For a better future we must know who we were

Ben Jones’ personal hagiography in the February 9 Rappahannock News (4 full columns!) deserves careful consideration and honest evaluation. In his own words, Mr. Jones defines his cause as “the Movement to bring the races together as neighbors who have shared that larger Southern culture, and to build a future together.” Noble words and to appreciate what they mean one must acknowledge that Mr. Jones’ biography evinces deep engagement in the civil rights movement and continued dedication to the equality and integration of the races. That is why his mission statement is so baffling. Let’s reflect on his very own words:

“Bring the races together as neighbors…” An aspirational statement but it has never been the case and it is still a struggle. Enslaved African Americans were not neighbors. Jim Crow laws throughout the South codified separate and segregated neighborhoods. Until 1968, red-lining practices ensured that African Americans were denied the full benefits of home ownership enjoyed by whites in other neighborhoods. A critical analysis of our history reveals that African Americans were systematically denied the status of “neighbors” with whites. To bring us together as neighbors we must first identify the structural, legal and cultural obstacles that have made it impossible and deal with them. That is not wokeness or presentism. It is reality.

“…who have shared that larger Southern culture.” There was no sharing. For much of our history African Americans were enslaved, not entitled to anything under the law and then excluded from the bounty of our nation during Jim Crow until 1965. It is important to understand what the “larger Southern culture” meant just 150 years ago. In 1857 Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision expressed the views then held by a vast majority of Americans (who were not enslaved):

[Decedents of African Slaves] had for more than a century before [the Constitution] been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

But what about the Declaration of Independence? you might ask. Justice Taney drives the point home:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the

Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

Sure doesn’t sound like a “shared culture.”

“… larger Southern culture.” Let’s agree that “War to Free the Enslaved” was not an attack on “Southern culture” though, arguably, it devastated economies of those states that depended on free labor to compete and prosper. But I wonder if the 6 million African Americans who fled the South during the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, brilliantly detailed by Isabel Wilkerson in “The Warmth of Other Suns,” would view Southern culture the same way Mr. Jones does. The title derives from a poem by Richard Wright, himself forced to migrate to Chicago, which says in part:

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown...

I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns

and, perhaps, to bloom.

“…to build a future together.” To build a future, rather than to just fantasize about it, we should know who we are and, to do that, we must come to terms with our history. Not an impossible task but one that requires an honest and unflinching assessment of our past. The current voguish term to describe the process of evaluating the past is “Presentism,” which seems to equate the critical analysis of history as a moral judgment, an attempt to impose our standards in evaluating past behavior. Let’s take Robert E. Lee, who led several secessionist states in a rebellion against the United States. We can admire his military genius and other fine elements of his character without erecting statues or naming highways in his honor. Similarly, we admire Thomas Jefferson for writing the Declaration of Independence, one of the most extraordinary expressions of human dignity, while also acknowledging that he was a slave owner who took one of his slaves as a concubine. Not idolizing our forefathers does not insult them, quite the contrary, we honor them by accepting them as full persons, products of their time and custom, while objectively evaluating their actions by what we know today.

We can build a future together when we accept our past, warts and all. That is not wokeness or presentism. It is reality.

To build a future, rather than to just fantasize about it, we should know who we are and, to do that, we must come to terms with our history.