Of the
many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must
endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean
the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our
ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers.I think,
when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was
young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been
kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and
subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought
which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were
deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants
of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in
fact and in spirit.I don't
propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble
ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can
afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who
are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I
was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as
nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I
class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely
myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept
most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.A few
years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was,
again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned
with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing
team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost.This was
heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was
the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by
that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic
justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet
Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like
that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away.
It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and
intellectual, work-out.
As I've
said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own
post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the
South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in
the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to
slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.I've
actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all
societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the
scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a
moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its
trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.It is one
thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same
time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is
deeply painful. It was not bad enought that my people had been enslaved, but
the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of
any moral high ground.The South
long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied.
Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and
white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states.
To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.Nathan
Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes,
that dead serious countenance, the warrior's beard. His story is American--the
dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he's noble too,
and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no
military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union
hell the whole time. Forrest is
the model of Southern chivalry--too much so. He made his money buying and
selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the
Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he
massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found
the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the
generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK
(Forrest). To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort
Pillow and in the KKK.At the end
of his book, McPherson has a section where the Confederacy, now desperate, considers
raising regiments of black slaves to fight for them. For years, now, they've
seen black soldiers--many of them their own ex-slaves--actively contributing to
the South's demise. But faced with the prospect of doing the same, Lee and
Davis are ensnared by the very lies that they've, until now, heartily embraced.
Conceding that blacks could be soldiers, would be a tacit admission of their
equality. As Southerner Howell Cobb puts it, "If slaves will make good
soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." The South eventually
raises two black regiments, but the Confederacy is defeated before any of them
see action. And yet, in this section, you can see them trying to square the
circle, trying to find another lie that will allow the lie of white supremacy
to stand.I imagine
for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's
painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour,
all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on
slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause. The temptation to continue to lie,
to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay
Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently
swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is
coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the
greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying
that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think
the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is
a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or
later, I think most of the South will be black like me.