Ouch, Right in the Heritage
By: Matthew Broyles
Tags: Civil War, Slavery, Civil Rights, Heritage, Racism

Let’s do a bit of a thought experiment.

Suppose that one day you find out that your grandfather, whom you love, has been convicted of human trafficking. He is unrepentant, even proud of what he’s put his captives through, everything from kidnapping, rape, beatings, not to mention the enslavement itself.

Now, you are related by blood to this person. He is part of your heritage. Do you celebrate him? Do you keep his picture on your wall, and go out of your way to mention him to your friends when you talk about where you came from?

Many people in Germany and other war-torn countries face this conundrum. People who they know personally, and have good memories of, nonetheless guilty of monstrous crimes. It is something these children and grandchildren have to reckon with, to fit into their picture of who they are, who they aspire to become.

A lot of us have this experience on a smaller scale. Uncle Frank, the wife-beating drunk. Cousin Jimmy, locked up for sexual assault. People we wouldn’t mention our relation to unless pressed. Certainly not people we’d like to spend any time glorifying.

Clever reader, you’ve no doubt deduced where I’m going with this. For those of us with long roots in the American South, it is difficult to avoid a connection to an ancestor who was involved at some level in the slave trade, arguably one of the largest mass murder/rape/abuse institutions in human history.

For many of us, it is an inconvenient truth. We know it happened, we regret it, and we strive to be better than those whose genes flow in our veins.

And then there’s the rest of us.

It often starts with the line, “I’m not racist, but…” and predictably deteriorates from there. Born and raised in Texas, I’ve heard it too many times to even begin to count. In most places, it doesn’t even need to be said. Drive past Jefferson Davis Park, or Confederate Parkway, or any of the myriad memorials to our ignominious forebears, and the voices of the past whisper insistently in your ear: ‘This happened, and we should have won.’

The next bit is always that the Civil War was not about slavery, but state’s rights. That’s a pretty little dodge, of the same ilk as “I’m not racist, but…” and of course it is just as irrelevant. It doesn’t actually matter whether you say you are racist or not. Any child can tell you that it doesn’t matter what someone says. It matters what they do.

If you believe that the Confederacy should have won, then you believe that my African-American friends should still be in chains. You really believe that. Because there was no Emancipation Proclamation in the South, and thus, with a CSA victory, all of those people would still be slaves. There is absolutely no getting around that conclusion, try though you might.

You truly believe that one group of human beings should legally own another. And you’re proud of it. So much so that you protest when reminders of that preference are torn down, requiring you to actually speak your monstrous evil aloud rather than let the statuary speak for you.

I hear “But it’s history!” That’s right. It’s over. The outcome of the Civil War was decided over 150 years ago. And you disagree with it. Which incontrovertibly means that you continue to support the moral reasoning behind slavery. Which means you’re an asshole.

I don’t care how nice you are to your kids. I don’t care how polite you are to the black lady at the grocery store. If you celebrate the parts of your heritage — and mine — that contributed to the kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of millions, then you are not only an asshole, you are a racist, and un-American.

If we’re talking history, the record shows clearly that the United States of America, a slave-free nation as of 1863, defeated and annexed the Confederate States of America over a century and a half ago. Any desire to rewrite those events to favor the South is a de facto admission that you do not wish to be a citizen of the USA.

Especially if you’re one of the Texas secessionists I run into all the time, whose threats of withdrawal from the union are as feeble as they are toothless. Take the vote today, and see how many of this state’s citizens wish to leave the protective embrace of the world’s largest economy. Who’s the minority now?

But I digress…

In the context of modern politics, I keep being told I’m a sore loser. That’s pretty rich coming from people mourning a loss incurred before the invention of toilet paper.

Let’s be clear, though, about what you lost. About the fact that not being able to own other people is such a burdensome state of affairs that veins pop out of your head when symbols of that failed human trafficking operation are consigned to the dustbin of history, along with swastikas and hammer-and-sickle. Slavery was always a terrible idea. And your insistence that its proponents were great people only serves to render my estimation of your judgment rather low.

“But my heritage!”

It’s my heritage, too. And I am rightly ashamed of it. My relatives who fought in the Civil War were wrong, and those who died deserved to. If they hadn’t, the African-Americans I call friends today would still be property. That is not a legacy I want to be part of. And if you do, then we have nothing more to discuss.