Mike Colangelo
2024-12-23 18:48:34 UTC
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Permalinkchurch in Virginia with beautiful Tiffany stained glass windows that celebrate
the sacrifice of southern traitors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/why-confederate-lies-live-on/618711/
The piece is called, "Why Confederate Lies Live On", with a subheading of
For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s
the story they want to believe.
The story includes a section about a museum at a sugarcane plantation in
Louisiana, the Whitney. The plantation also has a church, but that church has no
stained glass windows. Instead, it has statues of angels holding the broken
bodies of little black slave children who have died.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000
visitors a year. I asked Yvonne [tour guide] if they were different from the
people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names
of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking
they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.
Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from
the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from
white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but …
Were there any good slave owners?”
She took a deep breath, her frustration visible. She had the look of someone
professionally committed to patience but personally exhausted by the toll it
takes.
“I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of
how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they
clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were
still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped
your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does
that sound?”
But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it,
they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in
Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the
Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate
Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-
grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”
And that's exactly the problem: the ancestors of those people today who tell and
believe the lies about the southern traitors *were* monsters. There is no
getting around it. The slave owners, the brutal overseers, the traitors who
fought to preserve the cruel abomination of slavery were *monsters*. And they
need to be called monsters.
White supremacists who wish to suppress the teaching of the true history of
slavery and Jim Crow and white supremacy often make the discredited argument
that teach the truth makes white pupils "ashamed" of being white. First of all,
any white pupils who say that have been *coached* to say it by their white
supremacist parents. Secondly, the material can obviously been taught in a way
that doesn't implicate today's white pupils in the monstrosity of what their
monster ancestors did. Teachers need to say to white pupils, "Your ancestors may
have been — *were* — monsters, but that doesn't make you one, and you don't have
to be one." But the truth needs to be told, and all the southern traitor
apologia needs to be called what it is: *lies*.
People who don't want this material to be taught are Nazis. Deriding those who
push for the teaching of the true history as "wokies" is the shorthand way of
the Nazis saying they don't want the true history to be taught. It saves them
from having to make a detailed case against teaching the true history. Instead,
they can just dismiss it with a sneer. But of course they're wrong, and of
course those who insist on teaching the true and complete history are not
"wokies" or any other dismissive term, but in fact are the tribunes of truth.