Sharing some words of wisdom from Caroline Randall Williams. Listen...
"I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a
living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. If
there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they
want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. Dead
Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private
statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army
bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this
practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to
redress it. But there are still those — [government leaders] — who cannot
understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is
not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male
ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery
and Jim Crow. According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal
practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less
social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four
black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people.
Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward,
and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA
testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were
domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically
more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living
memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was
consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from
women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then
failed to claim their children.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make
tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the
South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people
I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause.
And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me
to accept their mounted pedestals?
You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You
cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does
not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of
the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve
got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was
raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the
storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for
whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes
these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South
that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is,
however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be
reckoned with.
This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride
that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie
beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a
certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.
But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your
unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who
survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But
I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very
existence, to be bad actors.
Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its
monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine
a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor
and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree
of frequency with which it occurred.
To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am
proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to
be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia
were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.
The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any
manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best.
The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have
embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story
forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense
of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in
a legacy of hate.
Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the
monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy
any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally
made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.
Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of
“Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at
Vanderbilt University.
