Heritage. A small word packed with the breadth and depth of
many meanings. It represents multiple ancestral lives, people with many
backgrounds and experiences melding into one resultant individual. It includes stories
from times past, often with little regard for accuracy. It is a hand-me-down
litany of beliefs, conclusions, and “truths.” It nourishes, if not inflames,
old wounds, unresolved grudges, bitter animosities. It glorifies that which has
been ennobled – from the vantage point of the ennobler. It evolves from legacy
into the cornerstone of one’s culture.
“Our Heritage” provides a bulwark against attempts to tell
an old story through contemporary eyes. When difficult questions are asked of
us about our view and understanding of past times, or how those past times
reemerge in our current life, “It’s Our Heritage” neatly obviates a need to
answer rationally or from one’s own fresh critical self-analysis. The past
simply remains frozen in time, unmoving, unchanging, unassailable. As a result,
WE remain frozen in time, unmoving, unchanging, our perceptions unassailable.
Nowhere is this idea of heritage more visible than with
Southern Culture. It is an idea, an institution, currently under great scrutiny
during this latest struggle over racial equality and justice, particularly as
regards the African-American community. While virtually every ethnic group in
America (except for the English) can point to a legacy of discrimination and
intolerance in their American heritage, African-American heritage holds a
special distinction in their story. Unlike other immigrants, African-Americans came
here
involuntarily – by kidnapping
and thereafter into the bondage of slavery. 245 years of the structural buying
and selling of them as merely “property” was followed by 155 years (so far) of
de facto continued enslavement and 2
nd-class citizenship. This is a
current reality that needs to be, must be, changed. But “It’s Our Heritage” is
one of the biggest obstacles to making that change.
A pause for full disclosure. I am a white Southerner by
birth and my first two decades of upbringing. (I am now finishing off my last
decades relocated back in the South.) I was born into a family and culture
steeped in the Old South, including the Daughters and Children of the
Confederacy organizations. It was a culture that operated within the “legal”
Jim Crow restrictions and separation pervasive in those times. All the while, I
was virtually oblivious to the racial segregation which surrounded me; “it was
just the way things are.” I asked no questions, while my eyes (and mind) were
shielded from what was standing right in front of me.
I was a voracious student of Civil War history in my youth.
Like any good Southerner, I came to idolize the names and places and artifacts
of that War – “the heroic war to defend the right of our state and its (white)
people to live without outside interference (i.e. ‘Northerners’).” The
destruction of that way of life by that war, combined with the forced redefinition
of the South’s legal, political and economic structures, was a bitter pill to
swallow. So when the hated ten years of Reconstruction ended, and the
opportunity then presented itself, everything was moved back to the way it had
been. Slavery was effectively reinstituted by disguised legal barriers, social
isolation, educational disadvantage, and economic exploitation. To make this
restoration of ante-bellum Southern life truly work, though, required
“justifying” – i.e.
ennobling – the War.
And the way to do that was to ennoble not the War, but the men who fought in
it: “the patriots” – the husbands, sons and brothers of Southern families – who
gave of themselves in service to their state and family. And so the statues and
shrines went up across the South to honor “the men,” rather than slavery and
the slaves, emblazoned with the adornment “Lest We Forget.” The statues served
to cover over the continuing horror and maltreatment of Jim Crow domination of
the “freed” slaves.
My great-great-grandfather was one of those ennobled heroes.
As a teenager from Tennessee, a non-owner of slaves, he likely enlisted more
out of peer pressure than a real conviction on his part. Nevertheless, he saw
the War to its end, and I have no doubt that he fought valiantly and served
honorably. After the War, he became owner of a general store, raised a large
family, and ultimately wound up in California – a normal, unremarkable life far
away from the War and its legacy. Samuel Carroll Lee is part of my personal and
Southern heritage, and I honor his legacy as part of the family ancestry that
created me. But that does not require me to honor the Cause that he fought for.
It was the wrong Cause to fight. It is today the wrong heritage to honor and
celebrate.
The South lost the Civil War. As it should have, as it was
destined to do. Yes, there was a legal and philosophical argument about the
rights of the States versus the Federal government. But men do not go to war
over philosophical arguments. They go to war over power and wealth. Slavery
represented Southern wealth. The South lost the war due to Northern
over-powering manpower and armaments, and the lack of the right side of a moral
and patriotic justification. Human slavery is a reprehensible concept, and the
fact that it existed in world history for thousands of years did not justify it
in America in 1860. It is an institution that cried out for redressing in the
evolution of human civilization, and America was unforgivably one of the last
to let it go.
My great-great-great-grandfather David Baggerly, Jr. from
North Carolina also fought in a war as a teenager – the American Revolution
that created this great Nation. However one might try to dress it up, Samuel
Carroll Lee fought to undo David’s work, and to split this country into two
parts. There is a word for the action of a citizen who wages war against our
Nation: Treason. However right he thought it to be at the time, whatever was
the call from his community, if one takes up arms against these United States
we would appropriately charge them with treason, and/or designate them as an
internal terrorist. I may feel compassion towards my ancestor(s) for doing what
he thought was right at the moment, but he was wrong. And the consequence of
his wrong-ness is not to ennoble him for that wrong, but to de-glorify his
decision. Which means de-glorifying the statues and memorabilia we have erected
and perpetuated over the last 155 years.
As history has shown us, great things can happen when a
defeated country separates from its wartime misadventure and begins its future
anew (e.g.
post-WWII Japan and Germany),
rather than stagnates in “what was.” It is long past due that we Southerners
move on from the stranglehold that “It’s Our Heritage” has trapped us under. “It’s
Our Heritage” freezes us into a time and circumstance that is long past. That
freezing prevents us from seeing the Truth of the past, and embracing the
legal, social and moral demands of the present. There is a reconciliation with
some of our fellow citizens that is right to do, and long overdue to do. We
need to consign the past to the museums and halls of study where it belongs,
that we might learn from our past, but not relive it. Honor our heritage not by
what we may have believed was right yesterday, but by doing what is right
today. We do this because it is right for African-Americans to finally
participate fully in the Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to which
they have long been entitled. We also do this for us, because it is right to
finally free ourselves from our own self-imposed enslavement to the burden of
“Our Heritage.” We would do so in order that we may move forward and achieve
the best of who we are. This is how I choose to honor my ancestor, Samuel
Carroll Lee, in the true reality of the year of 2020.
(If interested in an additional relevant reading, click on
this
link for my previous blog essay “Assessing A Life Lived,” November 12,
2017.)
© 2020
Randy Bell https://ThoughtsFromTheMountain.blogspot.com
