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Like my father before me, I will work the land
Like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand
He was just eighteen, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet,
You can’t raise a Caine back up when he’s in defeat
– The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, by Robbie Robertson
Nobody’s safe anymore. We never really were, but at least now the lid of illusion has been blown off. Now we know: whether you consider yourself a “white ally” or you want to pretend this is somebody else’s problem, or you just stick your head in the sand until it’s over, you’re not safe. The truth is, this latest escalation is just the beginning. The real war is hard enough and it takes place right in your bathroom mirror.
Today the violence unfolded over a statue of Robert E. Lee at a place called “Emancipation Park” in Charlottesville, Va. A fitting name for a fitting place: the modern-day Fort Sumter. Make no mistake: all that’s happening is a re-load of the Civil War, known affectionately in the south as The War Between the States. It’s not regional, though. It’s always been a war is between states of consciousness. We’re at war over values.
To be clear, the fight wasn’t over the statue, but what the statue represents. Like the Confederate flag, symbols are representatives of ideas, beliefs, and values. And Robert E. Lee, general of the Confederate troops, represents the nobility of an ignoble value system: the dehumanization of people of color.
True story: when I was a kid I loved Robert E. Lee. Nothing unusual about that except I’m a New York kid. My mother used to bring me books so I could learn about American history. It was the only time I ever really spent alone with my mother, the only time I ever felt special with her. I cherished it and grew to love American history. One of the books was about Robert E. Lee. I knew he was on the other (wrong) side, but Robert E. Lee was depicted as a noble, gentle, dignified man. He always looked sad in the pictures. The story mom told was, he didn’t really want to do it. It wasn’t his fault. He was from Virginia and was torn. Grant, on the other hand, was a messy drunk. In the value system of my family, it was worse to be a messy drunk than a racist, especially if the racist was really a good guy who was sad about what he was doing. My mom gave Robert E. Lee a pass, so did I. After all, my mom was from Brooklyn. She couldn’t have been a racist. She bought me some little statues of Lee & Grant, which I display on my shelf to this day.
You see, racism is not confined to regional borders. That would become more evident as the people from north & south began migrating to each other’s cities, sharing lawn space. Attitudes about race reflect a consciousness that often has more to do with family bonds than geography. But geography was the breeding ground for this poison.
After 9-11 I moved to Charleston, SC. My introduction to race relations came in my first week when I was stopped by a cop-on-steroids on Remount Road. The cop pointed to all the black people in the area. “Look around you. You see all these people? These are not nice people”, he told me. “Stay away from this neighborhood, you hear me?” A few years later, a black man named Walter Scott would be murdered by police just up the road from that spot. In Charleston, my job was to set up “Safe Zones” on campus where we could engage students in coming together to dialogue about differences. I facilitated inter-gender dialogues, inter-faith dialogues, inter-race dialogues, and others. They were wildly successful according to follow up research. The hardest of them all, however, were the “Northerner-Southerner” dialogues. Tensions were higher in those dialogues than in the white-black dialogues. Northern students would taunt the Southern kids, “Let it go, dude. The past is the past. You lost the war. Move on.” They’d laugh. Sound familiar? The Southern students seethed. They’d tell the Northern students that for them, it was about family. They loved their families and accepted the values they inherited. They enjoyed the privilege of nurturing hatred in the guise of family loyalty. The Northern kids enjoyed the privilege of believing they never had to examine their own racism becasue they were from the side that fought against slavery.
There was a fraternity on campus that traced their roots back to a white supremacist organization. They flew a Confederate flag in their frat house. That bothered some people. I reached out to the president of the organization. We talked about the message his frat was communicating to students of color. He was a super friendly guy who never stopped smiling, like he was running for POTUS, but his eyes said the only thing that needed to be said: “We don’t need to hear your liberal bullshit here, yankee boy. You ain’t one of us.” He let me know they didn’t feel any need to dialogue with anybody. “Thanks, we really appreciate it, but we’re good.” He was very polite. I’m sure he went far in life. Maybe he was at the rally in Charlottesville today.
I learned a few major lessons doing racial healing work in Charleston:
#1 The North never “won” the “War between the States”. That was just a story we told ourselves to feel better about our history.
#2 The war never ended. It just evolved to take on new forms (Jim Crow, institutional racism, gerrymandering, racial profiling, etc.).
#3: You cannot defeat it if you choose the same weapon your nemesis uses – hatred.
#4: I don’t know how to defeat it in anyone other than myself.
