Just Who Won the Civil War, Anyhow?

Last summer, waiting to visit the submarine Growler at the Intrepid museum on the Hudson River, I watched a video on the development of the submarine. Included was discussion of Confederate submarines during the Civil War with a reference to one of the developers as a "patriot." I thought that odd: where else would someone in open rebellion against a country be later called a "patriot" by that country? I mean, would George Washington ever be considered a "patriot" by Great Britain?

The meaning of "patriot" has always been of concern to me. I didn't like it when, as a youth, I was called "unpatriotic" for opposing the Vietnam War for I thought my action the most patriotic thing I could do. As a southerner born often living in the north while growing up, I was constantly reminded of the question of allegiance. This was during the 1950s, and the questions were quite real, especially to those of us with southern roots--and I certainly did feel a divide.

My great-grandfather Marion Stephen Barlow served under General Phil Sheridan (his company is now the inspiration for a group of re-enactors) in the chase of Jubal Early's Confederate army, the battle of Opequon, and the razing of the Shenandoah Valley. The army he served in is still hated by many Virginians for the destruction it caused, destruction as horrible as anything found in Sherman's 'march to the sea.'

After the war, great-grandfather Marion reminisced with an uncle of his (whose name I don't know, but who was likely a little further removed, probably a cousin, a child of Marion's uncle Aaron, who had moved across the Ohio River to Virginia--what is now West Virginia--many years before the Civil War) who had fought in the Confederate Army. They determined that they had both been involved in a skirmish at a place called Gauley Bridge, and could even have been shooting at each other.

The other side of my family was determinedly Confederate. Three of my great-great-grandfathers fought, one of them captured during the breakout at Petersburg in 1865, spending the final months of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Maryland. All three were men from western North Carolina.


The Civil War, of course, was a horrible experience. Its aftermath in Reconstruction and then in Jim Crow was sometimes almost as bad. Sometimes as bad. Yet, by the end of the 1960s, we seemed ready to put that behind us and to move forward as a unified nation devoted to ideals of equality and possibility. Belief in that made me proud and, yes, patriotic.

When my family moved back south in 1961, it was both the time of the Civil War centennial and the Civil Rights Movement. Watching both, I was confirmed in my faith in the union, faith that had developed over my earlier young life. There may have been a certain romanticism attached to the lost cause of the south, but the reality of it was that the United States was better off without dominate states rights and with a federal government committed to the protection of the rights of all. I had become a real patriot, proud of my country, fundamentally and permanently... and I thought all other southerners were moving that way, as well.

Now, fifty years later, I am beginning to think I was wrong. Rick Perry thinking Texas could secede from the union; Grover Norquist wanting to drown the Federal government in a bathtub. Even the hatred of Obama as "not one of us" (as non-white) is making me think that, after all this time, the victory of the north is receding, with the revenge of the south at hand. Making me think that the "patriotism" of much of America isn't patriotism for the United States at all, but for a Confederacy hiding in US clothing (much as, in the mountains after the Civil War, a U and S compressed together--or so the story goes--was a sign of lingering Confederate sympathies, as in the sign from my great-great-grandfather Joel Dimmette's post office in the picture here). Our Supreme Court seems to be handing the states the rights the southern ones once thought should be theirs but that they lost through war. Attitudes of hatred toward Washington are often hiding attitudes of hatred toward the once-victorious north.

So, who really won the Civil War?

Right now, I'm beginning to believe that no one did, though the old south may be growing in dominance. The south, as the old saying had it, has certainly risen again. Today's patriots aren't proud of a union of fifty states dedicated to liberty and justice for all, but are advocates of an ersatz "America" that is a stand-in for what had once seemed a defeated racist, classist, and economically oppressive system, a system now on the verge of being re-instituted over the country as a whole, not even just over the region where it began. That's bad for all of us, especially the real patriots, north and south.

