Conservatives false narrative

I grew up at a time when the public schools in the South taught a sanitized version of our country’s history that downplayed the impact of slavery and the role of African Americans in shaping our politics, culture, and society. Slavery wasn’t portrayed as good, but the horrors weren’t taught, either. We learned about token Black leaders like Frederick Douglas, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, and Harriet Tubman, but almost as asides rather than seminal figures. Nat Turner and John Brown were portrayed as misguided fanatics, not freedom fighters. And we never heard about the heroics of people like Robert Smalls, whose amazing and inspiring life story every school kid should know. He’s certainly as inspiring as Nathan Hale, Alvin York, or Audie Murphy.

I didn’t even learn the history of my own state until I was in my 30s. I had never heard of the Wilmington coup and massacre. I was taught that Reconstruction was an occupation of carpetbaggers and scalawags that caused hardship on the South, not that it ended too soon to avert Jim Crow.

The myth of the South and banality of slavery was shaped by generations of Southern academics and writers. They made heroes of villains and insisted that order justified oppression. They were so successful in their propaganda that most of the country looked away as Southern authorities used terror and coercion to maintain a social order that systematically denied rights to a significant part of the states’ population.

More than 50 years after school integration and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., we’re finally getting the history and stories we need to hear. I keep learning about African American leaders, inventors, and entrepreneurs, like Smalls, journalist Ida B. Wells, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams who performed the first open-heart surgery. We’re also learning that obscuring history and shaping the historical narrative kept the social order intact and justified oppression and discrimination.

I just finished Erik Larson’s new book, “Demon of Unrest,” about the attack on Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War. He makes clear that slavery and submission of African Americans shaped the politics and culture of the Charleston and other Southern cities. Blacks, both free and enslaved, had a daily curfew not enforced on whites. Southern leaders convinced themselves of their racial superiority and twisted logic to insist that slavery was a moral institution while using clearly immoral measures to keep African Americans from seeking their freedom.

I could hear the echoes of the sentiments that shaped white attitudes towards Blacks in my own lifetime. In the era just following the height of the Civil Rights movement, when I was going to school and coming of age, I heard plenty of justifications for keeping African Americans second-class citizens, mainly their intellectual inferiority and their propensity for violence and criminal activity. Over time, most of that talk was relegated to backrooms or only whispered among like-minded bigots.

Now, though, I see people re-writing history or ignoring their own prejudices to push back against societal changes that are making the country more just. Earlier this week, Ben Shapiro re-tweeted a Black academic named Wilfred Reilly who wrote, “Overall, more whites than Blacks were lynched in 23 states (a majority of states at the time), before we add in Hispanic and Native numbers…Lynching was often racist, but posse 'justice' was also very often just how communities dealt with accused rapists and cattle thieves and such.”

Reilly was in turn retweeting a guy with a chart showing lynching by state and race that indicated more white people were lynched in western states. It also showed the number of lynchings of Blacks in the South dwarfed any other state. It ignored that lynching and terror in Southern states were essentially state sponsored as a way to control the population of African Americans, not mete out justice.

On Fox News, Jesse Watters called Kamala Harris a “DEI” vice-president.Harris was attorney general of the largest state in nation before becoming the U.S. Senator from California. Implying that she’s not qualified and was only chosen for her race is pretty clearly racist.

He says the country “is almost over” because of the influx of immigrants. They’re coming for your culture! Again, he’s playing to racist reactionaries and trying to scare voters into supporting Trump.

When the 1619 Project was published the backlash against it was fierce. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with its premise, but I think it offers a legitimate perspective. The people criticizing it, on the other, tried to discredit it complete while having spent most of their careers remarkably silent about the Lost Cause narrative of history.

Conservatives are again trying to rewrite history, downplaying the accomplishments of people who aren’t white. Like Reilly, and Shapiro who promoted him, they want to diminish the trauma caused by centuries of state-sponsored terror as a means of social control. Watters is whipping up the furor by warning of the hordes of non-English speaking brown people coming over the border to destroy the country.

They are trying desperately to preserve a false narrative they’ve been telling themselves for generations: America is a country built by and for white people and now it’s under attack. For a brief period, that story was being debunked and the public was getting a more honest reckoning of our history. Now, they’re bringing it back with a vengeance.

Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of Politics NC.