Glenden BrownPast and Present
Over the weekend, I rented CSA. The film is a faux documentary about what would have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. CSA tells an alternative history - “What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War?” The alternative history depicts a dystopian, virulently racist world that frighteningly echoes the language of our own world - including a scene from an alternate world movie where a character says “Kill them all and let God sort them out!”
CSA includes commercials and newsbreaks from the alternative world, including several that include real products from American history - one of them a former Salt Lake City landmark - the Coon Chicken Inn. At the end of the film, the film makers showed the real products from American history they used for their “commercials.” The Coon Chicken Inn had as its trademark an oversize, African-American face with oversized lips and teeth - the door into the restaurant was the teeth. Images of African-Americans in popular American culture have long been grotesque parodies, starting with images of ante-bellum slaves in the South - happily serving their white masters, singing in the fields, loyally sacrificing their needs and desires for whites. Think of Mammy in Gone With the Wind.
Near the end of CSA, the “Canadian scholar” described the great sin of American slavery as denying the humanity of the slave. CSA drove the point home with a commercial for a drug - Contrari - give it to your servants and they’ll be happy; ask your veterinarian for more information. American racism began with the assumption that Africans couldn’t handle freedom and has found a wide variety of ways to never really give up that conceit. For decades, white Americans spoke of blacks “knowing their place.” In Auntie Mame, there’s a memorable scene in which the snobbish, wealth Mrs. Upton describes her African American maid Bertha as “one of the good ones. Most of them are so uppity these days.”
CSA is the arch-conservative world view writ large. In the CSA world, women never won the right to vote. In 1980, Ronald Reagan and his Secretary of the Interior passed the Family Values Act that empowered the government to create agencies to produce PSA’s warning against dissenters, homosexuals, and create a reporting line for people who might be of mixed race. In the CSA world, the government also legalized slavery of any non-whites (”The law changed the face of west coast slavery from black to yellow”), restricted Jews to a reservation on Long Island, and began a series of brutally, racist imperialist wars. The CSA is also depicted as having incredibly hostile relations with Canada; one of the CSA politicians says that Canada’s refusal to return escaped slaves is a debt and they owe the CSA “reparations for slavery;” the CSA has literally built a wall along the Canadian border. The film is a twisted view of what might have happened if the racist inspired Confederacy has won the Civil War.
At one point in time, I had a romanticized view of the ante-bellum South. Southerners still talk about the “War of Northern Aggression” as if the Civil War weren’t fought so Southerners could preserve the right to own human beings. When people today talk about “States’ rights” they’re using the argument that slave holders first formulated so they could find some legal rationale for defending slavery. Had Southern slave owners been willing to confront the truly immoral nature of slave holding, the Civil War would have been avoided. Instead, their impentrable wall of racism kept them from seeing the horror of slavery.
Shelby Foote once said that had the North been in danger of losing the war, they’d have taken the other hand out from behind their back. The deck was stacked against the South from day one - less then half the population of the North and almost no industrial base. Sherman’s march to the sea was crucial in the North’s victory. The damage done to the South’s infrastructure wasn’t fully repaired for decades. In a history class once, my professor said the South didn’t fully recover from the Civil War until 1930s but only because the rest of the country suffered the Great Depression.
In some ways, America is still divided by ante-bellum politics. Many Southerners romanticize and glorify the Confederacy as if it were fighting for a noble cause and argue, passionately, for regional uniqueness and, at times, superiority. Since 2001, the Federal government has been dominated by Southerners pursuing policies informed by Southern culture. The 2006 election (hopefully) represents a watershed election in which power changes to a non-Southern majority. Most of the major social movements in the US have been led by Northern liberals. LBJ acknowledged that signing the Civil Rights Act cost Democrats the South; political history of the US since then has been the painful realignment of Southern whites abandoning the Democratic party and liberals and progressives struggling to build a new national consensus.
The virulent, toxis racism portrayed in CSA, however, is not absent from our USA. Ronald Reagan mastered the use of racial codewords (”welfare queen”). George W. Bush is a black belt at “dog whistle” politics - using language in such a way that his base knows exactly what he means while the rest of wonder what the hell (his reference to Plessy v. Ferguson was code to anti-choice activists). The flap over a member of Congress taking his oath of office on the Koran is anti-Arab racism; the nativist wing of the conservative movement is anti-Latin American racism. These groups rarely speak openly about their biases but they are a present part of American politics and culture.
Northern and Southern racism express themselves differently, but they are at the root the same. See David Neiwart’s series at Oricnus:
I used to wonder why there weren’t more black people in places like Seattle — which, as urban places go, is pretty damned white — and Idaho, where I grew up, or Montana, where I lived for a several years, both of which make Seattle look positively chocolate in comparison. Like most everyone else, I just chalked it up to the climate and the pre-existing lack of colored folks: they didn’t live here, I assumed, because they’d naturally feel isolated.It was, we presumed, just one of those accidents of history and demographics.I also would sometimes hear black leaders and community members in Seattle talk about the somewhat hidden, institutionalized nature of racism in places like the Pacific Northwest, where people can be nice to your face and not so nice in action. And they would sometimes phrase it in stark terms, usually something these lines:
- “I would rather deal with Southerners, where the racism is up front and in your face, than people in places like this, where it’s all nice and hidden.”
Here in Utah - the Intermountain West in general - I think we’re guilty of that form of racism - the nice to your face not so nice in action racism. Racist jokes are told in private. Racism is institutional, casual, accepted. Our Legilslature starts is session today and the leaders of our Legislature say the state Constitution requires them to begin on the third monday of January. They could easily change the state constituion; instead they offer lame excuses. We can expect some our elected officials to offer mealy mouthed pablum about Civil rights today but they won’t take any action. They have no concerns about amending the constitution to make sure that gay folks don’t marry each other.
I read that many of today’s Republican leaders are the children of the people who were most opposed to MLK while he was alive and they are most anxious to claim his legacy for themselves today - absent of course his passionate opposition to Vietnam and his radical insistence on social justice and non-violence.
As liberals and progressives we have a duty to hold today’s leaders accountable not just to Martin Luther King’s legacy but to America’s legacy of expanding civil rights and liberties to an ever larger circle of people. We have a long way to go but from the beginning, American liberals have intentionally and consistently expanded the circle of people included in America’s identity. In the early 19th century, the crisis was over Irish Catholics, then Catholics in general, then Eastern Europeans; we still struggle to integrate people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, people of different sexual orientations, and of course, the struggle women’s equality has been ongoing since Jane Adams reminder to her husband to “not forget the ladies.”
Our prejudices and biases may only be echoes of those in CSA, but they are prejudices and biases; at the most basic, prejudice denies the full humanity of another person. We may not have official Jim Crow laws anymore, but the assumptions behind Jim Crow have not fully been addressed. Remember the book The Bell Curve? It argued that African-Americans are inherently different than whites. It wasn’t published that many years ago. We are challenged today to recognize the full humanity of all persons and at long last to break down the legal, cultural and economic barriers to each person fully living out his or her humanity. That is the Civil Rights challenge for our day - not undoing Jim Crow, but unlearning Jim Crow’s assumptions.
Are we up to it?