Civil wars

It's one of those curious things about a Southern primary school education, though it shouldn't be at all surprising: you get the nuanced version of the American Civil War. Scientific principles may be open to interpretation, subtleties of civics may be glossed, A Separate Peace may be taught as a "classic" (it's not a half bad book, it just doesn't deserve the time middle schools spend on it) but when you get to History, American History, well here you have all sorts of detail about who fought where and why and what they were using. Ask a reasonably smart Southern child if the Army can requisition his house so soldiers can sleep in his bedroom, and I suspect he'll have no idea, but ask him why the War Between The States occurred and he may well start expounding on the dangers of protective tariffs.

Years later, I was an undergraduate up at Appalachian State, taking a course on "Jeffersonian-Jacksonian America," i.e. the era between those two conflicted, contrary, populist, liberty-loving, slave-owning/racist American Presidents, and even as a liberal, progressive, sensitive Southern boy I was all about the nuanced view of the great bloody war that the years between Jefferson and Jackson were prelude to. (That's the real point of defining and setting apart that era, of course: it's the era of turmoil during which the postbellum of the Revolution becomes the antebellum of the Civil War.) I could have told you all about railroad gages, infrastructure policy and Federal funding, tariffs and taxation, the ways in which climate and geography affected farming and industrialization--still could, if I really cared to. But I'm sitting in that class one day--and I'll never forget this, though I can't remember the professor's name to save my life--I'm sitting in class one day when the professor, with an exasperated tone, stated the obvious. I don't remember if it was in answer to a question or just something he jammed out while he was riffing on his lecture--as I recall, he always sounded pretty exasperated.

"Brothers," he says, "don't shoot each other over 'state's rights'."

Blinds go up, blinkers fly off. They don't, do they? Oh, brothers might argue heatedly and violently about all sorts of things: politics, sports, the name of that one girl who was a year ahead of the oldest or a year behind the youngest. If they're drunk and their last name is Gallagher, they might come to blows over which song was supposed to be next on the setlist. But they don't pick up their guns and start blowing the living hell out of each other because one of them thinks the Federal government should regulate a standardized distance between rails on a railway or because the other thinks a flood of finished goods from Britain is good for a mostly agrarian economy even if it causes problems for millowners in other states. They shoot each other over something important, something like slavery, like whether people can own people or whether slaves are people or what's to be done with them if they're not chained up.

One reason you can get away with the nuanced view when teaching Southern history, aside from the way it soothes our collective guilt for our fathers' sins, is that historians generally prefer nuance. Saying Neville Chamberlain was a coward isn't as realistic or accurate or deep as a discussion of British foreign policy in the context of the domestic politics of a democracy still exhausted from the Great War or the logistics of fielding one of the world's largest military forces and yet being unable to readily deploy it because it's maintaining colonial order around the whole world, versus the clearly obvious signals German leaders were sending through the thirties that the German agenda was an imperialist one that would conquer British allies and impinge on British colonial interests abroad. But sometimes things really are as simple as they appear: the American Civil War was all about slavery in one sense or another--yes, there were other tensions, yes there were other issues, but the great toxic mass at the bottom of all the other debates, the issue that caused blood to spill in the Kansas and Nebraska territories, that drove the election of 1860, that fueled the rhetoric about "states' rights" until "states' rights" became nothing more than a euphemism, that issue was slavery.

And--forgive me for stating the obvious--slavery was a race issue. The skin of the enslaved became both a marker of enslavement and a rationale. Nineteenth century scientists--natural philosophers back then, to be more exact--even ones with abolitionist proclivities, went to some length to explain the ways in which blackness was a mark of inferiority that led to enslavement (perhaps tragically, but nonetheless inevitably) or even justified it (as right to put an African in the fields as to saddle a horse or milk a cow). Whites were not going to great lengths to enslave other whites, and social institutions like indentured servitude that are sometimes held up as "equivalents" were nothing like slavery, which involved not merely servitude but institutionalized inferiority--the notion that the slave was not merely a servant, but chattel, property that could be bought and sold and dealt with as well or as callously as an owner might care to, just as a modern person might choose to religiously maintain his automobile or to only care for it when a light comes on the dash.

