Je Suis Charleston

Last week, halfway through a vacation where I spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying about being mauled by a shark, another white shooter opened fire some 200 miles down the coast. During the manhunt, I watched helicopters thunder up and down the shore searching, not for Dylann Roof, but for a threat so rare as to be almost illusory. In all this, I know, there is a parable for whiteness and its absurd preoccupations in the face of great privilege. Its self-obsessed imagination. My unearned oblivion.

Still, there are things that I know. Having spent the first 18 years of my life in the mountains of Tennessee, and another four in North Carolina, I felt sick, but not quite surprised, when I heard that a white supremacist with a goddamn bowl cut murdered nine African Americans at a historic church in Charleston. Right now the press is doing what it does, trying to play up this white terrorist’s personhood. (Did you know that his poor sister had to cancel her wedding?) The awful truth is that he is like us, just not in the sense such manipulations imply. For years, Roof has been spewing poisonous nightmare views that the people around him didn’t identify as extreme. And why would they?  Frankly I’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between sizeable chunks of Roof’s manifesto and certain Facebook posts by my high school acquaintances. His thoughts on, say, George Zimmerman sound a lot like my uncle’s. The difference is that Roof’s rant has the gravitas we are forced to give someone who has murdered nine people. All too often we try to laugh off the words of regular old non-murderous racists, or just live with them, however uneasily.

Now that the Confederate flag has been denounced by the likes of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Walmart, it seems that mainstream society finally recognizes this relic of our shameful past as racist imagery. I’m less sure that people understand that it is much more than just a symbol; it is also a threat. Though I spent more than half my life in the South, I find it difficult to articulate the ways in which its discourse is not just a code, but codes built upon codes, including syrupy insults and thinly veiled warnings. Depending on which side of the law you ascribe to, the Confederate flag carries the implication of violence or a promise to look the other way. Whether it’s draped in the back window of a pickup or waving over a courthouse, its message to black Americans is always the same: if I see you here, there will be trouble.

The rhetoric used by staunch defenders of the Confederate flag will sound familiar to anyone aware of the cultural conversation surrounding satire in comics. In both, you’ll see people rally behind racist imagery under the pretense of honoring history or supporting freedom of speech. Comics figureheads like Art Spiegelman who have no love for white supremacy per se have created and/or defended racist cartoons as though the integrity of art itself depends on it. Not realizing that literally no one self-identifies as racist, they imagine themselves to be that other R word: righteous. What would Dylann Roof make of “Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist,” I wonder? Compare Spiegelman’s condemnation of the “sanctimonious PC police” with the part of Roof’s manifesto that talks about how easily black people are offended. Yeah, I know there are differences. But tell me, what similarities do you see?

The Charlie Hebdo shooting was both an international headline and a story deeply felt on a personal level by many people in the comics community. What happened in Paris was a tragedy, and there’s no shame in being moved by a story that is especially relevant to your life. But those who said “Je Suis Charlie” (or, worse, “Cartoonists’ Lives Matter”) did not speak for Comics. They spoke for white people who understood the massacre to be of universal significance because the killers were militant Muslims and most of the slain were white. While this fits conveniently with our idea of Trouble in a post-September 11th world, the incident was, demographically speaking, a statistical anomaly. Very few victims of terrorists—including the state-sponsored ones that infiltrate U.S. police—are white. You know who is? Right-wing terrorists like Dylann Roof, who are twice as lethal as their Muslim counterparts in America.

Reader, I don’t wish to suggest that you don’t feel the appropriate degree of sadness or outrage or abject depression about what happened in Charleston. None of us has near enough feelings for the nine people who died there, much less the victims of other atrocities that happen around the world on a given day. But if you do not recognize the Charleston massacre as a story that pertains to Charlie Hebdo or to comics on multiple levels, you are egregiously mistaken.

As a white person, I’ll never fully understand, much less convey, what it feels like to casually encounter racist imagery like some of the more infamous Charlie Hebdo covers or the Confederate flag. I can only offer an imperfect analogy. Back in North Carolina, across the street from the house where I was staying, there was a bar with a BITCH PARKING sign out front. I wasn’t particularly alarmed or surprised upon encountering it. Had I not lived outside the South for so long, I doubt I would have even registered it as a thing. First and foremost I recognized it as a stupid joke (though of course a joke, like “celebrating heritage” or satire, offers a certain kind of cover or deniability). In its sheer ridiculousness, this joke made me laugh. On another level, I felt annoyed. On another level still I felt weary. And finally, churning beneath all of those things, I felt a sense of unease. To me BITCH PARKING communicated a warning so obvious it may as well have been in flashing lights: Go home, girl. There is nothing for you here.

