is the title of this powerful Washington Post piece by Baynard Woods, a white man from South Carolina, married to a woman from South Carolina, who now is editor at large of the Baltimore City Paper.
He tells us that his family is in part descended from the Pinckneys of South Carolina, which as he notes
means that someone in my family may have owned someone in the family of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in the terrorist attack on Charleston’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Wednesday night. Those same people who owned his ancestors were likely involved in, or at least aware of, the suppression first of the Stono rebellion in 1739 — which resulted in mass executions and the placement of the severed heads of rebels on stakes on the road outside of Charleston and in the Negro Acts, a tightening of slave laws, including the outlawing of drums. And they were probably also involved later, in 1822, in suppressing the Denmark Vesey rebellion, which was centered around Emanuel. When that revolt failed, the church was burned and Vesey was executed — probably to the relief of my land-holding ancestors.
And that's just from the first paragraph of this powerful piece.
Please keep reading.
Woods is brutally honest about his own familial background, about the culture in which he grew up, and even about his own failures to be more forceful in confronting the ongoing cultural racism of his family and neighbors back home.
Allow me to share, and comment upon, a few more selections from this piece.
I spent my childhood in Lexington County, S.C., Roof’s home. I was raised in schools that still talked about the War of Northern Aggression in the 1970s and ‘80s. When we studied the Revolutionary War, we learned about Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” but we did not learn that, despite hosting more battles than any other colony, South Carolina contributed fewer fighters than any other to the Continental Army, because they needed the men to oppress the slave population, partially because of the fear of another Stono Creek.
I am a Social Studies teacher. While my primary course has been government, I have taught history, sometimes within the context of explaining what happens in government and politics, sometimes in a history course itself. How students are instructed is a major force in shaping their understandings to things in their own time. Thus I remember during the Falklands War a tv piece which interviewed some students of Argentinian background at a Washington DC university who said "We were always taught the Malvinas were ours."
Look at the piece of history in the paragraph above. "War of Northern Aggression" is in fact a total distortion, since under Lincoln's orders the Union military took no action until fired upon at Fort Sumter. The first truly aggressive action was by forces from South Carolina when the commander of that fort refused to turn it over to the secessionist forces. And the fact that South Carolinians used more men to prevent another slave uprising than they provided to fight the British is something that few Americans ever learn, even in college level courses on Revolutionary War history.
Now for something more personal for the author:
As I got older, I grew my hair long and faced the mild oppression that a privileged white hippy at the height of the war on drugs in the buckle of the Bible Belt would face. I was pulled over and harassed and even taken to jail for having marijuana — but I did not do time, and those arrests did not ruin my life in the way it might have were I not white.
We have seen issues of privilege many times. It is not that White were always given a free pass. Ask those Whites, even in the North, who did protests on behalf of Civil Rights for example, or who early on protested Vietnam. Nor that no Blacks ever got a free pass - I can think of too many examples of athletes who somehow avoided the full weight of the law falling upon them. Defensive player Ernie Holmes of the Pittsburgh Steelers only got probation for shooting a Highway Patrol Heli-Pilot - yes, he was having an emotional breakdown, but one wonders were he not a prominent athlete whether the law would have been so lenient. Perhaps one might think of Jameis Winston and the controversy over his actions when he was up for the Heisman, or even earlier, Johnny Rogers of Nebraska, who as a freshman was charged in an armed robbery (although he always denied he had had a gun) and somehow only got probation and was able to continue playing football and himself winning a Heisman.
But certainly in the South a person of color arrested the way Woods was for drugs would not have gotten away without serious consequences - unless possibly an athlete.
A combination of personal and history:
Later, I married a woman from South Carolina, and there was a period when we were both writing books that touched on race relations in the state. Mine was about a white sheriff who policed the largely black Beaufort County (just south of Charleston). In reporting it, I saw, repeatedly, the ways that a white minority in Beaufort kept a black majority out of power. I saw how the Gullah-Geechee people of the Low Country were systematically stripped of the land they’d had since before the end of the Civil War, when Sherman took the Bay of Beaufort in 1863, to ensure they were no longer a majority, and I saw the way that community was oppressed and policed.
I think of White minorities keeping Blacks out of power. I think of counties in the South were Blacks were a majority but until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 few if any Blacks voted - think of the Black Belt of Alabama, parts of Mississippi. I remember why Frederick Douglass insisted that the 15th Amendment was so critical that he called it a Jubilee - the Biblical expression for the freeing of slaves - because without the vote one had no ability to protect oneself from abuse through those controlling the levers of power and government.
I remember a Supreme Court decision written in the 1850s by a Chief Justice from slave-state Maryland that got history wrong - Taney claimed in Dred Scott that one reason a Negro could never be a citizen is that he had never voted, which was wrong, since Free Blacks had voted in at least 8 of the 13 original states at one point or another prior to the horrid decision in Dred Scott.
History, and knowing it honestly, is critical if we are to move forward as a nation and a society.
More personal, about visiting South Carolina:
When we visited, I would hear the casually racist remarks aimed at the president or the “lazy blacks” ruining everything with welfare. So my wife and I often found ourselves arguing with old friends or family members — most of whom, when pushed, swore they were not racist — about the appropriateness of their assumptions or language about African Americans. And because of the kind of social segregation that has created a sense of apartheid that extends all the way from Charleston up to Baltimore and beyond, they weren’t used to having these assumptions challenged.
You can read his words about his own sense of failure, of not having been more aggressive and forthright in challenging the assumptions and language and the attitudes underlying them. As he put it,
I failed South Carolina. I failed the descendants of those people my ancestors enslaved, and I failed myself.
Immediately after those words, Woods begins his summary with this sentence:
So I and every other white South Carolinian who has let the racist jokes go unchecked, who has looked the other way at some sanctioned act of bigotry, who has not taken the time and effort to listen to what black people have to say about their experience, is, in some sense, responsible for Dylann Roof — even as he remains responsible for his own actions.
There is more to that paragraph, which I will leave you to read on its own.
But it is not the final punch with which he hits us. Here is his final paragraph:
Of course, 99 percent of southern whites will never go into a church, sit down with people and then massacre them. But that 99 percent is responsible for the one who does. We white southerners — those of us who left, the others who stayed, and even those millions who have migrated to the Sun Belt — are all Dylann Roof. We are all responsible. We cannot shirk it. We cannot go forward until we fix ourselves. We must organize ourselves, educate ourselves and come together to fight against white supremacy. If we don’t, there will always be another Dylann Roof around the corner. And in the mirror.
And in the mirror
Ponder those words.
What is it about my words, or my silence and acquiescence, that contributes to the continuation of America's continuing problems with racism? Does it matter that until I moved to Arlington Virginia in 1982 I was clearly a Northerner, or that as a child of immigrant Jews I am not descended from people who owned slaves? I would argue that it does not. I have relatives who espoused racism. In the North I saw racism and anti-Semitism clearly, perhaps because my eyes were opened by pondering what I saw happening in the Civil Rights movement as I grew up.
And after all, for many people Arlington is not really Southern, being as one wag once described it part of the People's Republic of Northern Virginia. In some ways we are less Southern than is Baltimore, some 50 miles to our North.
I found the piece by Woods honest and powerful.
I thought it worth sharing.
I realize I have pushed the limit of fair use, although I doubt he would mind.
I hope my posting it here serves a useful purpose.
Peace?