Pat Robertson on the Haitian Revolution

Apparently, the most successful slave rebellion in the history of the American colonies succeeded because its leaders made a pact with the devil. Juan Cole offers an informed dissection of this racist version of history.

Donate to the Red Cross here.

"Traditional" Americans?

I suppose you could argue that America has a long history of paranoid white populism, so, in that sense, perhaps "traditional" makes sense here.

I don't think that's what Pat "White Folks Built This Country" Buchanan means, though.

You can read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan takes Buchanan to task for his historical amnesia here.

Teach the Controversy: Pangaea

Andrew Sullivan has a post up right now called "Looking at Race." It concerns a poll that asks Americans whether they believe that Africa and America were once part of the same continent.

At first, I thought, wtf does the existence of Pangaea have to do with race? Of course America and Africa were once part of the same continent, but the Atlantic Ocean has been around for about 100 million years, while our species is only a few hundred thousand years old. "Race" is not really a concept that maps well onto geologic time.

Then I looked at the breakdown of the results.

Yikes! Only 35% of white respondents said "yes," while 63% of black respondents agreed. I imagine that this gap is not reflective of overall scientific knowledge. Did all the white kids skip Earth Science? From this evidence, it seems that white people (particularly those who are Republicans, Southerners, or over 60) are less likely to accept the science of plate tectonics, perhaps indicating that they are still struggling with the idea that all people belong to the same species.

If it were just Republicans or Southerners who were willfully ignorant of continental drift, I might be able to explain it away by blaming Young Earth Creationism. But that racial gap is astounding.

White people do realize that our species originated in Africa, don't they? And that all humans of all races are related? Also — and I hestiate to point this out — white people are not actually from America originally.

One last thing — in his post, Sullivan says that he "would have said yes, but not too confidently." Really? Because I definitely covered Pangaea with my second graders. I thought that this was common knowledge, at least among elementary school grads.

Teach the Controversy 

Update: Some are saying that the question is flawed — that it doesn't really tell us how many Americans "believe" in continental drift. But that isn't the point, is it? The point of the question is to tell us how many Americans reflexively reject any idea that connects North America to Africa. It's a brilliant question because you can't just straight-up ask people if they are racist. Many people don't know what the term means, though they're pretty sure they aren't. You have to ask roundabout questions like this one.

Verbatim Pat Buchanan

"This has been a country built, basically, by white folks in this country."

Blame is Not is Plan

I wonder where David Brooks gets his numbers. In his column today, he states that in 1960, the "average American" had almost 14 years of education. I assume this number comes from the book by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz that provides his other evidence. I don't know where they pulled that from, since, according to the census and every other source I can find, fewer than 20% of American adults had even a year of college education in 1960 and the median educational level was 10.5 years (12.3 among adults between 25 and 29). The graph at right is from Education of the American Population (1976).

Of course, if you define "average American" as "average white, male American," as Brooks does, his numbers are much closer to reality.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. What struck me as the most bizarre was that, in a column on educational inequality and the achievement gap, Brooks completely ignores race.

By discussing the "average American" and focusing on the overall rate of high school completion, Brooks buries the lede, which is that the achievement gap is between students of different races. Yes, "socio-economic status" is a big part of the gap, but black, Latino/a, and Native American students are being out-performed by white and Asian students at all income levels. A lot can be achieved by erasing inequality between poor, middle-class, and wealthy students, but pretending that race does not matter is foolish.

In this column, Brooks is advocating investing in education and closing the achievement gap, and I agree with him that these are top priorities. Yet, I think heaping the blame for educational stagnation on "family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years" is wrong x 10.

I was a TFA teacher, and no one has devoted more time and energy to finding research-based evidence on the achievement gap than TFA. If you have a few free hours, go read through the data and overviews on the TFA site. After only two years in the classroom, I totally agree with the TFA research that says that funding and family are not the major problems holding kids back: a lot has to do with teacher quality, expectations, and fostering a culture of achievement. Lots of factors go into teachers'/administrators' low expectations, but I really believe that many people in education hold lower expectations for African-American and Hispanic students specifically because of their race.

I taught at a school that with a predominantly Mexican-American student body, though there were also students from Central America, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Portugal, and smaller populations of black and white students. Just like at the school I attended when I was a child, free lunch was the norm. Many of the students at our school came in with a full complement of educational disadvantages — parents with low levels of education, few English skills, low-income families, limited vocabularies in any language, etc. Some teachers dug in to fight the good fight, but others just threw up their hands and declared the situation hopeless.

