Heritage? Or Hate?

We’re told the victors write history.  This was not the case with the American Civil War.

But first, a digression.  I lived and worked in the Southeast during much of my twenties and early thirties, beginning with a stint in Alabama immediately following college.  It was an adventure for a West Coast boy, living an hour’s drive from the nearest freeway.  The slower pace of life aside, I quickly adjusted to my surroundings.

I remember a sense of trepidation in the weeks preceding my move.  I’d never been to Alabama or anyplace else in the South.  The civil rights upheavals of the 1960s were then recent events in our collective memory and I envisioned burning crosses and police dogs lunging at protestors.

I needn’t have worried.  Everyone I met was nice.  Folks you didn’t know would wave to you as you passed on the road.  Perfect strangers would greet you with a smile.  Store clerks would strike up conversations if no other customers were waiting.  When I left three years later, I found I missed the place and the people.  I still experience the occasional pang of nostalgia, though I couldn’t imagine wanting to live there again.

Their pleasantness notwithstanding, there was plenty of support for certain stereotypes of rural Southerners and their sensibilities.  Confederate flags appeared everywhere you looked, flown from private homes and public buildings and adorning the back windows of pickups.  Monuments to Jeff Davis and Bobby Lee occupied more than a few town squares and main streets, not to mention those dedicated to lesser champions of the Lost Cause. 

When people did mention it, they faithfully described it as the War between the States.  Oftentimes they would take pains to make sure you understood that the conflict concerned the South’s defense of the sacred principle of states’ rights and not the unsavory reasons given by outsiders.  And, to punctuate the public relations effort in furtherance of an image of a benign Confederacy, T-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with the Battle Flag and the slogan, “Heritage, not Hate.”

The events of the past few days have made me think hard about this particular conceit.  The Confederate flag has been brandished as a symbol of white nationalism and resistance to equal rights for people of color at least since the middle of the last century.  Since the November election, the fringe right and its white nationalist comrades have been emboldened to raise the movement's public profile.  This week’s tragedy in Charlottesville was foreshadowed by the increased media attention right-wing agitators have received since Donald Trump’s election and the semi-respectability such attention confers.

The angry young men with their bulged-eyed shouts of “White Power!” we see on TV are interspersed with the occasional calm, soothing talking head telling us that they’re not really racists.  They’re just standing up for their rights as European Americans in the same way African Americans and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans have.  They just want their own civil rights.  And the Confederate paraphernalia?  That’s heritage, not hate.

None of this would be comment worthy if it wasn’t for this point of view resonating among mainstream whites.  Over the past months I’ve heard veiled approval from acquaintances not just for Trump but for the increasingly high-profile opinions of media figures belonging to the fringe and “alt” right.  The gist of their attitude is that while some of the agitators are rough around the edges, they’re saying what has to be said in the face of political correctness.  

Such low key murmurs of approval among ordinary people surely have not gone unnoticed.  The public pronouncements of our leaders haven't done much to discourage, either.  The President’s bizarre and muddled initial response to the violence at this week’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville can be interpreted as further license by the extremists.

But by now we’ve become desensitized to expressions of extremism.  James Fields, the man who drove his car into the counter-protestors in Charlottesville, openly expressed Nazi sympathies in high school.  They were probably dismissed as drivel from an attention-seeking misfit, but in this case Fields’ thoughts eventually had awful consequences.   

However, most loudmouthed jerks don’t end up committing violent acts on this scale, and murdering whackjobs like James Fields are mercifully rare.  It’s the quiet, well-spoken apologists, the “heritage-not-hate” contingent, who present the greater threat long term. 

Their task is made all the easier because of our collective amnesia.  Memorials to Confederate leaders and the Confederate dead saturate the South a century and a half after the guns fell silent.  Public school history textbooks treat Jefferson Davis as the near moral equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. 

Ditto for Robert E. Lee versus Ulysses Grant.  As recently as the 1980s, a school district in Texas seriously considered adopting a high school history text which insinuated that the slaves were content with their lot.  (Which sounds a lot like claims we’ve heard lately from the far right that African Americans were better off as slaves.)  The subtext that the Confederacy and all it stood for was not all that bad and perhaps good or even noble permeates prevalent views on race and of race relations.

The implications of the current discourse are unsettling.  Charlottesville will fade from memory as time moves on and other, newer tragedies befall us.  But the attitudes which are gradually polarizing the public will have lasting and possibly dire consequences if we don’t craft a compelling counternarrative. 

Because in addition to failing to define a viable alternative to the economic immiseration of the neoliberal epoch, the progressive left is quickly losing what may be its last best opportunity to convince the white mainstream that racial equality is in its best interest.  The lesson from Charlottesville is that time is short. 

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar