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.
12 comments:
Craig and Stan and - god knows - Marshal cannot hear this.
Their radical protestantism and their whiteness will not even let them hear that masks are scientifically proven help each other.
As radical protestants, they hate community. Their freedom cannot be bend to catholic love of anyone else.
As white, they damn sure will not make their freedom common to lesser beings.
Craig saying he’d like to learn but can’t stand feeling uncomfortable doing it: white fragility.
Republicans are failing to fight the covid-19 pandemic effectively. Rather than doing what needs to be done, they have decided that the best course of action is to refuse to alter course and double down on a culture war. This decision not only fails to fight this potentially lethal disease, it's actually promoting its spread.
Craig and Marshal have to pretend, i.e. lie, that they don’t get this.
“Blessed are the poor.”
“Blessed are ALL lives, Jesus!”
You're not mistaken on any of this, Feodor.
Re: "Blessed are the poor..." As we've all noted before, too often the biblical "literalists" are only literal until it comes to Jesus' words, then it's time to make his clear teachings figurative.
You don't understand what "taking the Bible literally" even means. While you are so keen on pretending "Blessed are the poor" is different than "poor in spirit", you continue to ignore far less ambiguous teachings, pretending instead there's some caveat somewhere only "progressives" can see it. Once again you prove your hypocrisy and deceit. It's best you stop pretending you give a flying rat's backside what Jesus teaches, while I'll continue to pray that you someday will.
On cue, Marshal pretends he doesn’t get it. Dodge, diversion, denial, disassemble, myth-make, prevaricate, double down on a lie, then brazenly profess belief in irrationality: White fragility to disrupt truths that hurt.
"All the growth [in multiracial churches] has been people of color moving into white churches," Emerson says. "We have seen zero change in the percentage of whites moving into churches of color." Once a multiracial church becomes less than 50% white, Emerson says, the white members leave. Such findings have left Emerson discouraged.“
"For the leaders of color who were trying to create the multiracial church movement," Emerson says, "they're basically saying, 'It doesn't work. The white brothers and sisters just won't give up their privilege. And so we've been defeated, in a sense.'"
In Columbus, Ohio, Korie Little Edwards found a similar pattern in her own research. After her personal interest led her to join a multiracial church, her subsequent study left her skeptical that such churches were making the difference in promoting equality that she had hoped to see.
"I came to a point where I realized that, you know, these multiracial churches, just because they're multiracial, doesn't mean they have somehow escaped white supremacy," she says. "Being diverse doesn't mean that white people are not going to still be in charge and run things."
And there it is.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/891600067/multiracial-congregations-may-not-bridge-racial-divide?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR357JL7TEjX_f5DqByvRq2lMm2Sq3tDawHzSeOh3coO04zarAOYP0eNTa0
This is something we struggle with at our little church. We are multiracial and diverse, but still very much a "white church," in spite of our efforts. The struggle is real.
How is that a struggle exactly, Dan? If the door is open, what more MUST you do...use brute force and constant monitoring of percentages until you have just the right amount of whites, blacks, yellows, etc? It's absurd.
Marshal thinks a room full of white people with an open door must be automatically friendly and loving.
It is to Marshal, of course. Because he cannot think of himself as having a racial identity. He’s blind. Whiteness is the universal good to him.
And once again, he refuses to hear black people: “
"For the leaders of color who were trying to create the multiracial church movement," Emerson says, "they're basically saying, 'It doesn't work. The white brothers and sisters just won't give up their privilege. And so we've been defeated, in a sense.'"
In Columbus, Ohio, Korie Little Edwards found a similar pattern in her own research. After her personal interest led her to join a multiracial church, her subsequent study left her skeptical that such churches were making the difference in promoting equality that she had hoped to see.
"I came to a point where I realized that, you know, these multiracial churches, just because they're multiracial, doesn't mean they have somehow escaped white supremacy," she says. "Being diverse doesn't mean that white people are not going to still be in charge and run things."
There it is.
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