"The Help"

Growing up in and out of the south during the 1950s and 1960s, I was extremely attuned to the disparity between the lives of whites and blacks.  Everyone was.  Even though my Quaker family supported the Civil Rights movement without question, we still lived in what were, to all intents and purposes, segregated neighborhoods (in Atlanta, certainly).  Though some whites would have had us pretend that black neighborhoods didn't exist, we all knew they did, and that they were not the same.  Where blacks lived wasn't just different (the myth of separate-but-equal), but qualitatively different.  The houses weren't nearly as elegant, the cars not so new, not by a long shot.  The white neighborhoods showed clear signs of wealth and more to come; the black ones--and I even recognized this as a child--spoke of nothing but dead ends.  The white neighborhoods were places to aspire to (for those who did not live there--for those who did, well, that's another story), the black ones to get out of.  The only blacks who did make it into the neighborhood where we whites lived, however, were never welcome to move in.  They worked for the white families--as maids, as gardeners, and as nannies--and then went home.  Few whites ever went into the black neighborhoods--except, perhaps, to collect money.

This was not unusual.  In fact, it was the standard for middle-class white neighborhoods in the south and the black neighborhoods that served them.  It was also standard where we lived (a somewhat more liberal area than most) that the blacks who worked there were treated a little more humanely than they were elsewhere--but as employees, not as equals, and not as people who would be welcome to move in down the street.  No matter how much my parents, for example, wanted to treat with respect the man who killed the snakes down by the creek and did other chores occasionally, they could not ignore the barrier the culture of the south placed between them.  Their own contribution to integration was a move the other way, to a Brooklyn, NY neighborhood on the edge of Crown Heights, half of which was made up of middle-class blacks, the other half by middle-class whites.

What made me think of that was the movie The Help, based on the long-popular novel of the same name.  At the end of the movie (I haven't read the book), the main white character, Skeeter, heads off to New York for a new life.  This was one of the bits of realism in the movie: for all but the extraordinary few, the only road to success in the south lay through the north.  This was true for both whites and blacks, for the poor as well as those of the rich who wanted to be something more than abettors of a corrupt and immoral system.  Since World War I, this has even been one of the key motifs of southern literature, no matter the race involved.

What's fantasy about the movie is that black maids would unburden themselves to a young white woman, a product of the very system that oppresses them, who still lives amid that system, to one still taking in its largess as one of the lucky.  That's not a horrible conceit: There's no way the story could unfold through realism, for there's no way the story of 'the help' could have been told publicly at that time, as happens in the novel and movie.  The culture of oppression was way too strong for that.  However, without this bit of fancy, what truth there is in the novel and movie would not be accessible to most Americans.  Something was needed to make a relentlessly abusive system understandable to people with absolutely no clue as to how horrible it was.  Something was needed that would allow them to read and watch without rejecting the whole of it.

When I returned to New York City in the early 1990s (after four years living in West Africa), I was a little surprised by the revulsion I felt on seeing more and more black nannies shepherding white children in neighborhoods like Park Slope and Cobble Hill.  I would try to explain it to friends, but they invariably told me I was over-reacting, that I just didn't like people using nannies, that I was only noticing those because of the racial distinction between nanny and child.  It's true: I was reacting to an increasingly divided America, where once again we are moving towards a system of masters and servants, something we had been moving away from since World War II.

But there was that 'other thing,' too.  Something northerners just don't understand, and that many white southerners from middle-class backgrounds don't want to look at.  Though I recognize the class issues at stake, they are not what bothers me when I see a black nanny with a white child.  What bothers me is that the family involved has absolutely no understanding of the resonances of America's greatest failure, and of using women of an oppressed race to raise its privileged children--children who should have known better by the time they grew up, but who then continued the same oppression.  All I can think of as I watch is that the parents should know better, too, but don't.

I've heard all the excuses: Hiring only same-race nannies is itself a type of oppression, keeping skilled and able people from work they desperately need.  The difficulty of finding nannies who are not black.  Etc.  But none of these can erase the legacy of racism and abuse that is still ingrained in our culture.

The Help, whatever its naivete might be, does try to show those who did not see it first hand (though without, in my case, having had a nanny myself) just how colossally horrifying the situation was in the American south, even up into the 1970s.  Even if just for that, its fantasy aspects should be forgiven.

