How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith
“The Whitney (plantation, used to explain the horrors of slavery) exists as a laboratory for historical ambition, an experiment in rewriting what long ago was rewritten. It is a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails. It is a place asking the question How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?”
(Note: I am not including in my quotes the very well documented explanation of how groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy set about rewriting how southern history books and monuments told the story of slavery and the Civil War. You can study about that on your own-or read this book, which is the point of this post😊)
“Number one question (we get from white visitors): “I know slavery was bad…I don’t mean it this way, but…were there any good slave owners?” Yvonne (a guide at the Whitney) took another deep breath…”I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” She said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of it they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system…You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”
By Robert E Lee in 1868: “(We are) opposed to any system of laws which will place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race. This opposition springs from no feelings of enmity, but from a deep seated conviction that at present the negros have neither the intelligence nor other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.”
“I was fascinated by the conciliatory equivocation of his tone (a man speaking at a sons of the confederacy memorial event), and his desire, it seemed, not to push a demarcation between the Confederacy and the United States but to assimilate the memory of the Confederacy more fully into the country’s historical consciousness. Confederate soldiers, according to this narrative, were US military veterans just as those who had fought in WW1, WW2, Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq. It did not seem to matter that they had fought against the US; he believed they should be remembered as US veterans themselves.”
(Note: I understand the feeling and the need to unite after a Civil War. But I would look back to Germany-as a civil war against it’s own people who happened to be Jews, handicapped, LGBT or many other things-and how their government rebuilt after the Nazis, and see a marked difference in how the losing side was treated. I am not saying Germany got everything right, but if you fly a Nazi flag today, you have three years in jail, versus flying the Confederate flag today. Can you imagine making Jewish people go to a school named after Hitler? Or pass his statue as they walked to McDonalds?)
By Laura Martin Rose, of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in 1914: “The negro considered freedom synonymous with equality, and his greatest ambition was to marry a white wife. Under such conditions there was only one recourse left, to organize a powerful Secret Order to accomplish what could not be done in the open. So the Confederate soldiers, as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and fully equal to any emergency, came again to the rescue, and delivered the South from a bondage worse than death.”
“Greg Steward, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told New York Times in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston massacre, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparents and great-great grandparents were monsters.” Accepting such a reality would, for them, mean the deterioration of a narrative that has long been a part of their lineage, and the disintegration of so much of who they believed themselves to be in the world.
I am left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we’ve been told. What would it take—what does it take—for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been?”
From Barbra and Karen Fields: “Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race…so it is important to register their distinctiveness.”
“Eloi (a guide at Goree Island, one of the locations in Africa where enslaved people where forced to be a part of the Atlantic Slave Trade) continued, noting that this heinous industry required partnerships with leaders of certain African tribal groups. “During the sixteenth century, Africans used only arrows, not firearms. So the Europeans came with firearms, alcohol, and iron they would give to the African tribes living in and along the coast.” Eloi said that during the African tribal wars various factions fought one another. The white Europeans were more than happy to give guns to these different groups. They cared less about who was fighting than about the payment they received in exchange: humans, the prisoners of war who had been captured from other tribes. “The only currency that was accepted by was slaves.” This created a cycle in which certain tribes were encouraged to capture even more prisoners of war, in order to sell those prisoners to Europeans for more guns and other goods.”
“Hasan (a teacher in Africa) said he was constantly attempting to find a balance: helping his students understand the heinous implications of slavery without letting them fall into a state of paralysis. It was important that this history be taught, he thought, but the end result could be young people thinking of themselves or their ancestors solely as oppressed, exploited people who could never escape the legacy of Western subjugation. He wanted his students to understand it, but he did not want them to be defined by it. “It’s important to go beyond this view between victims and perpetrators,” he said, “You must present how Africa was before slavery, and how it is during slavery, and how it is after slavery.”