By the end of my tenure in Charleston, it was clear: until I could open my heart to people clinging to rigid Confederate values, I’d never be successful engaging them. I was trying to fight hatred through the lens of my own hatred. I just felt justified. I still do, and frankly, this has been my failing. It was enough to harpoon my career as a diversity professional. My own contempt was a massive liability that compromised my efficacy. But if I had been in Charlottesville today, I would have been right out there in the streets with the counter-protesters. We cannot kumbaya our way to enlightenment when these sickos are dressing up in KKK costumes and carrying nazi flags, driving cars into crowds and killing people. “By any means necessary”, indeed.
Now we have a person in the White House who is by all accounts mentally and emotionally unstable. Not only is he a yankee, he’s the worst kind of yankee: a socially clumsy, slick, greedy, graceless, loudmouth buffoon who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. How ironic that the new Confederacy selected him as their general to lead the charge. The new rebel yell has a yankee accent. Who woulda thunk it? No matter how many tweets his forked tongue issues about “coming together as one” and “loving each other”, there’s no denying he set the tone for this. When he speaks to his “base,”, these are the people he’s speaking to: the new Confederacy, which in a masterful display of public relations re-imaging – now goes by the name of “Alt-Right”. Sounds so much better than Nazi, no?
Today the new Confederacy took up arms and rose again. They came in force, some of them wearing militia fatigues and brandishing weapons. They were met with resistance from Americans sound enough to recognize the disease they represent. There was violence. Lives were lost. That’s what happens in war. There will be more, no doubt.
Why should anybody be surprised? Our president has assaulted our senses with violent rhetoric daily since 2015. He’s filled his staff with rich, powerful white men with historical ties to White Nationalist groups. He develops a vocal tic whenever its time to denounce the KKK, the Alt-Right, or whatever name they want to hide behind. His presidency has been characterized as recklessly pugnacious, picking fights with most of his own staff, our allies, and now several world leaders. Most recently he’s brought us to the brink of nuclear war with one country and just started threatening another. He’s bloodthirsty. Make no mistake, his rhetoric has nurtured the Alt-Right and given them the political equivalent of “liquid courage”. He’s established an emotional tone in this country which has inspired bold displays of racism, sexism, and hatred. His tweets about “love” and “oneness” win him nothing but the Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, while he continues to run around threatening to blow people up.
That being said, Trump isn’t responsible for what happened in Charlottesville today. What happened today was just the tipping point of a war that’s been brewing for 150 years. Let’s wake up and cast off the delusion that this war ended just because Robert E. Lee’s troops ran out of bread. Let’s get beyond the dreamy lie that just because the North “won” the war, racism reigns supreme only in the South.
If you think the battle is about Trump, or the Alt-Right, or racism, you’ve got a decoy in your cross-hairs. The real enemy to engage is contempt for “other”. Hatred has no loyalty. It’s a cunning, insidious enemy that morphs into new expressions. It behaves like spreading cancer. Evidence of this is the way even progressives and liberals attack each other now. The trust that once existed between target groups and their allies has long eroded. Nobody is safe anymore because everybody’s locked & loaded with self-righteous indignation and utter contempt for anybody who’s not singing their song in the key they want it.
There is more than one way to fight this disease, so choose your weapon of choice. If you like to fight in the streets, it’s likely there will be plenty of that until we dig this weed out by its roots. But like any good army, there must be a broad coordinated effort of mutual support across the spectrum of social justice warriors. You can be a rebel, an advocate, or a behind the scenes organizer. You can protest with art, poetry, or public speaking. You can engage your friends or family in dialogue. But most of all, as I learned in Charleston, you’ve got to stand in front of a mirror and get honest about your own contempt for whatever offends you. Until then, this Rebel Yell will simply find a new melody, and people will continue to die.
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Photo courtesy of the author.
I’ve been telling my wife this is going to end with a gun in our face or a gun in their face. You’re right the war never did end in their eyes and they’ve been fighting it ever since. Try visiting stone mountain in the summer. Enjoy the graphics on the side of the mountain during the laser show while they’re blasting Lee Greenwood. Spend five minutes watching Fox. They’re not looking for a compromise. They view that as weakness. It’s all or nothing. I keep telling her we’ve got to get a lot more guns because like it or… Read more »
I long ago gave up on any kind of reasoning with white Southerners whose sense of self depends on the southern strategy and Jim Crow.
As within, so without. Our greatest power to create the world as we wish to see it, resides in our capability to create ourselves as we wish to be. Wish for change? BE CHANGE. Thanks for this exploration, it is crucial to the days we face, ahead!
Correct. All of these articles advocating for OUTRAGE are just adding gasoline to the fire.
Until we exorcise the shadow within, and replace our own demonic outrage with what Buddhism calls KARUNA (wisdom) and METTA (compassion), we remain a creator and sustainer of the war – no matter which side we are one.