I think you probably know what this is really all about. There's been a lot of talk lately about whether critics of the President of the United States, a man who happens to have dark skin and a father who came from Africa, are "racists". Some critics, it might be said, although this distinction is being lost--there are critics on the right and left who write and say thoughtful things about fiscal policy or the rights of man, but then you have others who wave around signs on which the leader of the free world is portrayed as a half-naked tribal shaman with a bone stuck through his nose. A surprising number of defenders of the latter sort of "critique" have emerged who say that this is satire, although it's hard to see what the satirical context would be if one were to Photoshop, say, the head Dennis Kucinich onto the shoulders of a "witch doctor." Mr. Kucinich is no less a promoter of national healthcare than the President (moreso, even), but if one imagines an unlikely parallel universe in which Mr. Kucinich secured the nomination of his party and won the Presidency, one is hard-pressed to imagine any protesters trying to portray him as a supposed "witch doctor. Then there are others who appear to be saying that even mentioning the word "racist" to address protesters isn't helpful because racism is purported to be unprovable and shouldn't be presumed however racist the behavior might appear. My friend Janiece Murphy recently had a conversation with her son in which (I hope I'm not misstating this) he suggested that whether certain people are racists doesn't even matter, only the quality of their ideas is important (in which case, I think one might conclude, why bother calling the people out on their racism?). A former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, has found himself receiving more flak than usual for even suggesting that some of the folks out there might be racists.

Let's say this up front: not everybody who disagrees with the President is a racist, nor are all of the 60,000 or two million people who marched on Washington last weekend racists. Some of what we're seeing we would be seeing from the same conspiranoiacs and Republican puppetmasters who accused the Clintons of murdering Vince Foster; hell, some of what we're seeing, we'd be seeing from the same tinfoil-hat-wearing crowd that accused President George W. Bush of planning the September 11^th terrorist attacks.

But here's the thing: people don't show up to rallies with their guns or tearfully scream they want their country back over a difference of opinion over the public option, no more than brothers shoot each other over tariffs. There is a racist component to all of this, and there are racists participating, and there is both overt racism and the sort of toxic contact-racism that occurs when people choose (knowingly or naïvely) to associate themselves with racists.

I don't know that this is obvious to Yankees up North of the Mason-Dixon or to Cowboys out West of the Miss. But I can't see how it's not obvious to a Southerner. White men showing up with firearms outside wherever a "Negro" is giving a public speech is not a new or unheard-of phenomena down here, though some of us have been trying to get them to stop doing that for about 135 years (I'm happy to say we've had improved success in the last fifty of those). These God-fearing white folk, you outsiders need to understand, don't necessarily show up to a speech armed to stand outside with an intent to do violence--this is one of those subtle things some of you miss out of naïevete or (I'm afraid) on purpose because you can fairly say that nobody's there to assassinate anyone (at least not today--perhaps if somebody steps out of their motel room for a breath of air, however...). The real message of somebody showing up armed like that isn't "I'm just somebody who loves the Second Amendment thiiiiiiis much and hates taxes," no, the message has always historically been, "We're here to remind you uppity coloreds that we know how to find you and we're armed, so tread lightly." Shooting somebody in daylight, generally speaking, is rude and déclassé; we pride ourselves on manners in the South, sometimes referred to medievalistically as breeding, a word that tells you a great deal about class and race relations in the South right there by itself.

I mentioned a moment ago that former President Carter had gotten some flak (as you probably know); let me explain something you may have missed about Mr. Carter's comments about President Obama receiving racist treatment: they're important because of who he is, but that probably doesn't mean what you think it does. Mr. Carter's perspective isn't important because he's a former President, however failed that presidency was. That might be why people pay attention to what he says--being a former President Of The United States is a helluva bully pulpit to have--but it's actually irrelevant. The important thing about who Mr. Carter is when he says some of the attacks on President Obama are racist is that he's an elderly progressive from Georgia.

