I remember the first “minstrel” show I ever attended. My father was on the stage in blackface as one of the performers. This was the local Ruritan Club’s annual fundraiser in my small hometown in Virginia when I was a preteen, just becoming aware that the world was more complex than I had known. If anyone in the white community thought this show problematic, I never heard it. That annual event ended after a night when a group of brave, local African-Americans, with tickets duly purchased, took seats in the back of the hall and sat quietly stone-faced during the show and left just before it finished. This quiet confrontation put faces and names on those in the group being ridiculed and the minstrel show was never staged again in our community.
I was raised drenched in the Confederacy. Lexington, VA where I grew up is the home of Washington & Lee University where both of the named gentlemen served as Presidents. That campus is the Home of the Lee Chapel and Museum where Robert E. Lee is honored and he along with his family are interred in their crypt. Lexington also houses the Virginia Military Institute where the cadet/students who fought in the Civil War battle of New Market on the side of the Confederacy, are still lionized in a mural. The parade field there is lined with four of Stonewall Jackson’s cannons the so-called “Cadet Battery.” I was told Jackson named them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they “spoke loudly for The Lord.” The only home Jackson owned was a house in Lexington when he was a professor of philosophy and artillery at VMI. That building, now restored as Jackson’s dwelling for historical tours, housed the local hospital at the time I was born. So, yes, I was literally born in Stonewall Jackson’s house. Decals stating “The South will rise again” featuring an angry old Confederate soldier were commonly seen in public and private spaces. This genteel racism permeated my childhood; genteel from my perspective. I have no idea of what it was like to live in “colored town” as we called it – the African American community in the town. My school was first integrated under Federal order the year I began high school, much to the dismay of my family. It takes time, distance, and education to overcome the perspectives and misinformation we’re given as children. Some never achieve it. I recount my personal history on this issue to say that I get the Confederacy. I reject it and here is why.
I am proudly American and a student of history. They say “winners write the history” but that was not true of the Civil War. It is a singular, sad exception that in the century following the Civil War it was the South that wrote the history. The so-called “Lost Cause” narrative suggested the South fought for “states’ rights” while conveniently overlooking that the “right” they fought to preserve was nothing more than an inhumane policy to hold darker-skinned humans and their progeny in perpetual bondage. They erected monuments to those who led an armed insurrection against their own nation. Robert E. Lee was a former West Point Commandant who was offered the position of leading the Union forces. He wrongly chose the Confederacy and should bear the cost. Today people say their desire to maintain those memorials is to “honor tradition.” What in that tradition is honorable – the slavery, the racism, the betrayal of country, the Jim Crow laws? The Confederacy lasted a little over 4 years. I have underwear more resilient than that. They lost the war due to bad tactics and thank God they did. The only thing they won was the propaganda war that followed, the rewriting of history to glorify white supremacy by lionizing traitors to our nation’s evolution into “a more perfect Union.” I never feel more fully American than when I reject the Confederacy and the 100+ years of propaganda put out to justify it.
Further, those statues were not erected to teach history. We don’t need them for that, we know the history. No, they were erected as a statement of values. That’s what statues are, statements of values. The Statue of Liberty doesn’t teach us any history, it states our values as a diverse, welcoming nation sharing a vision of individual liberty, personal dignity, and a common good. That we have not always lived up to that vision does not dim its purpose. Rather it reminds us of what we should value even when we do not. Confederate statues and monuments glorify the values of the Confederacy, but behind the “courage” is the betrayal of nation. Behind the “standing for your principles” is slavery and continued racism. I don’t buy those values; I don’t know why anyone would.
You can be a proud Southerner if you mean the kinder culture than I find elsewhere in the nation. You can honor the cuisine (dang, I love me some Southern cooking), and the dialects. I love my Southern mountain accent. But those other values, we don’t need to buy into those any longer. I embrace American values of dignity regardless of race or class, individual liberty and balancing it with the common good, and similar virtues. Nothing in the Confederacy evoke my values.
Southerners, here is our real Lost Cause—It is time to let Dixie die. Those Confederate monuments are part of the pus and debris in the open wound of racism poisoning our nation for 400 years. Let’s finally drain the wound so healing can begin. I love many things about the South, but I’m done with Dixie. Let’s write history more accurately this time and put up monuments to our real American values, independence from tyranny, the courage to stand against inhuman policies, to stand for equity, diversity, and loyalty to our highest virtues. Let’s lift every voice and sing that song. Let that healing begin.
Tikkun Olam. AB