Rightist claims of heritage just nonsense
Events in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the weekend are evidence of what is wrong — and right — in the US. Hundreds of ultrarightists rallied to protest against the planned removal of the statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee. The rally was led by so-called white nationalist Richard Spencer and headlined by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. These enthusiasts of American reaction arrived in the college town like solids floating in a sewer: rightist militia members, white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Their chants included, “White lives matter!” and “Jews will not replace us!”
They marched through town with their faces uncovered, in what looked like a white power movement showing its strength. When Duke mentioned Charlottesville mayor Michael Signer by name, the crowd chanted, “Jew! Jew! Jew!”
Charlottesville was also a site of what is hopeful about the US. A far larger crowd came out as a counter to the right. These protesters were black and white, young and old. They included activists from Black Lives Matter, LGBT organisations, students, religious leaders and many others opposed to what is euphemistically referred to as the alt-right. One of them, 32-year old Heather Heyer, was murdered by a white supremacist who ploughed his car into a group of counterdemonstrators.
The right came to Virginia ostensibly to protest against the removal of Confederate symbols across the south. The campaign to remove these symbols began as a response to the Charleston church shooting, in which Dylann Roof — cut from the same cloth as the gang that marched in Charlottesville — shot and killed nine people at a black church in 2015.
The defenders of Confederate symbols will often voice some justification about how removing the statues constitutes an assault on their “heritage”.
Nonsense. Confederate “symbolism” — the flags, the statues — are all about the refusal to accept the defeat of a system that enslaved millions of Africans and, more than a century later, the death of Jim Crow segregation. It’s not complicated.
The revolutionaries who drafted the Declaration of Independence declared 241 years ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But, of course, it was also “self-evident” to these drafters that all men were not created equal. For nearly a century thereafter, “all men” did not include the millions of black slaves, male and female, whose labour helped lay the foundation of capitalism in the US. This question was settled only after a four-year civil war that left up to 750,000 people dead.
The end of slavery saw the rise of Radical Reconstruction, which attempted to transform the slaveholding South. But reconstruction was defeated, opening the era of Jim Crow, which formalised a kind of apartheid across the southern states. The Jim Crow laws were enforced by legal statute and violence meted out by the police, Ku Klux Klansmen and gangs of thugs.
Expanding the meaning of “all men are created equal” was not the result of clever jurists. It has taken millions of people marching — through the civil rights movement, the labour movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT movement and defenders of immigrants’ rights — to secure those rights in practice.
It’s not hard to guess what “heritage” Spencer and Duke yearn for. But the big questions of US history have been settled. There will be no return to slavery or segregation. This is true despite US President Donald Trump’s failure to clearly condemn what took place in Charlottesville, and that in Steve Bannon he has a conscious rightist in the White House. But state-sanctioned assaults on the rights of blacks, women, gays and lesbians, and the rise of Jew hatred and immigrant bashing, not to mention rampant police brutality, are serious concerns. Fortunately, the US streets are highly mobilised to push back against such backwardness.
Perhaps a far deeper conversation needs to happen.
How is it possible that Confederate symbols are allowed to continue to remind black people of their place in US society? SA has gone through its own process of talking about what to do with colonial names and symbols. The discussion is often difficult, but we have begun to hear one another.
Hope is an enduring human spirit. Reverend Brenda Brown-Grooms of St Paul’s Memorial Church captured it well in an interview with the BBC as she reflected on the ugly scenes unfolding in the streets of Charlottesville.
“I come from a people who were enslaved, and if you are going to make it through that misery, there has to be a spirit which allows you to see past what your eyes see in front of you and what your ears hear, and to understand how hope forms in your heart….
“As our people used to say, trouble don’t last always. It might last all of my lifetime, but not always,” she said.
AS OUR PEOPLE USED TO SAY, TROUBLE DON’T LAST ALWAYS. IT MIGHT LAST ALL OF MY LIFETIME, BUT NOT ALWAYS Brenda Brown-Grooms Minister at St Paul’s