It is undeniably true, as Brooks notes, that educational inequality starts early in life. By now, most educators are familiar with studies that have found that by age 3, the gap in language skills (a prerequisite for reading in any language) between the richest and poorest children is astounding. The error is in assuming that since children from some families start out at a disadvantage, they will inevitably lag behind their peers. In our current system, they will indeed lag, but it is NOT inevitable. Explicit vocabulary instruction, evidence-based pedagogy, and high expectations can do wonders for even the most disadvantaged students.

The trouble is that too many teachers and schools see poor students (particularly black, Hispanic, and Native American students) as unteachable. That might sound harsh, and I certainly don't mean all teachers or all schools, but there is a lot of that going around.

I've seen a lot of amazing teachers work wonders with kids and families, but I've also seen awful teachers who blame their own failures on the kids and the parents. A teacher cannot get the best results out of a student if that teacher assumes that the student is irredeemably lazy/ignorant/hyper/stupid/worthless. The things I've heard teachers say out loud about students would blow your hair back, and that's not even taking into account unconscious prejudices and systematic injustices (ex: systematically denying Latino students access to the Special Education services to which they are legally entitled — I'm looking at you, Alum Rock Union School District in San Jose, CA).

Brooks is right on his large point: investment in human capital is necessary to the nation's health. But honestly, blaming educational stagnation on the largely mythical declension of "the home" is not a solution. By all means, invest in early childhood education. But don't pretend that race is unimportant.

The Bloody Shirt

I'm currently listening to the unabridged audio version of Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox. I'm ambivalent about it. The prologue had me all psyched up for a ripping expose of reconstruction-era violence, but the rest of the book is falling a bit flat for me.

Most of this book is made up of primary sources (letters, newspaper accounts, journals, etc.). After the prologue, Budiansky steps back, offering very little analysis of his sources. What authorial presence exists takes the form of omniscient narration. The sources are quoted at great length, often in their entirety, and are left to speak for themselves.

I found this style to be more than a little annoying. Budianskyhas found some amazingly revealing documents, but he does not provide much context, leaving the reader wondering whether these anecdotes are universal or local. In addition, Budiansky treats the Northerners who produced much of this material (Adelbert Ames, Albert Morgan, John Dennett, Lewis Merrill, etc.) as neutral observers, rather than as men who were constructing their own narratives. He basically treats them as unbiased reporters of fact, which doesn't do much to help his argument.

But what an argument it is. No one could possibly read the virulent, aggressive, racist words written and spoken by white Southerners and maintain that these were men of honor and character. The documents that Budiansky has assembled are shocking in their brazen contempt for the equality of all citizens, their horror at the idea of freedmen voting, and their hatred for due process in all its forms. These are not hints and subtle, coded messages. The shameless vitriol of the Southern newspaper writers will shock even those readers who were already acquainted with the rhetoric of the period. Budiansky ably demolishes the idea that the KKK and its allies were marginal or honorable by reproducing their indignant arguments against the stirring guarantees of the Declaration of Independence.

One criticism I expect to hear from the few neo-confederates who bother to read this book is that it paints Northerners in an all-to-heroic light. Budiansky is not attempting to take on the issue of racism or anti-equality movements in the North, but that does not mean that the North was a utopia of progressive racial harmony. Since the Northerners in this book are generally abolitionists, progressive reformers, and liberal Republicans who voluntarily traveled to the South in order to guide the process of Reconstruction, they do come out of this looking pretty good. Budiansky acknowledges that there was corruption and incompetence among the military and civilian authorities during Reconstruction, but his main Northern characters call to mind innocent, idealistic college students of the 1960s. I don't think there's anything wrong with making African-American elected officials, white Republicans (including some Southerners, such as James Longstreet), and ordinary freedmen/women the heroes of this story — in fact, I think that that is an angle that is too often undersold. Still, Budiansky's choices may make him vulnerable to attacks by those who choose to ignore his core evidence.

As much as I applaud the aim of this book, there are several things that grated on me. First, even though "colored" and "negro" were considered respectful terms in the 1870s, that doesn't mean that it is appropriate for historians to use them without quotation marks. Second, Budiansky never met a dramatic rhetorical flourish he didn't like. Third, see above complaint about his not being critical of the sources he presents. Fourth, the chapter breaks often seem random. Fifth (audiobook specific complaint), the narrator does voices for all of the different authors, and some of them make me a little uncomfortable because they sound like something out of Song of the South. I think that this is an important piece of work, but I think it might have been better in documentary movie form than in book form.

