White Supremacy And The Myth Of The Confederacy

Prof. James Loewen writes today about how history has been turned upside down "with the pen (and noose)" by Southern apologists, then and now, and how its chickens have come home to roost:

With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about and our Army honoring Southern generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently. We can see the impact of Confederate symbols and thinking on Dylann Roof, accused of killing nine in a Charleston, S.C., church, but other examples abound. In his mugshot, Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a neo-Confederate T-shirt showing Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic semper tyrannis.” When white students in Appleton, Wis. — a recovering “sundown town” that for decades had been all white on purpose — had issues with Mexican American students in 1999, they responded by wearing and waving Confederate flags, which they already had at home, at the ready.

Across the country, removing slavery from its central role in prompting the Civil War marginalizes African Americans and makes us all stupid. De-Confederatizing the United States won’t end white supremacy, but it will be a momentous step in that direction.

As long as we fear telling the sometimes ugly truth about our history,  there will remain a large, ignorant population in this country that, 150 years on, will use the false myths of the Confederacy to justify flaunting its symbols of bigotry and treason.  It's long, long past time Americans stop indulging those noxious lies.

Civil War Analogy of the Day

"With its paranoid misreading of Obama as a socialist (echoing the 1860 South's misreading of Lincoln as an abolitionist), with its zeal for confrontation and its utter disregard, evident in its 2012 budget proposal, for the minority poor, today's Republican right betrays a mind-set that hearkens back to the secessionists who fired on Fort Sumter. Shutting down the government isn't comparable to shooting it down, of course, but the South's war on egalitarian government and labor standards threatens to diminish our country." -- Harold Meyerson in today's Kaplan Daily, discussing the grounds on which the Civil War is still being fought: whether Northern or Southern labor systems and versions of government will become the national norm. Read it.

Preview for Tomorrow

Tomorrow marks the 150th anniversary of beginning of the Civil War, when slave states committed treason by seceding from the Union in order to perpetuate slavery. Tomorrow, Hackwhackers will look at the legacy of the War and at attempts by the right-wing to rewrite history and honor the Confederacy.

(photo: Lest we forget what the South's "noble cause" was all about)