It was lunchtime and we weren’t there to drink. We didn’t even sit down. My brother-in-law just wanted to buy an ironic t-shirt. Still, looking around that dark room with a handful of Bubbas and a specials list featuring something called the Wet Pussy, I understood that my instinct in the parking lot had been correct. As my brother-in-law cheerfully chose his shirt, I felt something that wasn’t fear or danger or even anxiety, but its nebulous possibility.

Art Spiegelman’s blown cover for the New Statesman reminds me a lot of BITCH PARKING. The comics clubhouse scene is no longer about who’s allowed in; it’s about who feels welcomed. It’s about subtle signs and signals such as who is being tortured in the posters you hang on the wall. The flag you choose to fly.

Often, I think about the bathos with which champion of free speech and New Statesman cover boy Neil Gaiman imagined his own death at the hands of Muslim terrorists when he attended a literary gala at the Museum of Natural History:

Hanging above us as we eat is a life-size fibreglass blue whale. If terrorist cells behaved like the ones in the movies, I think, they would already have packed the hollow inside of the blue whale with explosives, leading to an exciting third-act battle sequence on top of the blue whale between our hero and the people trying to set off the bomb. And if that whale explodes, I realise, even an oversized flak jacket worn over a dinner jacket could not protect me.

To fantasize about your own grandiose, unlikely death is a luxury of whiteness. Back on the coast of North Carolina, I bobbed along nervously in the Atlantic Ocean every day for a week without seeing a single shark. One thing I saw plenty was the Confederate flag, both on the news and waving proudly in front of the shop that sells $7 towels. In comics I routinely see people hold up similar racist images as unassailable paragons of free speech. The next time you’re tempted to mock and dismiss those who tell you they perceive that phenomenon as an act of hostility, know this: the so-called PC police can’t do violence to comics by simply voicing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. What sort of violence your gleeful disdain can do to them—the humans, not the comics—remains a live question. Whether or not you deign to examine it is, as ever, your choice.

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Follow Kim O’Connor on Twitter.

 

Art, History, and Memory

 

Florida-Flag_By Julian Chambliss

Florida Burial created by Julian C. Chambliss


 
I recently participated in a public arts project that focused on the burial of the Confederate Flag. Predictably, this event generated controversy as the media reduced it to “black guy burns a confederate flag.” However, the goal was to engage the public about the Confederate Flag’s contested history. Conceived by artist John Sims, The Confederate Flag – 13 Flag Funerals grew from over a decade of artistic work. However, while art inspired this event, there is an argument to be made that the Confederate Flag is a “history” problem. This is a problem created by a “southern version” of history that ignores historical fact in favor of regional myths.
 

13 Flags Confederate Flags Flyer

13 Flag Funerals by John Sims


 
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the contemporary race debates in the United States provided the backdrop for this coordinated multi-state public art event. A burial inverts the assumptions of memorial and reverence linked to the southern experience defined exclusively by rebel fighting against the union; the project emphasized coming to terms with the Confederacy’s end. It suggests we can seek closure by recognizing the repressive and regressive ideas that defined that slave society and look to put southern experience on a different path. I agreed to organize a funeral because recent and past events in Florida highlight the disputed legacy of southern history. If Americans interrogate the flag’s meaning, they might reassess its role in an illusory public memory constructed to steal African-American liberty and stifle dissent after the Civil War.
 

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Julian Chambliss, Associate Professor of History at Rollins College (left), Jeff Grzelak, Civil War historian (center) debate the burning and burial of the Confederate flag. Photo by Lance Turner

 
A union victory and Reconstruction could not stop the rise of a powerful “Lost Cause” mythology that distorted meaning and actions connected to the Civil War.1 Historian David Blight wrote of Frederick Douglass’ understanding of historical memory that Douglass realized that memory “was not merely an entity altered by the passage of time; it was the prize in a struggle between rival versions of the past, a question of will, power, and persuasion. The historical memory of any transforming or controversial event emerges from cultural and political competition, from the choice to confront the past and to debate and manipulate its meaning.”<.2 Douglass saw the years after Reconstruction dominated by false memories that bonded whites in the North and South to the detriment of African Americans.

