One year, when I was a young teenager, we took our family vacation through the South, cutting a path via car through Louisiana then through the deep south to the east coast of Charleston SC. I don’t remember every moment, but there are images burned into my memory that remain. Most of the trip revolved around historical stops like to battlefields or historical buildings and towns.
One stop was to Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, pictured above. One strong impression remains of that visit. But it wasn’t the grandeur of the live oaks framing the white columned majesty of the main house; or the painstaking detailed tour of the house’s interior. It was the way slavery was addressed. The tiny residential structures that lined the drive up to the front door didn’t make it into the brochures, but they are there, just on the other side of the live oaks. The grounds tour was very brief. No one wanted to dwell on the life of the slaves — those ghosts were mostly silenced.
The small tiny airless cabins though, they stay with you. And they are with all of us in this nation — the Old South and Confederacy, hanging over us. The racism be it outright vitriol, or the “soft” racism of feeling that somehow victims of police brutality somehow must have deserved it is a direct result of our history and the U.S.’ refusal in the 1800 to abolish slavery back when our European counterparts did so.
But the Confederacy’s influence does not stop at obvious demonstrations of racism, it pervades our every day political discourse and social justice system; our current argument over guns; and attitudes towards labor and fair wages. It holds us back as a nation as the grip of the Confederacy’s legacy — right wing conservatism — still controls so much of what happens on Capitol Hill.
We dance around this fact as we argue over red vs blue and the meaning of the Bill of Rights. But our past is our present and will continue to be our future until we finally stop entertaining the ideology of the Old South as legitimate.
Last year in response to the horrific shooting at the a black church in Charleston, localities and states finally started the process of removing statues, other monuments and the Confederate flag from public squares and institutions. Over protests of “historical heritage” by those opposed to this action, most people felt it long overdue. After all, the Civil War was fought over the right for states to protect slave ownership; and these were symbols of a society that owned a population of people and protected their “rights” to own with abject terror. And supposedly, the South lost, right?
However, every day in America – as highlighted by this week’s news – we deal with the legacy of slavery. And not just the raw visceral emotion of prejudice that defines racism against African Americans that is obviously on display, but the constructs that are with us that were a direct result of protecting white power: policing and, indirectly, the Second Amendment
The first “police forces” in the colonies were slave patrols in the Colonial South. A book, named as such, documents the establishment and legacy of these patrols:
While whites held the power in the slave-owning South, by the late 1700s they were beginning to be vastly outnumbered by slaves, brought over by the boatload to make plantations profitable. Rather than reveling in dominion over their subjects, white South Carolinians were paranoid, fearing for their lives as blacks began to outnumber them almost two to one….South Carolina became the first of the three slave-owning states to adopt a comprehensive slave code. The new code officially established slave patrols or "paddyrollers," groups of white men charged though civic duty to keep slaves down and keep revolts from happening.
Yes, there were police forces established in the northern colonies as well, but these came a little later and too were formed to instill control including over “slaves and American Indians.”
Therefore it’s not a stretch to say our current authoritarian system evolved from one that was inherently racist and designed to suppress certain populations to protect the privileged few: white property and/ or slave holders.
Furthermore when we look into gun ownership and the origin of the Second Amendment, we know that it was penned to protect a “..well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms..” The father of the Bill of Rights is largely seen to be James Madison who was born to southern wealth on a Virginia plantation; and owned slaves his whole life, never to free them even by will after his death. In this context we know that only free men would be allowed to own guns. An of course, firearms were used by these slave patrols specifically to intimidate and suppress the slave population out of fear of revolt. It is in the context that the right to bear arms follows a more horrendous narrative than many would have you believe.
It is not a coincidence that the largest vocal support for the police and the Second Amendment today seems to be contained along conservative lines. One could say that it’s fair to view the modern-day right wing as a direct decedent of the southern white man. If you look at conservative platforms in the United States they basically are a reflection of Old South ideology, held up by social Darwinism that maintains that only those that exert strength and smarts will be the most successful in society, and deservedly so. (Never mind that privilege begets privilege. Or as someone once said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”)
And therefore this ideology also encases views that the powerful should be free to pay people what employers deem affordable rather than what is needed to live a life of dignity. This legacy of the plantation owner where the powerful few make the rules on how those doing the labor live and get compensated still hangs over us today.
And our massive prison system that disproportionately houses inmates of color also is a direct result of the Confederacy’s cruel intentions; and fear and hatred of the black male as so expertly chronicled by Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness.
As other Westernized nations have rejected strict authoritarianism and moved towards more equitable societies where health care and a good education are a right, not a privilege, America is still strangled by the power of the southern states in their ideology that the powerful deserve more than anyone else and must be protected by an increasingly militarized police force. And as it’s been pointed out multiple times this week, the right to own and carry guns is only respected for white Americans — just as the writers of the Second Amendment intended.
It took almost one hundred years after the North won the war for true recognition of racial equality as a concept and enacted into law, but we’ve seen this week how much more ground we need to cover. How much longer will it take for the legacy of the Union and President Lincoln’s vision of an equal American society to actually come to fruition?
Sources like Fox News and other right-wing hate propaganda machines have been able to lengthen the power of the Confederacy by dog whistling racial fear, deference to monetary power, and violence as the remedy. And it is possible little can be done to reverse these perverse ideologies until the older generations pass away. (Think about it — the Eisenhower Generation many who are still alive today knew people in their youth that were young during or in the aftermath of the Civil War. Relatively little time has passed since we were a slave-owning country.)
It is also possible that we can never be free of these chains until new legislation is enacted to reinstate some form of the Fairness Doctrine that’s repeal led to the establishment of these fear machines. There is no doubt that propaganda is a huge problem in our country and it keeps us from unifying for the greater good.
But we don’t have time to wait; it is time for progressive Americans to speak truth to power and demand for leadership and legislation that reject these institutionalized ideas established by the Colonial South. We must vote — in every election no matter how little may be on the ballot. We must vocally push for the end to our police and prison state; demand stricter gun laws; and call to abolish the War on Drugs – established in response to a decade that had finally started to reject Southern culture - which enables some police to act on their racism and violate all citizens’ civil rights with impunity. (Let me be clear — there are good people that hold jobs in policing. However, our laws and the criminal justice system as a whole are not just.)
If we are the “greatest country in the world” surely we can imitate other progressive societies that have embraced gun control and comparatively peaceful policing while rejecting rampant inequality. This means we need to move towards spending more on infrastructure, schools, fair wages, and socialized health care for the benefit of all Americans. We need to embrace the rhetoric of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for everyone.
It is time for the Confederacy to finally be defeated.