I disagree with William Grimes of the New York Times, who thinks that the myth of the oppressed South "surely expired a generation ago." It's probably true that academics no longer ascribe to a narrative of Yankee tyranny, but this book is not written for academics. The old idea that white Southerners were a noble people who were outrageously abused and harassed during reconstruction still thrives in the public imagination, and the value of Budiansky's work lies in its relentless presentation of an alternative narrative in which freedmen and their Republican allies are the true heroes of Reconstruction.

California Teacher Fired for "Afro-centric" Lessons

This is disgusting. Karen Salazar, an English teacher at Jordan High School in Watts, was fired after administrators determined that her lessons were "Afro-centric" and inappropriate. Salazar used excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and rap lyrics in her class and encouraged students to become politically active. The administration isn't talking, so there aren't a lot of specifics on what they found objectionable, and I'm sure they're scrambling to cover their asses with something halfway plausible. Ms. Salazar was well liked by her students, she has a Master's degree, and her mentor teacher gave her positive evaluations. What more could a school ask of its teachers?

Other bloggers have covered the details of the case and commented, so I won't rehash the basics, other than to add my voice to the outrage.

I spent a very brief time in Watts during my training for Teach for America. While the school building was terrible and the instructional materials ancient, the master teachers and administrators who oversaw our training there were passionately committed to their students and saw education as political activism. Obviously, I didn't meet the administrators at Jordan, who seem to have their heads up their asses.

It should go without saying that teachers should teach students how to apply critical thinking skills to everything, even the curriculum in front of them. Isn't that what college-level work is all about?

The most odious thing about this case is that it lays bare the destructive assumption that "standard" histories of the United States or canons of literature are not themselves political constructions. It reminds me of that fight in Philadelphia a few years ago when white residents got angry about the new African-American history requirements for high school students. The assumption is that the "basic" history is a military-political history of the nation state and anything else is pandering to an interest group. "Literature" means English novels and romantic poetry, and anything else is godless commie propaganda. I know I shouldn't be surprised by this ubiquitous type of dumbassery, but it still gets under my skin.

Were Colonial American Slaves Christians?

Cross-posted from my new co-blogging gig over at American Creation:

In March, Pat Buchanan wrote syndicated column called “A Brief for Whitey,” in which he enumerated what he believes to be the “convictions, grievances and demands” of the “Silent Majority” of white Americans. Among Buchanan’s jaw-dropping claims, he parrots the old proslavery canard that slavery was a positive good because it gave enslaved Africans and their descendants the opportunity to become Christians:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

There’s an awful lot to unpack in that paragraph, but I will confine myself to the subject of people who were “brought from Africa in slave ships” and “were introduced to Christian salvation.”

In the words of Larry E. Tise, author of Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, the idea that “American slavery was a blessing to degraded Africans” was “the quintessence, the very heart of American proslavery thought whether colonial or antebellum” (Tise, 32). During the early 19th century, pro-slavery legislators, ministers, and intellectuals argued that slavery was a benign, patriarchal institution that benefited slaves in every way:

What more can be required of Slavery, in reference to the negro, than has been done? It has made him, from a savage, an orderly and efficient labourer. It supports him in comfort and peace. It restrains his vices. It improves his mind, orals and manners. It instructs him in Christian knowledge” (William Johnson Gray, "The Hireling and the Slave," 1855).

It is not my intention here to recount the history of proslavery thought. Interested readers can find in-depth treatments of the subject here, here, and here. Instead, I want to ask a simpler question: Were slaves in the American colonies Christians?

Short answer: some were, most weren’t.

This is a tricky question because it is so broad. It is virtually impossible to generalize about the religious practice of all enslaved people in all centuries and all colonies. Even if we ignore the syncretic religions of the Caribbean and Latin America, it is difficult to generalize about African-American religious practice before the Civil War. Some slaves, like Phillis Wheatley, became devout Christians, while others continued to practice African religions or blended religious traditions. In addition, counting Christians is problematic (see Brian’s post and discussion here). For this post, I am defining “Christian” as someone who was baptized into a Christian denomination (Methodist, Baptist, Moravian) or who regularly participated in identifiably Christian rituals (reading/discussing the Gospels, praying to Jesus, etc.), even if those practices included non-Christian elements.

Before the Methodist and Baptist revivals of the early 19th century, very few slaves were instructed in Christianity and even fewer were baptized. Before 1667, slaveowners in Virginia feared that baptized Africans could not be held as slaves under British law. In order to calm their fears, Virginia passed a law stating, “baptism does not alter the condition to the person as to his bondage or freedom; masters freed from this doubt may more carefully propagate Christianity by permitting slaves to be admitted to that sacrament."

