The Need For A Civil War Memory Offensive

New York's Soldiers and Sailors Monument back when the living memory of the Civil War could visit it

If you travel to the Upper West Side of Manhattan and stroll along the paths in Riverside Park, you might come across two massive monuments to the Civil War: the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and Grant's Tomb.  The former is a towering structure honoring the Union troops who served in the war, a Beaux Arts beauty in its time that now looks awful today with cracks, weeds, and poorly covered-up graffiti.  Grant's Tomb has been cleaned up, but this gorgeous monument (built with the help of fund raising by the grateful African American community in New York City) is barely kept open by the National Park Service.  If you travel to the South, you'll notice that similar monuments to the Confederacy are kept in gleaming shape, and even battlefields managed by the National Park Service will have museums that include varieties of reunionist and even Lost Cause ideology.  (Surprisingly enough, the museum in Vicksburg is not like this at all.)

There has been a lot of needed discussion in the aftermath of the Charleston terror attack about the Confederate battle flag.  I think that discussion needs to be converted into a Civil War memory offensive.  Ignorant people have been free to believe that the flag is a benign symbol of "southern pride" because those who sympathize with the Confederacy have had an inordinate influence on public memory of the Civil War.  Just witness Shelby Foote's heavy presence in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, where he gave great praise to slave trader, war criminal, and Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest.  It has been so from the beginning, where 1915's infamous A Birth of a Nation presented a racist interpretation of the war and Reconstruction, and 1939's Gone with the Wind valorized slave-owners.

Those who rightfully sympathize with the Union cause (or more appropriately, the American cause) need to amplify their voices.  Many historians of the Civil War (rather than reenactor hobbyists) have been engaging with the public, more need to follow their example.  Teachers need to teach not just the battles, but the larger political and social aspects of the Civil War, and ground its causes without any doubt in slavery.  (Historians should assist in making materials that do this that teachers can use.)  Modern day Unionists need to do more to honor their own monuments, memorials, and heroes.  (I'm a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates for many reasons, not least of which that he uses a photo of Grant as his Twitter avatar.)  Monuments like the Soldiers and Sailors Monument need to be repaired and used ceremonially.  (New York should also more formally memorialize the Draft Riots, but that's a whole other issue.)  In general, Reconstruction needs to be made much more legible to the public.  This crucial time in American history has been largely forgotten, and the few public narratives that exist still parrot a paler version of Birth of a Nation.

More importantly, many existing memorial sites related to Reconstruction and the Civil War need to be changed, and contemporary Unionists ought to fight for those changes.  For example, a friend of mine recently visited the site of the Colfax Massacre, a horrific act of violence perpetrated in 1873 by white supremacists against former slaves to destroy their political power.  This is what the state of Louisiana's official plaque looks like:

That's right, one of the worst incidents of lawless violence in this country's history is presented as a victory against tyranny.  It is absolutely disgusting that an event like Colfax is honored in this way.  This marker is only one of many valorizing white supremacy and its accompanying violence.  Yes, take down that traitorous, blood-soaked flag and burn it.  But also rip the historical narratives rooting that flag right out of the damn ground.

Has The GOP's Deal With The Devil Come Due?

Back when the Tea Party winds stared blowing back in the early parts of this decade, I wondered whether the Republican Party had signed a devil's bargain.  It was encouraging the support of fringe elements that had long been outside of the mainstream of American politics, all in order to benefit politically from the rising feelings of resentment among white people.

One such example is the Republican eagerness to put the grievances of the "open carry" movement into law, as just recently happened in Texas.  This is a movement that worships guns and views the Second Amendment as a protection against tyranny, as if the only thing standing between the status quo and a dictatorship is a bunch of dudes carrying AR-15's into the local Chipotle.  Voters who vote on gun issues tend to be highly motivated, so the Republicans are willing to break bread with armed vigilantes if it means electoral success.

The same goes for white nationalism, although the connections have been blurred more.  The continued Republican support for the official use of the Confederate flag (which was only shaken after the terror attack in Charleston), is a case in point.  The same goes for the lip service paid by Rick Perry and others to Texas nationalism, which in my experience is an idea limited almost completely to white Texans.  The anti-immigrant rhetoric and "show me your papers" laws in states like Arizona are based in a conception of the United States as a white man's country.  Sometimes the links between the "secure our borders" rhetoric and the ugly truth beneath those words gets exposed.  For example, it came out today that that Earl Holt III, the leader of Council of Conservative Citizens, has given campaign donations to multiple Republican presidential candidates.  In case you don't know, this organization was cited directly by terrorist Dylann Roof in his manifesto as instrumental in affecting his worldview.

