I recently read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography, and found it inspirational. When I expressed my enthusiasm on X, I got mocked by many for having just discovered this hip new writer.
When I think about why I didn’t read Frederick Douglass’ biography until now, part of the answer is that I basically never read anything in school, even what was assigned. Still, I’ve read a lot of books over the years, and I was never inspired to pick this one up. It’s kind of strange, though, since Douglass was the most prominent black intellectual of the nineteenth century, and I knew that he had been born a slave before escaping, so the story would obviously be of interest.
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I mean my counter argument to that is that as a thing slavery should be condemned, but also that the South itself should be allowed to keep its heroes and iconography instead of binding it to slavery. I think the civil war was TO preserve slavery, but my answer to that is also “so what?” Slavery was thought to be the entire thing that the South’s economy hanged on, its reliance on it fueled by hundreds of years of propaganda partially started BY the Founding Fathers. It leads to a bizarre moral relativism where there is no sympathy to the fact that perhaps the South isn’t Literally The Third Reich for perpetuating a terrible thing and instead that it should be treated as a dark time in the history of America, but one that is no more or less detestable as every other part of a country’s history. Many people celebrate Guy Fawkes and the IRA and Churchill and Castro and Zulu and Caesar despite them all being terrible people, I think the fact that slavery is looked down on as such a terrible thing to have done hundreds of years ago is exclusively a white, liberal, western thing. Slavery is still bad, but it’s been treated on the level of the Holocaust I feel is always been weird to me because as opposed to the fact the Holocaust was an outlier of its time culturally the idea of ending slavery is still a radical position and only the modern first world really balks at slavery as it does today. One testimony of a guy who kept slaves and didnt particularly care when they got fried I’d say is actually proof of my point rather than a refutation, because pretty much everywhere else in the world slavery still happens and slaves are treated worse in places like Asia and Africa than western slavers could ever have dreamed of. Our disgust with slavery is due to us evolving to have values of decency, democracy and fairness, but we still dont go around fighting wars to end slavery in the congo. It seems like a unique pretension that we westerners cant be caught doing something that makes us seem like the guys we bought our slaves off of, unless it’s kids in china in which case we sweep that under the rug
Except that the banishment of monuments as well as symbols from the Confederacy is performative. The enforcement of absolute purity, a power play.
I grew up in GA. The Confederate battle flag was for many people a symbol of regional pride, and even a sort of “fuck you” to non-southerners who looked down their noses at the south. If you didn’t grow up in the south, you have no idea about the pervasiveness of snotty attitudes and rank ignorance on the part of non-southerners.
I suppose many cultures feature this sort of regional bigotry, like the way Londoners think of Yorkshire people, or how people in Milan think of people from southern Italy.
An ignorant bigot from outside the south—a very intelligent one, perhaps a writer for The New Yorker. e.g.—sees a Confederate battle flag on display in a southerner’s yard, and assumes its meaning is white supremacy or even pro-slavery, when it’s nothing of the sort.