Even after this legal question was settled, many masters actively discouraged slaves from attending religious services because they feared that Christianity would make slaves “not only proud but ungovernable, and even rebellious” (Raboteau, 103). In 1740, after the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passed its infamous “Negro Act,” which forbid slaves from gathering during their free time, even for religious services. These laws were replicated by other states in the 1830s in response to Nat Turner’s Rebellion.

Pre-1800 efforts by missionary groups such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) were generally limited, underfunded, and unsuccessful. In 1720, Thomas Hasell of the S.P.G claimed that after 11 years of missionary work among the slaves in South Carolina, he had baptized fewer than 10 people. In 1713, ministers working for the S.P.G in South Carolina reported that, “The conversion of slaves is, considering the present circumstance of things, scarcely possible. ‘Tis true, indeed, that an odd slave here and there may be converted when a minister has leisure and opportunity for doing so . . . But alas!” (Wood, 142). Silvia Frey and Betty Wood, authors of Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830, argue that Anglican missionary efforts in the colonial period were dismal failures (Anglican Christianity had very little to offer slaves) and that virtually no slaves converted until Moravian missionaries gained footholds in Virginia (1740s) and Georgia (1770s).

In the last years of the 18th century, Methodist and Baptist camp meetings and revivals began to baptize considerable numbers of enslaved people. Despite many difficulties, particularly the laws that prevented most slaves from learning to read and write, thousands of slaves did convert to Christianity during the 19th century. Before 1800, observations like Alexander Hewatt’s (1779) were not unusual:

[T]he negroes of [South Carolina], a few only excepted, are to this day as great strangers to Christianity, and as much under the influence of Pagan darkness, idolatry, and superstition, as they were at their first arrival from Africa (Raboteau, 66).

Of course, we can’t take the words of Hasell or Hewatt at face value — the slaves they observed may have been adherents to a syncretic Christianity that was shocking or unrecognizable to ignorant observers. At the same time, we should not privilege the propaganda of antebellum writers who also had their own reasons for inflating the numbers of Christian slaves: slaveowners wanted to portray slavery as benevolent and abolitionists hoped to outrage their countrymen by relaying tales of enslaved Christians such as Uncle Tom and Eliza.

Slave narratives written in the 19th century often speak of both Christian and non-Christian religious practices among slaves, such as when Charles Ball recounts what seems to him a “traditional” African burial or when Frederick Douglass tells the story of Sandy’s root. Since these narratives were written for political purposes in the 19th century, they are not very good sources for examining African-American religion in the colonial period. I don’t know much about the historical archaeology that has been carried out at slave quarters, but I would be interested in seeing if that work might shed any light on pre-1800 religious practices.

Contrary to the claims of slavery apologists, there is little evidence to suggest that very many slaves were converted to Christianity before the Methodist and Baptist revivals of the 19th century. Some historians even argue that some kidnapped Africans were syncretic Catholics who had been converted by Portuguese missionaries and were prevented from practicing their Christian religion once they arrived in the New World.

Of course, even if it were true that all enslaved Africans became Christians, the narrative of “civilizing the savages” would still be repugnant. All justifications for slavery are odious. In this case, it is not just bad taste; it’s bad history.

Internet Jackass Theatre

Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin draws our attention to a "Big Ass Confederate Flag" being erected on the side of a highway in Florida. Quite rightly, he points out that a group like the SCV, which purports to be educational and celebratory, could probably spend their money on better projects than the erection of a gigantic middle finger along the side of the road.

Lest we harbor any illusions about who supports this project, allow me to present a few of the comments from the St. Petersburg Times website:

I fully support the display of any Confederate Flag as a reminder of the Yankee armies invading the Southern people's homeland. The states had every right to seceed from the union. Lincoln's greatest concern was collecting his "cotton tax".
- "West"

Gorgeous. I can't wait to see it ! Why is this whole slavery crap revisionist stuff always trotted out when this topic comes up. This flag is about MY Southern heritage. My blood. Too many are brainwashed or gutless to challenge this indoctrination.
- "John-Kiwi"

The confederate stands for a southern uprising against the tyrannist north of the time. The North tried to control the southern states and tell them where and to whom they could sell their export. Race only entered when the north was losing.
- "Jared"

God bless the boys in gray! It's shameful that everyone in America is allowed to be proud of thier heritage except for those of us who are decended from the valiant Confederate soldiers. The NAACP has made the confederate flag "racial". Deo Vindice!
- "Jesse"

To be fair, plenty of people commented and called these jerks out.

It is important to read these comments because, for many people, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that those who want to fly the Confederate flag* are really only interested in honoring their ancestors. The whole "Heritage, Not Hate" campaign is carefully calculated to make the public display of this hateful symbol palatable. Even I fell for it — when I was a freshman in high school, I wrote a 25-page paper for my Civics class about how the administration shouldn't have suspended a kid for wearing a Stars and Bars t-shirt.