Now this is not necessarily a case of Republicans actively seeking out the support of extremists.  Rather, they have been more subtle, in that they will take their money and promote policy positions that make those extremists happy.  Anti-immigrant legislation, voter suppression of people of color, and slashing programs that help Latinos and African Americans in poverty might be called "securing our borders, combating voter fraud, and welfare reform" officially, but everyone with eyes who can see understands that they are all policies that further white supremacy.  (Hence their popularity in large sectors of white America.)  The horrors of the Charleston killing, as well as the almost comical responses by many conservatives that downplayed any discussion of race, have highlighted just how beholden the Republican Party is to extremist elements.  In the wake of a racist terror shooting it must figure out how to spin its long-standing policies of no gun control and defending the flying of the Confederate flag.  It was easy to court extremist elements when no one was watching, now it will be much harder to hide.  Time will tell if this will actually result in any electoral change.

Track of the Week: Randy Newman "Short People"

Randy Newman seems to have a particular genius for writing two types of songs: warm catchy ballads for Pixar films and wickedly satirical songs sung from the point of view of horrible people.  The awful opinions expressed in order to be mocked are still bathed in the same exquisite melodies as in the Pixar tunes, making it hard for the casual listener to get the joke sometimes.  And occasionally the melody is so catchy, as with "Short People," that Newman could score a big hit with it.

The narrator of the song is obviously deranged in his hate of short people, mumbling about their "dirty little hands and dirty little minds."  This is similar to Newman's earlier "Political Science," where the narrator fantasizes about nuking the world and turning it into "one big American town" in a biting parody of American nationalism.  The earlier song was just as catchy as "Short People," but the lyrics were perhaps easier to decipher, which kept it from getting played on the radio.

I wonder if anyone got Newman's point when he released "Short People" in 1977.  While Newman likes to skewer bigots in this fashion, he also presents them as everyday people, wandering around the same world as you and I.  I've been thinking a lot about that in the aftermath of the Charleston shooting, whose perpetrator has been revealed to be the kind of deranged bigot that Newman often sang about.  According to news reports, others knew about Roof's violent hatred and even his plans to act on it, and did nothing.  That tells me that they were either sympathetic to his general viewpoint, or that such feelings were so common as to not cause alarm.

As far as the latter goes, I have heard, when in "white spaces" some horrifically, violently hateful things over the years, and I am not talking about your garden variety prejudice.  I am talking about eliminationist sentiments, like the kid in high school who wanted to nuke Mexico, the bartender who wanted to "send them all back to Africa," and so many others.  The events in Charleston are proof that these hateful souls are not a joke, they have the potential to do truly terrible things.  While it can be satisfying to disarm bigots by laughing at them, we should never stop taking them seriously.

We STILL Need To Talk About White Male Pathology

I woke up this morning to the horrific news of the terrorist shooting in Charleston.  Following the story today, I have seen yet again how the killer/terrorist is presented as an "isolated case" detached from larger society.  This is the way it tends to be with white men when they commit these acts.  The folks at Fox News are even spinning this as some kind of anti-Christian thing, despite the fact that the terrorist liked to sport apartheid symbols and justified his attack to one of the victims with noxious racism.  Many white people in this country are so afraid to admit the persistence of racism even when it has manifested itself in the most violent way possible.  If this is not an act of racist terrorism, what on earth is?

In the aftermath of the horror of the Newtown shooting I wrote about how America needed to confront the pathologies of white masculinity, and returned to the topic multiple times afterward.  A Slate article today provides a list of the many, many terrorist acts committed by racist white men in the last twenty years, a truly scary litany of murder and hate that most white people refuse to see as anything more than a set of unconnected "isolated incidents" with "lone wolf" perpetrators.  They will also likely blame "mental illness." as if someone cannot be both mentally disturbed and a terrorist.  Furthermore, they will not wonder why mentally ill white men often respond to their illness by murdering other people (often people of color) in large numbers, when other types of people don't.

For an illustration, take a foreign example, that of the xenophobic Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik (the president exaggerated today a little about the uniquely American nature of mass shootings.)  He murdered 77 people in a highly planned bombing and shooting spree all on political grounds as an enemy of the Left.  (He targeted a social democratic youth camp for reasons similar to Roof's targeting of a prominent and politically powerful African American church.)  Beyond his politics, Breivik fit the stereotype of the maladjusted, aggrieved loner.  The American media does not have a problem characterizing Breivik as a politically motivated actor.  Why then the reluctance to do so with Dylann Roof?  The answer is pretty simple, namely that it would raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions.

