On Aug. 2, The Robesonian published an editorial titled “75 years ago, heroism stepped forward in Mayenne,” which included an apparent presentation of their itsopinions on the Civil War:
The editorial read in part: “There is an ongoing effort to sanitize this nation’s past, led by a generation of young people anxious to ignore the context in which events occurred and the mores of a different time, willing not only to be easily offended, but to embrace injury when confronted with the facts. The most obvious targets have been white Southerners who otherwise did monumental things, but were on the wrong side of America’s deadliest war … .”
I would like to call out this gross oversimplification. First, the “effort to sanitize” has not been led by “young people.” Folks young and old, across the class spectrum, and of various backgrounds, have called out the South’s celebration of the Confederacy. People like Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Fred Hampton, Alicia Garza, Toni Morrison, Winona LaDuke, and countless others have called out the U.S. for its whitewashing and sanitizing of its history that includes Indigenous genocide, slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and mass incarceration.
Second, what context do we need to justify slavery? Slavery was brutal to Black, Indigenous, Mexican, and other people. It was most likely brutal to Black and Indigenous descendants who currently subscribe to this paper. There is no “context” to justify the enslavement and lynching of fellow human beings.
Third, I must address the statement “The most obvious targets have been white Southerners … .” Just a few days before this, a white male posted a white supremacist manifesto before killing three and injuring many others at a Garlic festival in California. A few days after 22 people were killed by a white supremacist who drove nine hours to the border town of El Paso because he felt immigrants were “invading” this country. Yet, it was whites who invaded Turtle Island and caused widespread carnage throughout Indigenous land. Whites targeted Indigenous people with disease, war, and bureaucratic treaties that sought to eliminate their culture and language. It was a white supremacist massacre in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 that led to the lynching of numerous Black people by whites who staged the only successful coup of a democratically elected city government this country has ever seen. It was a white supremacist massacre in Tulsa in 1921 that took the lives of many Black people and ruined Black Wall Street. There’s the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Dakota 38 and many more I could cite.
One of the many things wrong with this country is that we continue to honor, praise and/or excuse the Confederacy and those who supported it. We (white people in particular) have yet to come to terms with the carnage our ancestors facilitated. We must have truth and reconciliation in regards to the history of this country when it comes to the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, slavery, lynchings, and segregation, and our ancestors complicity and involvement in these. And, we should never glamorize or sanitize the confederacy. To quote Toni Morrison, “If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.”
