A slaveowner-dominated society is for all its democratic pretensions a totalitarian society that cannot allow contrary notions. For those whites who think they were not involved, the most important involvement of all white people over the past 150 years is maintaining the silence and reinforcing the denial. And propping up the institutions that maintain the silence. It is time we broke that silence and let those who want us to go back to that time of blatant white privilege that we will not go back.
This is a comment on Denise Oliver Velez's diary on the internal US slave trade that persisted until the end of the Civil War.
It is white people in this country who are at a major crossroads. We who are white and privileged just by that fact need to say very loudly to the politicians who are pandering to the bigots that we will not go back. We will no longer be the nice white folks who keep the silence. We will not be the people of good will who will be intimidated by the ditto-heads. And if our research into our own families has some ugly truths, we will own up to them. Because it is our history as well. And owning up to it gives the opportunity to change. And change the institutions that are trying to force us into silence.
During the 1990s, one of my colleagues at work was a German on assignment with an IT vendor from Germany. He and I talked about our respective histories. It struck us how much the issue of past atrocities hung over both of our countries. His dad was drafted into the Wehrmacht; my ancestors were drafted into the NC troops and SC troops of the armies supporting the Confederacy. He didn't know much about how his dad felt about that because his dad didn't talk about it much. My own ancestors left little records beyond their census and their Confederate service, and no stories have come down about their feelings about the Civil War.
Germany had a process of de-Nazification and education in which the institutions that had spawned and propped up militarism, anti-Semitism, and nationalism were reformed and much effort expended to ensure that everyone understood the atrocities. The South never was de-Confederacized; on the contrary, the former slaveowners used terrorism to bring themselves back into power sufficient to broker home rule in the 1876 national election.
Writers like Thomas Dixon, who romanticized the Ku Klux Klan, and Margaret Mitchell, whose novel Gone with the Wind glamorized plantation life in a thoroughly ahistorical way, maintained the attractiveness of slave society for whites outside the South. It was chivalric, noble, quixotic, romantic, aristocratic, and so on; all of that being utter bullshit. It was the story that local elite ladies told themselves in their small town garden clubs across the South when their white-jacketed butler brought in their morning sherry. And their emotions ran with the trials of Scarlett or the lost-at-sea Theodosia Burr Allston and not with the women in the house and fields of Tara or the women of Allston's rice plantation and likely breeding farm. Even innocent institutions like garden clubs became the vehicle for maintaining control.
The white churches in the South (and outside the South as well) have been anchors of denial; the small number of white clergy and laity who stood 50 years ago with the civil rights movement and the larger number today pay a price for breaking the silence. That is why at this moment in history what is required is a large number of people breaking that silence and telling the Neo-Confederates and the elite maintainers of the institutions feeding racism (and that includes the CEOs of Comcast, ClearChannel, and FoxNews among many others) that we will not go back. And we white people who know the truth and stand with an end to racist institutions will not be silenced in our understanding of history.
Because the textbooks are already under assault.
Thanks, Denise, for reminding us once again how deep went the depravity of the society that promised so much in flowery words. It's time to live the words and transform the society.