The fact that Roof presented himself online wearing patches of the apartheid regime flags of Rhodesia and South Africa is telling.  He was obviously "radicalized" at some point, since knowledge of those regimes' symbols isn't common among most American 21 year olds.  He didn't commit his act in just any predominately African American church, either.  He chose the church founded by black freedom fighter Denmark Vesey and pastored by Clementa Pinckney, an elected official who had called for mandatory police body cameras.  It is the first AME church founded in the south, and due to its history is a national landmark, official or not.  I can't imagine that a person who was aware of Rhodesia's history would not have been aware of the significance of this particular church.

Will the government start entrapping fellow white supremacists to pre-emptively get them in prison, just as they have with followers of radical Islam?  Will the government be committing psy-ops on white supremacist web pages and forums, as they do with Islamist ones?  Don't hold your breath.  The hatred Roof expressed to justify his shooting is very extreme, but sadly it is not rare.  Go to practically any traditional white barber shop in large swaths of this country for a day and you will likely hear a variation of it.  God knows I have.  It is an everyday hatred that is not taken seriously by many whites, just listen to Roof's roommate.  But don't worry folks, it's just an isolated incident by a quiet loner.  Move along, move along, and don't forget to keep buying stuff.

****

Here's what I wrote in 2012, most of it still sadly relevant:

Whenever a horrible event like the massacre in Newtown takes place, we try to find ways to explain it. This is often a futile exercise, because many people merely superimpose their larger beefs with society onto these events, rather than examining them with any real analytical and factual framework.  Hence, we have people like Louie Gohmert saying the teacher should have had her own assault weapon, or Mike Huckabee lamenting the loss of God in public schools.  We should be very careful of monocausal explanations that oversimplify things.  There are a lot of factors at play in the Newtown massacre, from the perpetrator's mental state to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.  However, I would like to echo others out there in the blogosphere who want to examine the role of white masculinity in all of this.
Of course, there have been other mass shootings in other countries, and the worst such shooting in this country was perpetrated by a Korean student.  That being said, this country has witnessed the lion's share of mass shootings, and disproportionate seventy percent of the shooters have been white men.  I hardly think the connection is coincidental.  Ever since the Aurora tragedy this summer, I have been contemplating this issue, trying to connect the dots to explain the connection between white masculinity and mass shootings.  I finally feel like I have some speculations worth sharing.
Masculinity more generally in this society is defined to a great extent by violence and control, and violence used as a means of maintaining control.  I have long been amazed and appalled by how many public figures in this country who have abused their wives and girlfriends have been allowed to stay on the pedestal.  That sad fact is to me evidence that masculine control through violence is implicitly accepted as legitimate in America.  Action movies predominate at the box office, and the orchestrated violence of the NFL is America's most popular sport.
Furthermore, white men in this country are taught that they are the masters of their own destiny, and are usually not confronted with the same limitations of possibility that men of color are.  When white men fail, an experience our society gives them few resources to confront,  they often lash out at those they hold responsible, or turn inward and commit suicide.  Most mass shooters seem to want to do both, as Adam Lanza did.
The completely atomized nature of white middle class society contributes as well.  Shooters are usually described as "loners," men disconnected from others and hence unable to empathize with the human beings they kill.  We are an increasingly individualized society, which means that those mentally unstable, frustrated white men with access to deadly weapons are so rarely stopped before they kill.  They sit on the margins, alone, without any kind of cohesive social structure to bring them in.  Adam Lanza had stopped going to school and interacted with few outside his home, Eric Harris was able to plan his rampage in a home where his parents took evidently little interest in his doings, James Holmes had been expelled from his university and lived alone in a city far from home.  While atomization is occurring in all groups of American society today, in middle class, white culture it has probably been the most egregious and damaging.
We have a situation where white men are socialized to be the masters of their fate and able to use violence to maintain control over their lives.  These same men lack the tools to handle adversity, and are often left to their individual resources, even if they are mentally disturbed.  When some of the most mentally unstable of these men experience soul-shattering setbacks and are given access to semi-automatic weapons, we can only expect the worst.  We need to educate young men (especially white men) to not see violence as the answer to their problems, or to phantasize violent solutions.  We need to equip them with the tools to withstand failure, and to keep the more troubled of their number from slipping through the cracks.  Last, we need to talk seriously and openly about the nature of American white masculinity, and stop pretending that it isn't problematic.