It was a deliberate process. As one southern veteran explained, if southerners could not justify the war they would, “go down in History solely as brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country.”.3 The result of their efforts coalesced around broad themes we know well today. You can “hear” them whenever we see the Confederate Flag. When people say, “The Civil War isn’t about slavery” or when they venerate the Confederate soldier, that is part of a broad cultural resistance rooted in a specific way of remembering the past. This imagined history shaped facts and marshaled emotion to support southern efforts to reassert control through force. The obvious targets of this persecution were African Americans, but in truth this unequal social landscape injured the poor of every color. Journalist T. Thomas Fortune explained in his 1884 book, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, the oppression of blacks was just one part of a broader “pauperization” of the southern labor class that benefitted southern elites..4
 

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Winter Park Scrapbook, Olin Library Archive and Special Collection, Rollins College.

 
These actions continued an established pattern in the South. Before the war southerners altered their rhetoric about slavery as required to bolster perceptions of the slave system. With slavery gone, white southerners created a new story to support their control over African Americans. Through archival research projects, my students and I have seen how both white and black southerners fought against this mythology.

Eatonville, the first incorporated black town in the U.S., came into existence as a way to repudiate the white assertions that “the colored people had no executive ability about them, and would ruin rather than build up.”.5 African Americans in Florida were threatened or killed for attempting to be fully engaged citizens. If they joined unions, voted, owned property, and failed to show deference they faced punishment..6 Whites that dared to speak against this treatment faced stigmatization, threats, and violence. By the turn of the century, a “separate but equal” segregation rooted in African American social, political, and economic subjugation was firmly established.
 

Flags Confederacy

Flags Confederacy by Julian C. Chambliss


 
This legacy of race conflict is the public narrative we must understand when we judge the flag. An online search for the “Confederate Flag” in most contemporary search engines will return one image above all others. Designed by William Porcher Miles, this flag is not the national flag of the Confederacy. Indeed, it was rejected in 1861 in favor of a “Stars and Bars” design that was ultimately unpopular. .7 The flag we know was incorporated into the battle flag for the Army of Northern Virginia. Robert E. Lee’s army was so successful on the battlefield this flag was integrated into subsequent national flags..8 As the southern narrative of the “Lost Cause” shaped southern views, the flag was infused with meaning beyond historical fact..9

While the initial “Lost Cause” narrative had elements of mutual valor as a focal point of public discourse, such sentiments shifted after the turn of the century as a new generation of southerners rejected the “criminal” effect of northern actions after the war..10 Historian William A. Dunning inflammatory condemnation of Reconstruction gave southern actions and perspectives a justification rooted in a twisted history. As Alan D. Harper explained, “It was ‘Dunning thesis’ above everything else, that produced for us the popular stereotype of Reconstruction, a stereotype whose central figure are in the words of Horace Mann Bond, ‘the shiftless poor white scalawags; the greedy carpetbaggers; the ignorant, deluded, sometimes vicious Negroes; and the noble, courageous and chivalrous Southerners who fought and won the battle for White Supremacy’.”.11
 

Popular South

The Popular South by Julian C. Chambliss

 
Popular culture embellished myths and justified violence in the first decades of the twentieth century. The success of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) sparked a resurgence of the secret society created to resist Reconstruction. While the original KKK was effectively neutralized in the 1870s, the success of Griffith’s film inspired William J. Simmons, an Atlanta based recruiter for fraternal societies, to establish a new organization..12

The resurgent KKK’s slogan was 100% Americanism and it appealed to white Protestant men (and their families). This organization expanded throughout the 1920s bundling white supremacy, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism feelings into a potent mix that attracted a national membership. The group’s success allowed KKK members to be elected to political office in southern states. Perhaps more astonishingly, states such as Indiana and Colorado also elected KKK members to municipal and state offices..13 Internal conflicts, scandals, and public opposition led to the KKK’s decline in the 1930s, but the public’s romance with southern culture reached new levels with the release of Gone with the Wind in 1939. Based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, the southern experience presented in this film encapsulated the tropes of the Lost Cause for broad consumption.

