Heritage or hatred?
8th May 2017 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
It’s a little hard to believe that some of the descendants of a people who decided centuries ago that it was “Manifest Destiny” for them to conquer and oppress all non-white people and control all of the world’s resources would fix their mouths to accuse government officials in New Orleans, not exactly the most constitutional, or equitable or place on the planet, of running roughshod over their constitutional rights and trying to erase their history and heritage.
It is mind-boggling how undereducated and indoctrinated a considerable segment of the white U.S. population remains more than 150 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
There are still people who believe with every fiber of their being that the Civil War was fought to free enslaved Africans and not as a struggle between wealthy whites in the North and the South over money, political clout and control of the U.S. economy. To this day, the myth persists that countless soldiers on both sides gave their lives to free Black people. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even President Lincoln had proposed sending Black freemen to places like Sierra Leone and Haiti after the war.
Another enduring myth is that the Confederacy is part of the heritage of poor southern whites. Slavery in the U.S. was the creation of the ruling white class of landowners — the one-percenters of their day — and not the entire white population. While the peculiar institution helped white males amass great wealth, it also took away economic opportunities from the white masses, who often had trouble finding work since slave labor was comparatively less expensive.
Black slaves often bore the brunt of the white backlash from poor whites, who resented the fact that slaves had a place to eat and live while their families struggled to survive. Poor whites were sometimes hired as plantation overseers or slave catchers who retrieved Blacks who attempted to escape bondage in search of a better life.
As the system of government set up to overthrow the federal government, the Confederacy was the brainchild of wealthy whites, who used poor whites to actually fight the “War of Northern Aggression” on battlefields.
Poor whites were duped into believing that the Civil War was being fought to protect their way of life when in fact it was being waged to maintain the lifestyle enjoyed by wealthy Southern landowners and control the national economy.
Today you sometimes see descendants of those poor, undereducated whites being used by the one percent to defend white supremacy and Confederate monuments. Only rarely do you see wealthy whites who benefited the most from systemic racism and economic injustice speaking out against efforts to secure justice, equity and equal protection under the law for people of color.
The same misinformation and indoctrination that convinced poor whites that Black slaves were the reason whites couldn’t feed their families has been used to convince 21st-century whites that they are being oppressed by Black, Brown, Red and Yellow people, paving the way for the election of President Donald Trump.
Interestingly, wealthy and powerful whites didn’t think twice about initiating a Civil War that could potentially destroy the nation, just as conservative whites today, whose campaign coffers are filled with donations from the one percenters of today, aren’t the least bit concerned about how their divisive strategies and actions could cause the federal government to collapse.
Waiting to pick up the pieces would be the nation’s most wealthy and powerful families, who see nothing wrong with taxing the masses and using those public funds to promote their own agenda nationally and internationally.
One of the things that struck me as curious about this whole flap over Confederate monuments in New Orleans is the lengths to which monument supporters would go to get their way. We hear all the time from the mayor and police chief about a “culture of violence” that is the root cause of Black-on-Black violence in New Orleans but we never hear any talk about this culture of violence that pervades Confederate supporters.
As violent as Black people in New Orleans are perceived to be by mainstream media and elected officials, you never hear about local government having to cower out of fear that the Black masses would go to extremes to prevent the government from taking some action that many Blacks find to be unjust or reprehensible.
Even though thousands of Blacks were displaced by the demolition of the city’s housing projects after Hurricane Katrina, the City did not carry out these demolitions overnight out of fear of contractors being targeted or murdered by protesters with assault rifles.
There was no need to bring in the National Guard or snipers when the State of Louisiana decided to terminate thousands of New Orleans public school administrators, educators and staff members.
Nobody was assaulted or assassinated after the Recovery School District decided to merge O. Perry Walker and L.B. Landry senior high schools despite objections from many in the community and RSD officials’ decision to build a new school for Black children atop a toxic landfill in Central City.
Confederate supporters have made it clear that some of them are willing to kill to prevent the relocation of monuments that commemorate acts of treason against the United States.
Yet, mainstream media continues to portray Black and Brown people as boogeymen, the ones that need to be feared and treated like dangerous animals by law enforcement agencies. Go figure.
As the city’s 300th anniversary looms on the horizon, it is telling that French Quarter business owners are still adamant about preventing Black entrepreneurs from establishing businesses in the area even though the French Quarter was literally built by enslaved Blacks and rebuilt twice by Blacks after it burned down. Very seldom do you hear about the African roots of gumbo, the city’s premier culinary creation, or the origins of the sassafras plant.
Nor do we hear French Quarter business owners acknowledge how different the City of New Orleans might be without the centuries-old tradition of Blacks gathering on Sundays at Congo Square or the undeniably Black origins of jazz, America’s quintessential gift to the world.
There has been talk about some folks threatening to boycott New Orleans should the city follow through with plans to relocate the Confederate monuments. That sounds an awful lot like some folks who don’t even live here trying to dictate to the people of this city what our principles and priorities should be.
Later for all of that. Let them take their tourism business elsewhere but be warned that the Crescent City is a tough act to follow.
We don’t need to depend on tourism dollars from anyone who thinks their patronage gives them the right to tell us how to live and relate to one another.
We’ll just have to bite the bullet and make do. To that end, we will have to start electing people to public office who are serious about improving the city’s public schools and diversifying the economy so that we can begin to attract new companies to the area and make livable wages a reality for the first time in the city’s 300-year history.
Taking down a handful of monuments to white supremacy in New Orleans does not compare to the destruction of civilizations erected and maintained by melaninated peoples around the world or the white-washing of history that makes people who should know better believe that Egypt is not part of the African continent, that Egyptians were not once a Black people, that Jesus is a blonde, blue-eyed messiah who was born in what is now called the Middle East, that Hippocrates and not Imhotep is the “father of medicine,” and that pretty much anything of historical significance that has ever been done in the history of “everdom” has been done by white Europeans.
Taking down the Battle of Liberty Place monument won’t undo the harm that was caused by Congress deciding that Black men, women and children were three-fifths human or by a Supreme Court Justice declaring that Black people had no rights that white people were bound by law to respect.
Relocating the P.G.T. Beauregard monument won’t undo the harmful lingering effects of the Jim Crow era or the glaring inequities that have created two Americas, one white and one Black.
Taking down the Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis monuments won’t make the shameful history of the willful destruction of Black Wall Street, the shameful history of Rosewood, Scottsboro or the Tuskegee Experiments vanish in thin air.
All it can and will do is break the chains of mental slavery and signal the approaching dawn of a new day in New Orleans. One where all men and women are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and free to determine their own futures.
It’s time to move forward.
This article originally published in the May 8, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
