Why the White South Is Still in Denial About Slavery

Really, this ought to be titled "Why America Is Still In Denial about Slavery," but whatever. From AlterNet:

When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering.

And

Instead of beginning a period of reflection, the South spent the late 19th century dressing up in old uniforms and comforting itself with revisionist stories.

The Reconstruction-era South didn’t invent dishonesty, but its response to America’s defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever-growing edifice of false history. It’s a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that’s too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the “stars and bars” fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work on highways named after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture.

And

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

More here.

Here's another question: what does it mean that "the greatest country in the world" spent half of its history forcing an oppressed people to work in slavery? Here's a quick and brief answer that hardly exhausts the topic: it means that America isn't "the greatest country in the world."

I mean, maybe we could be "the greatest country in the world" if we ever came to terms with our slaver past in a repentance oriented way, in a way that made human rights and the dignity of each and every individual around the world the most important concern for ourselves as Americans, in a way that makes us always, always, always search for methods to pay for our deep national sin until Kingdom Come. If we, as a nation, were always sorry for such an unpardonable crime, if redemption were a national imperative, part of who we are as Americans, then, well, maybe we could start thinking about being "the greatest country in the world." But not until then. For now, we continue to have blood on our hands that we refuse to wash off.

And this isn't simply some abstract exercise in morality (as if that would make our crime less grave): the above linked essay goes on to observe that Civil War revisionism created the cultural template for how we, as a nation, deal with our many crimes: Vietnam, Iraq, and many other debacles and atrocities committed by the US over the years don't make us feel bad at all. We just change history around and focus on whatever myths and lies make us feel good. This allows us to go on sinning forever because we never acknowledge that we are sinners. Consequently, we never learn from our mistakes. Ever.

You see a similar dynamic with how the US establishment deals with the plight of African-Americans. It's like, why don't black people just go get jobs, or get an education and then go get jobs? Slavery was in the past, not now, why are they still bitching? Of course, the past isn't the past: the past is right now. Indeed, if you consider the Jim Crow era as simply the continuation of the slavery era, but with a few social and legal modifications, slavery didn't really end until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, three and a half years before my birth. That's just a few decades ago. White and black America alike are literally reeling, to this day, from the unrepentant, sink-or-swim liberation of a people who were once held in bondage.

I mean, how do you just make the transition from prisoner-for-life, from "inferior" species, to free and equal? How do you do that within a cultural context that doesn't recognize at all the enormity of such a change? How do you do that within a cultural context where many are openly hostile to such a transition?

Slavery is our original sin. It's written all over everything we do, everything we say and think. But we ignore it, and such dishonesty about who we are leads us again and again to folly and failure. And one day, perhaps, our doom.

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