details like that get in the way of a nice little "guilt" trip right?

Slavery shaped poor white’s psychology, too
So now, in addition to being a very bad writer, he's a psychologist too? Interesting.

Indeed, in the face of the crippling insecurity of his own life, the only claim the poor white could make for himself was that at least he was not a slave, at least he was not Black.

For two centuries our poor white traded away the possibility of a better life for himself and took in compensation only the thin gruel that he was better than the poor Black. 

In many ways that didn't really matter. Just because someone isn't beaten with a whip does not mean they can't be ground down by other things that are just as painful. In some cases the poor black slave (and sometimes free men of color) had some security under those same slave masters until they passed, while the poor white only had whatever he managed to hold onto -- which was usually not that much.
Not saying that justifies one, or the other, just pointing out a very grim reality.

Southern society based itself upon the degradation of millions and millions of human beings.

Not all of them black either. But again Southern identity as a whole isn't just based on a system of the bourgeois and the proletariat. It wasn't just "moonlight and magnolias" or "mint juleps" either.

That is the heritage represented by the Confederate flag. “Our new government,” boasted Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in 1861, “is founded upon ... the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.  That slavery ... is his natural and normal condition.”

Nice cherry-picking, though you should take the time to track down and read the whole speech. You might find its not quite as hyper-focused on one subject as you think. That being said, Stephens was an asshole and even Davis didn't like him.

No one can deny that Southern heritage, and American heritage, which has always taken its lead on race from the South, is a white supremacist heritage.

Not entirely so. People of color of various ethnicity have always played a role in the establishment of the South and America respectively. Their roles might have always been pushed down in favor of white ethnocentric domination (as it was for much of the world for centuries until quite recently) but their efforts had an impact and we are today thankfully acknowledging that and giving these people and their descendants their due. The fact that this author seems unwilling to take that into account in favor of playing the good ole "guilt" card says more about him that it does about all those willing to move forward in a responsible way.

Those who fly the Confederate flag may not be motivated by hate.

But we must all understand this too: if we uphold the heritage of a white supremacist society, even if we do so in denial of what that heritage really is, in the end, we reap only hatred, violence, fear, and our own spiritual impoverishment, as is testified to by the entirety of this country’s history.

So in conclusion, no amount of social progress matters if we can't begin every sentence with "I'm sorry for my ancestry".
Very rarely have I ever encountered anyone who honors Southern and Confederate heritage use that pride to promote any sense of "superiority" in any modern sense. Those few that do are almost always shunned by those of us who accept the greater truth that Southern heritage (and yes that also includes the noble flag of the South) belongs to all Southern people -- and not just those of us that tend to get sunburned easier. There is no denial of that at all. Sorry, but I can't buy your argument.

David Barber is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Martin.....and Carl W. Roden is "The Man Deniers Fear The Most".

Final Thoughts

The acknowledgment of the horrors and injustices of chattel slavery in American history is not something that this blogger finds unimportant. Quite the contrary. Recognizing the legacy of the injustice of that flawed system is very important in both understanding where we all came from and where we are headed.

Those of us who honor Southern heritage and identity recognize this fact, even if we do not feel the need to consistently virtue signal that detail and engage in self-flagellation on the alter of politically correct idealism. Being self-reflective of the past wrongs does not mean surrendering to a constant state of professed guilt in the present.

Neither the descendants of slave owners, the descendants of slaves, nor the descendants of poor white Southerners are their ancestors. We have their blood, yes. We have their names, yes. But we are still people living in our own time and place in human history. We can learn from both the good and the bad in our collective past as one Southern people with a shared heritage and continue to promote the positives of all those experiences to build on a foundation with a new cornerstone of mutual respect.

To do otherwise would ensure the sort of spiritual impoverishment that the author of this piece feared, though perhaps not exactly in the way he presents it.

The representation of that positive heritage, the Southern flag the one that Mr. Barber fears and hate irrationally, belongs to all Southern people -- the descendants of all mentioned. That's why I, and millions of others, regardless of the color of our skin, display it and call ourselves proudly Southern people.

And that is the key to defeating white supremacy, as well as any other ideal that puts some above others unjustly.

Again my thanks to Mr. Hackett for providing the focus of this article and giving me the opportunity to further advance the truth of Southern identity and heritage in a positive way. God bless your little heart, sir.

Have a wonderful, Dixie Day, and Y'all come back now, ya hear?