While individual people may indeed be well-meaning, the display of the Confederate flag* is an intrinsically political act — and its politics are racist, segregationist, and retrograde. This flag has been a familiar symbol since the time of the war, but it was only during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s that it began to be displayed in such a prominent, public, "f-you" sort of way.

We should read comments like those on the St. Petersburg Times' website to remind ourselves that this type of racism is alive and well in America. Remember it any time CNN or your local newspaper expresses shock at racism in the current presidential campaign or uses words like "resurface" or "reemerge" or the odious "postracial" that imply that racism died out at some time.

Of course, racism exists in many forms, of which the dumbass, slavery-denying variety is merely the most quotable. Racism, like sexism, is part of our daily lives in America, and any impression that easily-recognizable flare-ups are some sort of aberration results from a privileged ability to deny quotidian examples (see Melissa McEwan for more — she says it better than I can).

Being reflective about my own privilege and trying to recognize how it works in my life are constant projects for me, as they are for many (but not enough) people. I don't think that "West" and "John-Kiwi" really overburden themselves with similar concerns. Is there a way to clue them in? I don't know. Any discussion of privilege, even if you're only talking to yourself, is intensely uncomfortable, and I'm not sure how to reach across the aisle without seeming like an enemy.

*The "Confederate flag," is, of course, the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, not the Confederate national flag. Why isn't the SCV erecting one of the many versions of the latter? I think it's because they secretly hate the Army of the Tennessee.
I once saw a Confederate reenactor proudly flying what he thought was the First National Flag of the CSA from his truckbed at an event in Virginia. It was actually the Puerto Rican flag. I didn't tell him.

Poe's Law

I'm sure I've asked this before, but I'll ask again: Is there a Poe's Law corollary for neo-Confederates?

Recently, the Florida Times-Union ran a story about Bobby Tillet, a BJ's Wholesale Club employee whose bosses told him he could either remove the stars and bars from his truck or park it somewhere outside their lot. There's a lot of bloviating about "freedom of speech," but at least the article manages to quote someone from the ACLU who helpfully points out that BJ's is not an agency of the federal government and is thus not bound by the first amendment.

There has been some predictable reaction to this story in the Times-Union's "Rants & Raves" section, in which loyal readers rehash their predictable and blockheaded arguments.

Tuesday, 5/27:

This is concerning the article with the fellow having the Confederate flag flying from his truck. I think it's wrong that they singled him out and made him move his truck to another location. I will never shop at BJ's again. Where's the right of freedom of speech and freedom of expression? It's OK if blacks wear a shirt showing (Malcolm-X) or they wear clothing Fubu (for us by us) ... Yet somebody wants to show the Confederate battle flag and they're racist. What's really racist is NAACP, the black college fund, the black college spring break and Black Miss America. They're racist! Until those people change their ways, there will always be divisiveness.

Thursday, 5/29:

I want to give the Times-Union a huge rave for displaying the Confederate flag. Living here in the South, that shows me a time when people were kind and gentle, and worked hard for what they got. They didn't take from others. It was a much more genteel time. People showed respect for each other. It was gaiety instead of the constant sorrows and negativity . . . For the person who said he was canceling his subscription, I'm making up for it by calling in for a subscription.

Bachelor #1 just sounds like some jackass 14-year-old, but I call Poe's Law corollary on the second author. Not even the most delusional Lost Causer could come up with that "they didn't take from others" line.

Retouching History

(Images in this post via unless otherwise noted.)

If you are in the mood for a little righteous anger this morning, head over to RetouchingHistory.org, where Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite have documented a disturbing example of how some Confederate sympathizers have used Photoshop to distort documents relating to the service of African-Americans in the Civil War. (Also check out Handler and Tuite's other project, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record.")

The above image was widely distributed as a recruitment tool and is based on a photograph of African-American federal troops taken in Philadelphia around 1864:
There are several details that confirm that these are Union soldiers. First, the white officer is clearly dressed in a US Army uniform. Second, several of the soldiers are wearing US belt buckles and eagle breast plates, the former most visible on the sixth private from the left, the latter on the bearded soldier at center-right. Third, they are wearing Union insignia, including company letters and infantry horn insignia, on their forage caps (see the fifth private from the left).

