Tags
brotherhood, compassion, Confederate Statues, Forgiveness, God's tenderness, healing our land, Racism, unselfishness
As we fight about these issues that are arising surrounding Confederate Statues, many are wondering: why now? Why, all of the sudden, are people noticing things they lived next to for decades with not so much as a word of complaint?
This is just a sign that the stubborn facts remain: the malevolent, destructive institution of slavery was dooming our nation to discord and fighting from the start. They should never have allowed it, but because they couldn’t come to an agreement, tragically they did.
Even Washington expressed this foreboding fear: “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principal.” He was painfully aware it directly contradicted our Declaration of Independence, declaring ALL men were created equal!
He actually told Edmund Randolph, according to Thomas Jefferson’s notes, that if the country were to split over slavery, Washington “had made up his mind to move and be of the northern.”
Many of our Founders who were ambivalent and troubled about allowing slavery had the vain hope that it would end soon by degrees naturally, passing their responsibility on to future generations.
Of course it wasn’t ending naturally because it was economically advantageous to the rich plantation owners, something other smaller nations that had managed to end slavery like Spain, France, and England, didn’t have to deal with. In America it was actually spreading into further parts of the country.
The Civil War split this country in bloody conflict a mere 60 years after President Washington’s death.
His foreboding was right.
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As far as I can tell there is no nation on earth that presently allows slavery legally, and hopefully modern “institutions” of government finally at least acknowledge what an evil it is. Of course, there is more slavery in the world today than at any other time in history because of the much greater size of the world population – but that is ILLEGAL slavery, not legitimized by governments.
Although nations prohibit it, it still exists in heart-wrenching proportions as sex trafficking, child forced labor, and the booty of war for groups like ISIS and Boko Haram, as well as the caste system that, for all intents and purposes, behaves like slavery.
The fact that it still exists in illegitimate forms does not mean we can somehow trivialize America’s terrible history of slavery, as though it doesn’t matter now. Some have even suggested, appallingly, that it was good for the Africans we brought against their will and enslaved, as if our “civilized” way of life was better off for them.
How stunningly blind, cruel and self-serving.
Because slaveholders didn’t understand the culture or agree with the customs of another continent, in no way meant it was better for them to be enslaved, oppressed, and abused with generational lifetimes of forced labor!! How dare we?!
Anyone who has that thought cross their mind may do well to take a few hours and study the horrors of American slavery – watch Roots, or 12 Years a Slave, both based on true accounts.
Then put yourself in the mental image of someone forcibly kidnapping you and your family to a faraway country in the worse possible inhumane conditions, abusing and raping your wife and daughters, tearing your family apart, and basically working you to death from morning till night with no compensation or hope of it ever ending – for you OR your heirs!
Picture it! See your children torn from your loving arms. Watch them being mercilessly beaten. Just empathetically think how it feels for a few minutes yourself to be considered less than human. Inferior. Disposable. Disrespected. Mistreated and abused. Debased.
And this was not only allowed in our nation, it was legitimized in our laws.
Please try to understand. These feelings and the embedded memories they evoke don’t just magically dissipate on their own.
We can see now how that ravaging blight has deep roots that remain, in some areas still treating African-Americans as 2nd class citizens, even with “laws” to protect them.
What many people don’t realize is that most of these Confederate statues went up as a backlash to the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow era, quite a while after the war in the early 1900s to 1950s. They were not like the earlier memorials that were mostly to mourn dead soldiers – these monuments were deliberately put there to instruct and remind people in the public squares, often a form of intimidation in the South. Basically, as a glorification of the cause of the Civil War, and their state’s “right” …the right primarily to continue “their way of life” ~ slavery.
And if you don’t believe that slavery was the de facto cause of the war, then look up the VP of the Confederacy’s Cornerstone address, with these sickeningly shocking, unvarnished remarks:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
This is a nauseating reality that simply must be faced by those who don’t want to see it.
I know this is a tough issue, but perhaps we need to just stop and really put ourselves in another’s shoes and understand how this has affected those who have been oppressed and abused, and in many areas still are.
It’s been a difficult journey since the Civil War that officially ended slavery but couldn’t change the hearts of men and women who still embraced an inferior view of the Black race. Racially segregated schools, not allowing Blacks to drink out of the same water fountains, or sit in the same restaurants was happening in MY lifetime! We are not that far removed from legal, institutionalized racism.
This is something that MUST be dealt with head on, instead of continuing to make excuses and pass down the responsibility to future generations. If understanding what these statues symbolize and perpetuate is the next step closer to tearing down those walls of prejudice, and loving my brother, then let’s consider that.
It can be a teaching moment. It’s not changing or re-writing history, pull in the full history. Could we add other facts and statues that reveal ALL we’ve come through? Could we move some to museums, and government buildings, as places that record history, not public squares that glorify the lost cause of a divisive time period?
We must admit we have a problem with racism in America, and it’s not going away on its own. But I choose to believe that we CAN heal and come together if we will try to LISTEN, understand, and care enough for others to be willing to lay down our own stubborn opinions.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in accepting his Nobel Peace prize:
“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
Me too.
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Katie Mahoney 