Perhaps it can even help northerners understand my gut revulsion when I see a black woman pushing a white infant's stroller.  If it can manage that, even partially, then I have absolutely no problem with the fantasies in The Help.

Appalachia On My Mind

“If it weren't for Appalachians, this would be a perfect country.”

That's what I seem to be hearing, these days, from many of my progressive fellow travelers. They point to a map in The New York Times that shows that Appalachia, essentially, is the only area of the country where Republicans gained in presidential voting.

Except for the southern Louisiana portion, this looks rather like the migration pattern of my family. So, what I hear when people criticize the people inhabiting the regions in red on this map is criticism of my own background. What I particularly resent is an underlying assumption that the increase has a simple, racial genesis.

Whether Obama is an east-coast elitist or not (I'd say not, but it doesn't matter), Appalachia has been stigmatized for a long, long time—and even more during the past eight years, when the “crackers,” “rednecks,” and “hillbillies” have been yoked (in liberal minds) to George W. The connection (like the current increase in voting Republican in the region) is used as proof that Appalachians are worthy of the disdain for them felt in much of the rest of the country.

There's a lot more going on here, however—and the contempt felt for Appalachia says to me (a displaced Appalachian, now a New Yorker) more about the liberals and progressives than it does about the people of my home region.

According to the U. S. Census Bureau, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana make up four of this six most impoverished states in the U.S. (New Mexico and Mississippi are the others). They also make up (with Tennessee, Western Virginia, and Western North Carolina) the part of the United States that has been continually scapegoated for American failing for more than a century (though Louisiana isn't really Appalachian, it has felt the scapegoating, too). When America fails, it has become easy to place the blame on “them,” for the image of the Appalachian has become as ingrained in the rest of America as the image of the African-American among white America (just witness how quick many were to accept Ashley Todd's accusations of assault right before the election).

The view of Appalachians (and those descended from the Scots-Irish in general) has little difference in background or in effect from the racism that much of the rest of the country faults Appalachia for. To make matters worse, the fingers pointing at racism in the mountains should be pointed back at their owners. Having voted for Obama does not absolve one from racist attitudes—any more than not voting for him makes one a racist.

Too Sensitive to Smears?

My growing sensitivity over disparagements of my Appalachian (Scots-Irish) background may be making me a bit more sensitive to insults to other groups—to an extent I had not realized. And, perhaps, too much so. Perhaps it is due to my anger at the assumption that West Virginians (inbred hillbillies, doncha know) voted overwhelmingly for Clinton because of inherent racism—and not because they (like people in, say, New York or California) actually made thoughtful choices between candidates. Though I am an Obama supporter, I can see reasons for anyone, black or white (or blue and green stripes, for that matter), deciding that Clinton is the better choice. I’m not going to denigrate them by saying that they vote only by color. Certainly, I am not going to stupidly assert that any ethnic or regional group makes its choices simply by race. Not only is it untrue for the vast majority, it carries with it assumptions about the region or group based on gross and often denigrating stereotypes.

So I probably should not have been so surprised by my reaction to this person yesterday:

She’s bilingual, German and English. We were discussing grammar, she arguing for a prescriptive viewpoint while I countered that grammar arises as description and should be treated with that in mind. Somehow, we moved into the expanding vocabulary of English (much larger than that of any other language). I said I loved that aspect of the language; she said it leads to lack of understanding.

“Imagine you were standing on a street corner in Harlem—now, I have nothing against them, in fact, I love the way they use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary… ”

I started to say something, but held my tongue. I did not want to call her on what I was hearing as a racist comment, but my dander was rising. Still, I was extremely uncomfortable being pulled into an ‘us/them’ dichotomy by her remarks.

“ …but imagine you say to a ten-year-old you find there, ‘All men are mortal.’ The kid would not know what you are talking about.”

I was starting to get ticked off, and really should have stopped her right there. However, I wanted to give her a chance to make her point.

“On the other hand, in Germany, if I said the same thing—in German, of course—any child would know exactly what I meant.”