But wait, I thought that Union soldiers wore dark blue. Why are their coats so light?
Behold, the Union military-issue great coat:

Ok, so we've shown pretty conclusively that these are UNION soldiers. But hey, if you crop out the officer, blur the insignia, add some misleading text, you get the first and only photograph of the fabled 1st Louisiana Native Guard, CSA!
After that, make some prints, slap it on a website, and all of your neo-Confederate friends can pat themselves on the back, knowing that the South was always more righteous than the North and the war had nothing to do with slavery.

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves

From my recent posts, the casual reader might conclude that I have not been reading very much lately. Fear not, dear reader: my single-handed conquest of Widener's stacks continues, one moldy page at a time.

Today, in preparation for my upcoming paper on the monumental landscape of the Gettysburg battlefield, I am reading Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America by Kirk Savage (1997).

Savage has one basic point, which he makes persuasively: the post-war memorial landscape of the Civil War reinforced ideal American manhood as white, powerful, and independent by ignoring or subjugating the black body, particularly the bodies of black soldiers, in sculpture. In seven short, readable chapters, Savage discusses representations of the African-American body in antebellum art (both high and popular), monumental representations of slavery and emancipation, and commemoration of the ideal citizen-soldier. Throughout, Savage calls attention to moments of possibility and foreclosure, and explores the complex cultural work done by public monuments.

I thought that this was a great book and would recommend it to anyone who ever marched in a Memorial Day parade, visited a marble monument in Washington, D.C., or took a trip to Gettysburg with the Boy Scouts. Monuments are so familiar to us that we seldom stop to ask what work they are doing. Even though Savage is working within fairly standard frameworks of cultural history, I almost felt like I was reading an exposé: Does the seemingly benign memorial on your town greed have a sinister secret? The shocking truth revealed tonight at 11.

I found Savage's accessible explanations of classical sculptural referents particularly helpful. Since I have very little formal art history training, I would have missed a lot of the connotations conveyed by specific poses and compositions.

In short, I am pleased.

Confederate Apologists

I found a new blog today when I was rumbling around the tubes searching for more information on Lost Cause commemoration, Confederate Memorial Day, etc.: Michael C. Hardy's North Carolina and the Civil War.

Hardy is a thoughtful, well-meaning Confederate apologist, which is the kind that fascinates me most. He is earnestly devoted to preserving "Southern Heritage" and honoring soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Of course, that means ignoring the nasty bits like slavery, patriarchy, and coercion. A search on his blog for the word "slave" is revealing: as of today at 3 pm, there are 272 posts about North Carolina and the Civil War on this blog and exactly 6 of them contain the words "slave" or "slavery." Of the six posts that mention slaves,

• one complains that there are few interpretive markers at the North Carolina state capitol, and that "the few markers present are devoted to African-Americans"
• one describes a loyal slave who brought his master's body back from Gettysburg
• one is made up of quotes from 1860-1 describing reactions to secession
  
• one is a post entitled "Happy 200th Birthday, Robert E. Lee" and mentions Lee's slaves, but goes on to declare, "his entire life is an example that should be emulated. In a day and age when we need heroes, when we need people to look up to, Lee should be one of those men who command our attention."
  
• two chronicle that most elusive of apologist canards: the black Confederate soldier.

It would be beyond tedious for me to go through all six posts that mention slavery (let alone the 266 that don't), so I will confine my comments to the insidious myth of the black Confederate.

Some may argue that "myth" is an inappropriate word here. By "myth," I do not mean to imply that there were absolutely no African-Americans or Native Americans who fought for the Confederacy. There undoubtedly were a few.

Rather, the myth of the black Confederate reads something like this: during the Civil War, over 50,000 slaves and free black men served as soldiers in the Confederate army, which PROVES that the South wasn't racist, and, by the way, the North was racist too!
*Please note, this is NOT a quote from Mr. Hardy - I'll get back to him in a minute.*

First, the claim that 50,000 (or more - these guys say 100,000, this guy says "at least 100,000") African-Americans fought as soldiers for the CSA is flat-out bullshit. Many, many slaves worked for Confederate troops in service capacities and as manual laborers/drivers/gravediggers, etc., but many of them ran to Union lines as soon as they could (many bringing valuable information with them). Saner heads have found that, at most, a few hundred African-Americans may have fought on the Confederate side. Which, incidentally, is about the number of female soldiers who were able to join the army by dressing as men.

Second, the idea that finding black soldiers who fought for the Confederacy would prove that the war was not about slavery is silly. The war was about slavery. It was not necessary a war for emancipation, but saying it wasn't about slavery is unfathomable. Don't take my word for it - just ask Confederates circa 1861. Regardless of how many people of color may have fought, the idea that the war was not about slavery is a pillar of the post-war myth of the Lost Cause.