The myth and reality of southern life clashed after WWII with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The Supreme Court’s Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) decision ended the separate and unequal doctrine created by southerners in the 1890s. In response, segregationist groups resisted calls for civil rights reform and adopted the Confederate Flag as a symbol of their commitment to preventing integration. While contemporary defenders of the flag are quick to accuse segregationists of “stealing” the flag and assigning it racist meaning, the reality is that this approbation aligned with southern cultural practice of refuting reform that began decades before. Protesters turned to the flag because they understood it to embody the imagined South conceived and championed after the war. This was a South where whites were supreme and African Americans (and their supporters) were second-class citizens.

After the 1960s’ rights revolutions, the practices associated with segregation were scrubbed from public life. Yet, southerners continue to resist. According to Bruce Schulman a “commercialized” southern whiteness rooted in “driving pickup trucks, listening to country music, watching stock car races and flying Confederate Flag” emerged in the 1970s..14  Detached from any overt racial framing, this cultural narrative was another version of pushback and corresponded with a powerful political transformation. The dissatisfaction and resentment that led southerners to abandon the Democratic Party in the 1960s made them the backbone of conservative Republican political aspirations in the 1970s. By the 1980s the Republican Party relied on southern and suburban voters to support its call for “smaller government” and “traditional” values that critics argued undermined hard fought civil rights gains.
 

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Water burial of the ashes, “The Confederate Flag: A Belated Burial in Florida” Photo by Lance Turner

 
Since the 1990s we have periodically argued about the Confederate Flag. Yet, because we remain mired in distorted history, the injurious nature of this symbol resting easily in the public sphere is never fully explored. Beyond the heritage excuses, the flag is a signifier of a broader pattern of southern resistance to social reform that started after the Civil War and never stopped. For those shaped by the “Lost Cause” version of history, the flag burial was a challenge to bedrock beliefs.
 
The threats online and the emails demanding I be fired are nothing compared to the violence faced by previous generations. Indeed, for many people this project will quickly fade. The burial will not matter to people that equate the Confederate Flag to the Quran or the Bible and call the project blasphemous. It will not spark a reflection in those that question my citizenship or education as a black man. However, it might spur others to consider the dissonance of the flag as a defining symbol. For these people, it could inspire new thoughts and perhaps the search for a different marker of their regional identity. If that happens, the effect of the fractured history represented by the flag may start to heal.
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1. Caroline Janney, “The Lost Cause,” Encyclopedia of Virginia, July 9, 2009, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Lost_Cause_The#start_entry.

1. David W. Blight, “‘For Something beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1, 1989): 1159, doi:10.2307/1908634.

3. David S. Williams, “Lost Cause Religion,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, May 15, 2005, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/lost-cause-religion.

4. T. Thomas Fortune, “Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South,” Internet Archive, accessed May 23, 2015, https://archive.org/details/blackandwhitela00fortgoog.

5. Loring Augustus Chase, “‘Eatonville’–Winter Park Scrapbook, 1881-1906.,” Central Florida Memory, April 4, 1891,http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/CFM/id/27434/rec/22.

6. Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2006).

7. Southern Lithograph Co., “Our Heroes and Our Flag,” still image, www.loc.gov, (1896), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006677653/.

1. Thomas G. Clemens, “Confederate Battle Flag,” Encyclopedia of Virginia, July 18, 2014, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Confederate_Battle_Flag#start_entry.

9. Caroline E. Janney, “War over a Shrine of Peace: The Appomattox Peace Monument and Retreat from Reconciliation,” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 1 (February 2011): 93.

10. Ibid., 99.

11. Alan D. Harper, “William A. Dunning: The Historian as Nemesis,” Civil War History 10, no. 1 (1964): 54–55, doi:10.1353/cwh.1964.0042.

13. Shawn Lay, “Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, July 7, 2005, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/ku-klux-klan-twentieth-century.

14. “When The KKK Ruled Colorado: Not So Long Ago,” Denver Library, June 19, 2013, https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/when-kkk-ruled-colorado-not-so-long-ago.

15. Bruce J Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA.: Da Capo Press, 2002), 106.