“First of all,” I responded, “if you said ‘We all die’ in Harlem, the kid would understand you completely. What we have is simply more ways of saying things. All you are doing is using the fact of a large vocabulary to denigrate those who don’t have as great a grasp of the extent of it as you do. That’s not really fair, and is the type of thing people latch onto for arguments for the reality of class distinction.” I was trying to remain calm, but I could feel that I was close to losing my cool.

“That’s not true. I respect them completely.”

Suddenly, I lost it. She clearly did not respect them, and was trying to use language as a means of showing herself better.

“Stop!” I raised my hand, palm out like a traffic cop. “I can’t continue this conversation.”

“Why not? I love the way they use…”

“Stop! I’m hearing tinges of racism, here, and can’t go on.”

I turned and walked away, nearly shaking, suspecting I had overreacted, but sure I would have ended up yelling if I had stayed to talk longer.

Were I a better person, I would have explained that, first of all, I did not like being drawn into her “us” against some “them” out there, simply because she and I share a skin color. I would have asked her if she would have broached her example to an African-American. That might have opened her eyes to what she was, in fact, saying. Unfortunately, as Bob Dylan wrote in “If You See Her, Say Hello,” “Either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft.”

Oh, well.

Answering the Obama Challenge

My reaction, on reading Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech yesterday, was that he has offered us and our presidential candidates the chance to raise the level of debate in America to a level not reached for more than thirty years. This morning, The New York Times, in an editorial, agrees: “

We can’t know how effective Mr. Obama’s words will be with those who will not draw the distinctions between faith and politics that he drew, or who will reject his frank talk about race. What is evident, though, is that he not only cleared the air over a particular controversy — he raised the discussion to a higher plane.

It is going to be difficult, however, for Americans, from lonely bloggers to pundits with a national stage (not to mention Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and even Obama himself) to pull themselves out of the muck they’ve been playing in for so long (each pretending that only the others are in the sewer)—that we’ve been playing in so long—and to begin to address ideals and ideas in our presidential politics, not simply issues (which we have used as a replacement for ideas) and attacks on the weaknesses of others.

Just how hard this will be was brought home to me this morning as I read reader responses to The New York Times “Campaign Stop” column on the Obama speech. One person wrote:

I really believe that this unfortunate episode is just about the worst possible thing that could have happened to Obama - formerly this white boomer’s choice for the presidency. The Reverend Wright has just answered the doubts of every white voter contemplating voting for a black president for the fist time. In spite of all his eloquence, I predict that Sen. Obama will never manage to extract the good reverend’s foot out of his mouth.
— Posted by Teddy Harris

This mild (by comparison to many) attempt to bring us back down into Rovian innuendo and spite made me sad for another reason: I doubt the writer feels he (or she… “Teddy” could easily be a woman) is racist, any more than Geraldine Ferraro does. But this is a racist comment, of just the sort Obama was asking (by example) that we rise above. Obama says he heard such unwitting comments from his grandmother, and we have certainly heard them (and worse) from Wright.

But what do we do when they continue, continue in the face of what amounts to a plea that we step above and beyond? Today, following Obama’s example, we ask the person to take a step upward. No longer do we turn away in disgust.

In the little post, Harris assumes a racial divide and hegemonic thought within both whites and blacks of just the sort that Obama, and his panoply of supporters have been working to overcome. Like Wright, Harris does not see that we are trying to move forward from the divisive positions of the past—does not see that we have, in fact, moved forward (even if it is only a tiny step).

No more than black voters (who Obama had to woo away from Hillary Clinton—he was not initially so strongly supported within the African-American community), white voters are not monolithic—nor are they afraid that there’s some sort of secret black resentment in all of that community, a fear that Harris expresses as “doubts.”

Harris is allowing racism to dominate his/her decision-making process, though Teddy would probably be pained to be called racist.

It’s time for Harris, for me, for all Americans to rise above considerations of race and to look to our ideals and dreams—to the best possible future for America. For a long time, we’ve been too scared to express such idealism, mired (as we have been) in the muck of racial divisiveness fomented by political opportunists.

Finally, someone is giving us the opportunity to step up, as a group, to prove that we are something better.

I hope that, one day soon, the Harris’s, both black and white, will look down at themselves, see the muck, rinse themselves off, and step up and join us.