Posted by Jay Livingston
Karl Oliver’s Facebook post went viral, and not in a way he wanted. Oliver is the Mississippi state legislator who went on record with his views about Lousiana governor Mitch Landrieu for removing that statue of Robert E. Lee and other monuments to the Confederacy.
Of course it’s “LYNCHED!” that’s providing Oliver his fifteen minutes of Internet fame. Oliver later apologized: “I acknowledge the word ‘lynched’ was wrong. I am very sorry. . . I do not condone the actions I referenced, nor do I believe them in my heart.” In other words, he didn’t want to see anyone actually lynched. He just put the word in all caps because at the time it seemed like le mot juste. As indeed it was. It perfectly expressed his thoughts and sentiments.
But the full racism of the message comes from the pairing of “lynch” with one of the other all-caps words – OUR in “our history”. To Oliver, and no doubt many others, the category “Southern Americans” contains no Black people. It’s not just that he would like to return to the days when the only people who counted were White, the days when you could lynch someone who offended the total dominance of Whites. But even today, when he looks at Mississippi and the South, he sees only White people among his “fellow Southern Americans,” at least the ones who matter. The population of Mississippi is 40% non-White, but for the Karl Olivers of the South the numbers are no more important than they were back in the days of the Confederacy when Blacks were a clear majority in the state.
Or maybe he thinks Black people in Mississippi share his reverence for the Confederacy. Maybe he’s like Jusice Scalia, who thought that Jews would be honored if a monument to the war dead of their religion and other religions were decorated with a cross.
Gov. Landrieu took a more inclusive view of the history those monuments honored.
| These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism, as much as burning a cross on someone's lawn. They were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. |
And for the record, the monuments are not being “destroyed,” as Oliver says. They are being quarantined. Robert E. Lee will still be there on horseback, probably in some museum, for anyone to see. What has changed is the symbolism about whose South and which history is being honored.*
--------------
*Mitch Landrieu and Louisiana may be outliers. Mississippi will probably not take similar actions, even with the embarrassment that Karl Oliver has brought. As Bryan Stephenson, a Black lawyer, says in a recent interview with Ezra Klein (here):
| In this country, we don't talk about slavery. We don't talk about lynching. Worse, we've created the counternarrative that says we have nothing about which we should be ashamed. Our past is romantic and glorious. In my state of Alabama, Jefferson Davis's birthday is a state holiday. Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday. We don't even have Martin Luther King Day in Alabama. We have Martin Luther King/Robert E. Lee Day. Our two largest high schools are Robert E. Lee High and Jefferson Davis High. They're both 90-some percent African-American. If we don't think it matters, then I think we're just kidding ourselves. |
No comments:
Post a Comment