You think Mr. Carter hasn't seen a racist attack on a politician before? The man has lived through at least two eras of Southern racial history, the pre-Brown Jim Crow era of de jure (by law) segregation and the post-Brown era of de facto (by circumstance) segregation; if you feel that things have improved enough since the fifties, maybe we're in a third era during Mr. Carter's lifetime. The man has lived through riots in Southern streets, civil rights marches, busing debates, lunch counter arrests and all the rest of it, don't tell me the man doesn't know race and politics. Has he ever been approached by racist whites and told to shape up and fly right?

[Robert] Patterson channeled his anger [over the Brown decision forcing school desegregation] into a lasting innovation for the white supremacy movement—give it a respectable face, strip it of explicitly racist rhetoric and use it as an invisible hand to guide mob violence. He created the Citizens’ Council, which would spawn a regional network by year’s end. Each council’s membership boasted the area’s finest white leaders in business, government and, yes, media. They directed their public anger less at integration itself than at federal incursions on local rule, but the resulting violence was no less extreme.

At the time, Carter was a Plains, Ga., peanut farmer and board of education member. He recalls in his campaign memoir, Turning Point (Random House, 1993), how the Plains Council pressured him to join. When he refused, the council sent 20 of his best customers to demand compliance. Carter again refused, this time adding, “and besides, there are a few politicians in Atlanta who are taking the dues from all over the state and putting the money in their pockets, just because folks are worried about the race issue.”

-Kai Wright, "Jimmy Carter, True Son
of the South, Hits Nail on Head"
The Root, September 17^th, 2009.

Hell, I could have told you that even if I couldn't source it--could have even correctly guessed at the part of the same old story of white clients or customers showing up to imply that certain attitudes aren't, shall we say, "good" for business. He's an 84-year-old (turns 85 in about two weeks) Southern liberal politician from Plains, Georgia who has spent decades in local, state and national politics before devoting his post-Presidential career to an assortment of humanitarian and progressive causes. Forget that part of that political experience makes him one of four living ex-Presidents, because it's a distraction: take it as a prominent Southern liberal said, "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American. I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shares the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans." As a much younger Southern liberal myself, I agree with the man point-for-point.

Certain members of the right--some of them racists and some of them perhaps merely benefiting from the fears and antics of racists--are trying very hard to sideline the issue. We are, I'm happy to say, in an era when "racist" has become one of the worst possible things you can say about someone, so it behooves racists and their bedfellows to try to keep anyone from calling them what they are, and one way to do that is to try to create a climate where it seems dangerous to call anybody out on racism without appearing to engage in crazed hyperbole. By discrediting the word, they hope to discredit the people using it. It doesn't help that sometimes the word is used prematurely or inappropriately or without evidence, or in cases where reasonable doubt might exist.

But caution and fear are different things: it is one thing to be cautious about an accusation of rank prejudice and another to be afraid to make the accusation at all. We have a moral responsibility to call out racism when we see it, to be intolerant of it. And that includes an obligation to be awake and aware, to respond to the obvious evidence of our senses and experience. Showing up outside a Presidential speech with your guns has certain connotations down here that y'all Yankees and Cowboys may not be aware of but those of you down here ought to be aware of. Showing up at a rally with a sign that depicts an African-American as a savage isn't original, a certain kind of person has been making art like that since Reconstruction. You want to tell me you didn't know there was a subtext, I'm not sure if I believe you, but if I give you the benefit of the doubt, you know now: it's racist as hell, you're on notice. Scream at a rally that you want your country back--well, where I'm from, we've heard that kind of talk before, when somebody an awful lot like you was saying she wanted her neighborhood or her schools or her favorite lunch counter back, and we know damn well who you wanted it "back" from, even if you were too genteel to say the n-word out loud where one of them might hear it.

I've kept this civil so far, I think, but I'm getting worked up to a not-genteel string of invective and f-bombs that might dilute my point. And my point is this: don't tell me racism isn't racism--I'm a born Southerner with all the pride and shame that entails, and I wasn't born yesterday and I'm going to call it like I see it. An overwhelming portion of the animosity directed at President Barack Obama is racist, conscious or otherwise, deliberately or thoughtlessly. It is not respected, it will not be tolerated.

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Photograph of Obama protester with racist sign ©2009 CNN.