I subscribe to the belief, one I'm hearing a lot lately, that empathy is what we really need right now. At times of crisis, the more we understand each other and feel that we care, the easier it will be for us to find common ground and create places that feel safe for everyone.
I know that as I went to two Trump rallies in the 2 weeks before the election that I was struggling to understand “these people."
My friend who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has family
running deep in the South, shared the text below just with friends on Facebook, and gave me permission to share, but asked not to be named: (photos are my own)
I think some people underestimate the pervasiveness of Southern belief that the Confederacy was a noble cause. They don't have deep roots here, or they are young.
Even in my lifetime, the slightly-outdated Georgia history text that we used in fifth (?) grade taught that the war was to preserve a way of life and a way of government (i.e. a union of sovereign States). This text wasn't written by some wild-eyed member of the KKK, but by a leading academic, James Bonner.
My grandmother was born just the other side of 1900. A college text of hers I was just reading states that the South opposed ending slavery because of what it termed the difficulties of integrating the ignorant negroes into democratic society.
As a child, I went to public events put on at Oakland [California] Cemetery by the Sons of the Confederacy. This was still, even in the 1980s, very normal. I could not join since no one in my line was a Confederate soldier; the closest was a great-great uncle. No one mainstream was talking about the Confederate battle flag as a racist symbol back then, even in my family's well-educated white progressive bubble. It wasn't even a public controversy, even though it should have been.
In the 1960s, I am told, my mom was in trouble with my grandmother for going to integrated meetings involving the Unitarian Universalist church, which had a partnership at one point with the then-controversial minister Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's congregation, Ebeneezer Baptist. My grandmother, or so I'm told, retired from teaching in the public schools after a year of integration because she recognized she wasn't treating the black children equitably. This is a woman who, in the 1920s, had prided herself on her education and her progressive ideals. (But see also how white feminists and suffaragists embraced racism!)
For those of us white people who are old enough, or have roots here, Southern white racism is more than an unfortunate historical fact: it is a part of our family story. It right to condemn the old ways of thinking. It is right to honor those who exemplify the values we now hold dear, instead of the exemplars of the old way of thinking. But please remember that today's progressives will be tomorrow's deplorables. Even now, we all accept oppressive ideologies that we cannot see, and will not see except for generational change.
If our growing mutual discourse about the legacy of Southern racism were a dear beloved teenage child, I could make three requests of it. First, remember that mocking the racist symbols can look like mocking the living descendants of the people who erected those symbols. Secondly, if you're a white person not from here, don't pretend that the South is some racist backwaters distinct from the racist backwaters you come from in Maine or New York or Oklahoma. Finally, remember that within even a lifetime, we've gone from being ruled by people who believed that MLK, Jr. was a communist and integration a transgression against divine plans to wherever we are now.
Generally, Southern white backlash against antiracism (okay, okay "white feelings, I don't care," "white tears," whatever, I hear you) has been unnecessarily charged by white people personalizing an attack on racism as an attack on their identity (#1), people from elsewhere pretending their shit doesn't stink (hello, Watts riots? #2), and forgetting that, as your car will warn you, "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear."
All that said, fuck Trump. Fuck being unable to condemn racists. Fuck the idea that somehow the positions of antifascists and fascists are equivalent. We've fought wars over this stuff. People have died.
I don't think anyone actually read to the end of this ramble.