A look at the themes that may be bubbling up from the right.
Cross posted from Pruning Shears.
The debate over the Confederate flag that has erupted since the Charleston massacre has, for the most part, put the flag's defenders on the spot in a way that doesn't seem to happen very often. It usually seems like a day or two of mumbling about heritage is enough to stave off those who want the flag taken down, but that hasn't worked this week. Journalists - particularly at the Post And Courier - have been pressing representatives to publicly state where they stand. There's palpable frustration that candidates equivocating on the issue are being questioned more closely than those who aren't.
(As for Tantaros' complaint that the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow and, for many years, segregation: yes, and it's a terrible stain on their history. But then they passed federal civil rights legislation about fifty years ago and the Dixiecrats stormed out of the party. And by the way, if tolerating them was terrible many years ago - which it was, and Tantaros is right to imply as much - then how much worse is it to house their ideological descendants in 2015? Or more pointedly, what does it say about a political party that would have those racist crackers?)
Others on the right are trying to stake out a savvier position, namely that the fiendishly clever libs have laid a trap for conservatives by forcefully denouncing the Confederate flag and what it stands for.1 I tend to put the causation in the opposite direction; liberals were incensed by the Confederate flag's symbolism so near a racist terror attack, and denounced it. The right just happened to be poorly served by its animating impulse ("today's conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily") in this case.
In any event, it's been surprising how poorly the fight has gone for the neo-Confederates this time around. They usually don't lose ground like this. The intensity and relative length of the story (a week is a long time to stay in the headlines in the Internet era) has also caused some of the more obscure talking points on the issue to bubble up. I've encountered two new - to me anyway - narratives on how slavery's evil is mitigated. If the puke funnel theory of the news is correct then there's a decent chance at least one of the following will be a talking point when the issue flares up again.
The first and more plausible theory seems to have its roots in Barbara J. Fields' paper "Ideology and Race in American History." In it, Fields traces the history of African slavery in the US. One of her themes is that because the idea of race is nonsensical, any attempt to interpret history through race is a fool's errand and will inevitably fail. Other factors - most notably class - will be neglected, which will further distort our understanding of what actually happened.
There's a lot to be said about that approach. The idea that monied interests in the North and South had a common goal of creating large scale industrial agriculture - in opposition to the common interests of small scale farmers both black and white - is fairly compelling to me. We might well have underappreciated class dimensions in our history because race has been so prominent. We might also wonder, as Fields does, what our history might look like had lower class interests shown more solidarity.
But she isn't naive either. The fact that America's institution of slavery used only African slaves from the beginning doesn't escape her notice. She just draws a distinction between "prejudice and xenophobia" as the de-humanization of The Other, and "the enterprise of classification and identification" - the pseudo-scientific gloss - that came to be known as racism. She doesn't think racism caused slavery because the very idea of race is absurd - but prejudice and xenophobia were very much factors.
It's a fine distinction, one certainly worth exploring in an academic paper, but one that can easily get lost in public discourse. Prejudice and racism are used pretty much interchangeably in everyday use. So when some clever academic on Twitter states that "Historians discarded this 'racism caused slavery' nonsense decades ago" using Fields as a citation, it throws a wrench into the discussion. Using a technical definition of a word in a vernacular dialogue is too clever by half at best - and outright deceptive at worst. But maybe that's where we are headed.
Then there is the less plausible theory. It's actually just a part of the much larger politics of grievance on the right, which in this case can be summed up as Whites Are The Real Victims. The most perfect expression of how completely untethered from reality this thinking can get comes from Kennewick Man. It seems that in 1996 an 8,500 year old skeleton was found, and self-styled anthropologists with no axe to grind at all determined that this was a white man murdered by colored savages. So whites were really here first! And were the original victims of genocide in North America! Haha, we win!!! Or not.
(In perhaps the most hilariously clumsy piece of messaging in human history, black or white, the forensic reconstruction of Kennewick Man's face is a reproduction of Captain Picard from Star Trek.)
I learned this week that Whites Are The Real Victims of slavery too. At least, unlike with Prehistoric Patrick Stewart, there is an actual generally accepted historical record to fall back on. But as with the discussion of racism it requires a little sleight of hand.
Ever hear of the Barbary slave trade? Pirates from Algeria and elsewhere in northern Africa raided European coasts - even inland villages and towns - and carried residents back to serve as slaves. We don't have accurate records from the time so good numbers can't be had outside of extrapolation, with the upper estimate being around 1.25 million. A huge number, though still about one twelfth the number of African slaves.
Barbary's slave system had some key differences from America's too, perhaps the largest being a ransom system. Europeans that raised enough money could buy back a slave, making that institution more volatile across generations - but the bottom line is slavery is slavery and it's all abhorrent. Of course, in the present case that means getting "BUT THERE WERE WHITE SLAVES TOO" tweets as a way to point out that our slavery wasn't so bad after all. Instead of saying that maybe we should reckon with our past and let Algeria reckon with its past, we should apparently just declare the entire subject off limits - or only describe it in the blandest, most technocratic terms.
So there's your preview of (possible) coming attractions: it had nothing to do with racism and anyway white people were enslaved too. I'm already nostalgic for the comparatively high-minded dialogue we're having at the moment.
NOTES
Treason in defense of slavery.
(Back)