Third, lots of Confederate apologists like to stick in a gotcha: The North was racist too! Thing is, you'll find no argument here. The North was horribly racist - hell, even abolitionists were paternalistic, condescending racists. I fail to see how this makes the war less about slavery.

All of this is a lot of lead up to say something very simple: Michael C. Hardy is not a wild-eyed crazy person. It is easy to dismiss people who say insane things, but the myth of the Lost Cause does not always come wrapped in the Stars and Bars. From what I have read on his blog, Hardy is a considerate, well-intentioned person who is interested in research, history, and honoring his forebears. Still, he is not at all interested in slavery and posts information about black Confederates on his blog without commenting on the history of this debate.

The problem is that Hardy's vision of the Confederacy is a gentler, more reasonable version of the insidious Lost Cause ideology. When our focus is on honoring the men who fought and died, no doubt bravely, without ever really grappling with what they were fighting for, we don't learn anything. When we implicitly deny the horror of slavery and the continual betrayal of African-Americans during and after the war, we are setting ourselves up to accept racist fantasies in the present. When we fawn over Southern leaders like Lee and Jackson as models of American manhood, what we are really doing is yearning for a white, Christian, patriarchal past in which women and slaves knew their places and real men were subordinate only to God.

I realize that everyone has interests and doesn't necessarily have time to explore all of the problems that attend those interests. I don't have a problem with Michael Hardy if he wants to write primarily about military history. Still, his blog is a reminder of how the soft power of the Lost Cause myth continues to inhabit our mental landscapes.

Confederate Commemoration and the Lost Cause

Yesterday, Professor O'Donovan spoke on the subject of memorialization in the decades after the Civil War with particular attention to public monuments in public places. Anyone who has driven through a little town in Northeast will recognize the archetypical Civil War monument: a young, white, lone infantryman with an immaculate uniform and a rifle (and sometimes a flag) stands sentinel at the top of an obelisk. These monuments commemorate a particular version of the war — one in which vigorous Anglo-Americans fought for high ideals but, according to the monuments, did not suffer, die, have legs amputated. There are no slaves, no African-American soldiers, no hint of the reasons behind the war. Instead, the town square monuments celebrate an ideal American who defended an abstract concept of America at a time when immigrants, ex-slaves, and union workers were threatening middle-class visions of national unity.

After class, I started wondering what messages monuments send in places that have both Union and Confederate monuments, such as the Gettysburg National Battlefield. At Gettysburg, most of the monuments commemorating Union regiments were erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and many of those with sculptural soldiers follow the same patterns as town square monuments. A few of the Union monuments are more dynamic, interesting, or impressive, but they are generally pretty staid.

In contrast, the Confederate monuments are arresting, tragic, and glorious. This is partially a function of the periodization of these monuments: most Union monuments went up in the 1880s and 1890s and reflect the sculptural conventions of that time. Although the Virginia monument was erected in 1917 and the North Carolina monument was dedicated in 1929, most of the Confederate monuments have been erected since the 1960s. It's not just their modernity that makes these monuments more compelling. Let's take a look at some examples:

Louisiana (via):

Mississippi (via):


North Carolina (via):

Alabama (via):

The difference is incredible. The Confederates are struggling, striving, and even dying. In contrast to the remoteness of the Union monuments, the Confederate monuments evoke a visceral reaction. Who can behold the Mississippi monument without feeling sympathy for the barefoot, desperate, suffering men who are clearly fighting for their lives? Even though Gutzon Borglum designed the North Carolina monument in the 1920s, to modern eyes, it recalls the flag raising at Iwo Jima. These Confederates are eminently sympathetic. They are not traitors or slaveholders. They are noble, suffering men, and the contrast between them and their Union counterparts could not be more stark.

One interesting case is the Maryland memorial, which is supposed to commemorate both Union and Confederate soldiers. The two men on the Maryland monument are brothers - they aren't even armed! There is no better example of the racist narrative of Civil War commemoration than this: in this representation, there is no hint that the war might have been about slavery - it is merely a story of mutually brotherly struggle and reconciliation.
Maybe I'll get into the disgusting rhetoric of the dedication speeches another day.

Just one more thing: many Union monuments are located at the point of that regiment's farthest advance (i.e. Peach Orchard, Wheat Field). The Confederate monuments are arrayed along the battle line they occupied immediately prior to Pickett's Charge. At Gettysburg, the monumental landscape is permanently frozen just before the disastrous assault that spelled doom for Lee's hopes of invading the North. Discuss.

Colfax Massacre Anniversary

Today is the 135th anniversary of the Colfax Massacre, in which a mob of white Southern Democrats murdered at least 100 black men (exact estimates vary) in Colfax, Louisiana.

