Why all the nostalgia for the "good ole days" of the confederacy???

[Honeykiss1974]

CONFEDERACY NOSTALGIA...


CONFEDERACY NOSTALGIA MAKES ME NERVOUS
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX

Why do so many white folks wish they were in the land of cotton? Probably because they weren’t the ones picking it. My question may seem facetious, but with so many Bush Administration nominees speaking fondly of the Confederacy, it is no wonder that George W. only garnered 8 percent of the African American vote. The combination of Republican National Committee Chairman James Gilmore’s declaration, last year, that April should be Confederacy month, South Carolina’s insistence of keeping a Confederate flag on its grounds, Attorney General-designee John Ashcroft’s waxing nostalgic about Confederate values with Southern Partisan Magazine, and Interior Secretary-designee Gail Norton’s comments on states’ rights and old time values is enough to frighten this black woman. Sure, nobody has come out and said that slavery was all right, or that they’d like to reinstitute it. But in embracing the Confederacy and the values for which it stands, they implicitly embrace slavery and the oppression of African American people.

There is no amount of historical parsing that makes slavery all right. There are those who will remind us that slaves were sold by Africans, as if that makes it right. Others will say that slaves weren’t that bad off, having been provided with clothing and food (the better to energize you to chop cotton) in a competitive Southern economy where poor whites often went hungry. I’ve read dozens of justifications of slavery, none of them compelling. It must depend on the lens through which slavery is viewed, whether your background is owner or slave. But it would seem to me that at this late date in our nation’s history, there could be no justification for our nation’s slave past.

This is why issues like reparations and an apology for slavery won’t go away. Without these, from time to time, it becomes fashionable to talk about the Confederacy, about slavery, in nostalgic terms. Confederate descendants talk about their ancestors and the lives lost defending the confederacy. They lost their lives for a lost cause, bluntly. They can fly all the flags they want to, wax eloquent about the past all they want to, but the fact is that the Southern economy before the Civil War depended on the exploitation of one group of people to provide the comfort of another. Northern liberals tiptoed around the issue for a while, but ultimately threw down. There was a war and the South lost, and they’ve not gotten over it since. So they obsessively fly the flag of a lost cause, establish universities that prevent race mixing, euphemistically speak of states’ rights, and then protest that they aren’t racists. Me thinks they squawk too much!

If they aren’t racists the are, at minimum, insensitive, and their insensitivity both scares me and makes me nervous. Especially when these folks who want to go back to the good old days are aspiring to lead government departments not in the past, but today. You can’t tell me that their old world values won’t seep into their contemporary work. You can’t tell me that someone who wishes he were in the land of cotton doesn’t picture himself sipping a mint julep with some silent slave serving it. And you can’t tell me that such a person doesn’t look at an African American member of Congress and somehow see that silent slave. That frightens me.

Of course, these Republicans say they want to be everyone’s leader, that they want to reach out to more African Americans to make their party more diverse. If they are serious, they can start by cutting that canned Confederacy rhetoric. They ought to take leadership on this issue, burying their Confederate past. If the Confederacy is every referred to in contemporary life, it ought to be referred to as an abhorrent mistake, instead of in nostalgic terms. But the fact is that when some people talk about the Confederacy, they aren’t only talking about the past. They are doing racial signaling, reminding some Southern whites that they aren’t the party of African Americans, like some say the Democrats are. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say you want to reach out to African Americans, then use symbols of our enslavement as your calling cards. Republicans will have to choose.

Actually, all of America will have to choose, one day, to come to grips with our nation’s racist past if we want to have a future where race matters less. We will have to come to grips with the enormous wrong that was done to millions of people, and to the fact that this wrong was compounded by post-slavery discrimination, and continues to have an impact today. Too often, I’ve listened to whites tell me that they don’t want to talk about slavery, that they never held slaves. Unfortunately, though, they still have bragging rights, which is what this nostalgic Confederacy talk represents. Here is what they are saying - I value the days when folks like me used to own slaves and folks like you used to be slaves. That frightens me, but also convinces me that anyone who wishes they were in the land of cotton ought to be there. Picking it instead of pursuing public life.

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