At this time, it seems appropriate to note how this event was commemorated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The marker at left (via), which Richard Rubin once called "the frankest monument I have ever seen," still stands in the local cemetery. Although historians generally employ the term "massacre" when describing this event, the state of Louisiana still refers to it as a "riot" in its official commemorative marker (see right, via), which also declares that the violence "marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South."

For more information on this disgusting betrayal of the promises that the Federal Government made to African-Americans during Reconstruction, see Charles Lane's The Day Freedom Died or read a short version here.

Progressivism, Allies, and Privilege

In light of the outcry in response to Amanda Marcotte's apparent appropriation of the ideas and words of another blogger, brownfemipower (who has suspended her blog, which is why there's no link), in a recent article, I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on studying history with an eye toward exposing the progressive legacy of privilege.

Of course, the insidious nature of privilege often makes it invisible to the privileged. That's why people who consider themselves progressives to be purposeful about reflecting not only on their own privilege, but also on the history of progressivism and its not-so-nice sides.

I think it's fair to think of modern progressivism as getting its start in the mid-19th century with social movements such as abolitionism and the first women's rights movement. While abolition is often held up as a sterling example of progressive change, there are several problems with the story as it is generally told:

• The Garrison-Stowe-Lincoln Narrative: Here's how this one generally goes: In the 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator, which introduced the country to the idea that slavery is bad. Then, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which made everybody cry and realize that slavery was really bad. Next, we fought the Civil War and Lincoln freed the slaves.
• Problems: This narrative drastically underplays the role that enslaved people played in their own emancipation. Men and women in chains did not need Garrison to tell them that slavery was wrong, and, when the Civil War broke out, they did not wait for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children sought the protection of the Union armies (which often failed to offer any protection at all - even selling some slaves back to the South early in the war). The mass movement of self-emancipation, as much as any other factor, forced the Federal Government to approve legal emancipation. Black men then fought to uphold the gains they had made. By the end of the war, about 180,000 African-Americans had served in the US army. Their struggle to gain respect and fair treatment is well known.
• Abolitionists as Benevolent Christians: The abolition movement we remember best is the evangelical movement that talked a lot about the evils of breaking up slave families, and the wickedness of unChristian slaveowners. In this telling, elite, white Northerners agreed that Jesus wanted the slaves to go free and it was their duty to fight for the right of every man to be a husband, every woman to be a genteel mother, and every child to grow up a Christian. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Quakers, etc.
  
• Problems: The evangelical abolition movement was only one strand of abolitionism. See Eric Foner's book, Politics and Ideology in the Era of the Civil War to learn about the labor movement's abolitionism, which advanced an argument about how industrialists and slaveowners were allied in an effort to consolidate a permanent, hereditary, exploited laboring class composed of both black slaves and white wage-slaves. This ideology was somewhat Jeffersonian, in that it conceived of every man as an independent citizen and imagined wage labor as a temporary step toward land ownership. Instead of addressing the concerns of white labor leaders, the Republican party made slavery the ultimate enemy and silenced Northern laborers' critique of the symbiotic relationship of slavery/industrial capitalist machine. Also, the evangelical abolitionists didn't want racial equality, (neither did the labor movement).
  
• Modern Scholars and W.E.B. DuBois: For a loooong time, historians had no problem with the U.B. Phillips version of the Civil War. Recently, pretty much all academic historians have accepted the narrative of black self-liberation and the war as a labor struggle. Which means that they're about 70 years slower than W.E.B. DuBois, who came up with that argument in Black Reconstruction in 1935. (btw, shoutout to Prof. Susan O'Donovan on most of this stuff - I hope she'll forgive the paraphrasing in light of the fact that I was actually listening.)

It's not just abolitionism that has a legacy of upholding privilege. The Women's Suffrage movement campaigned pretty hard on the "I can't believe that black men can vote and I can't" angle. The temperance movement was explicitly anti-immigrant. Hell, even the introduction of secret ballots over party tickets introduced a literacy requirement for voting since you couldn't just pick the Republican ticket anymore - you had to actually be able to read the names (and there were laws against asking for help). Education reform almost always finds a way to hurt kids who aren't white and middle-class.

All of this is just to say that "progressive" movements have a long history of pursuing that progress at the expense of the people of color and other workers. Just because someone is a liberal doesn't make him a saint or place her outside of this nasty web of embedded racism. I identify as a liberal and hope I can be an ally, but I say and do privileged, racist things all the time. I hope that continuing to study this history with an eye toward social justice, even when it means that liberal heroes aren't quite as marble statue-y, continues to enable me to reflect on my own biases and privilege.