Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C.S. Lewis
Especially in times of great change, society manipulates definitions of sanity when unstable social conditions require scapegoats. “Drapetomania” explained the “irrational tendency” of black slaves to flee captivity. Benjamin Rush diagnosed rebels against federal authority with “anarchia…excess of the passion for liberty…a form of insanity.” The dominant medical perspective still reflects Puritan prejudices when it defines some children as born “neurologically defective” (a more acceptable term than “original sin”).
But in America these conditions occur (or are identified) within the all-encompassing situation of late-stage capitalism, in which the most corrupt industries – most especially Big Pharma – have been quick to take advantage of human misery, financially endowing university departments of Psychiatry and selectively funding pro-drug research programs. In 2006, it accounted for thirty percent of the American Psychiatric Association’s $62.5 million in financing. About half of that money went to drug advertisements in psychiatric journals.
(Americans may be ill-educated on these issues, but they are not stupid. Mass resistance to the Covid vaccines is not simply a function of religious intolerance, anti-science ignorance or right-wing propaganda, but very often of fear of corrupted science. In 2015, the editor of the leading medical journal The Lancet, cited “studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest,” concluding that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”)
Big Pharma provides the answer to nature gone wrong (previously cured by baptism at birth). In the U.S., 2.5 million children and 1.5 million adults manage hyperactive and attention deficit behaviors with Ritalin, with 17 million prescriptions per year. Peter Breggin, MD, however, writes that the Attention Deficit (ADD) diagnosis was developed specifically to justify “the use of drugs to subdue the behaviors of children in the classroom.” The U.S. produces and consumes ninety percent of the world’s Ritalin, most of which is given to our children, including ten percent of all ten-year-old boys.
However, when we hear of epidemics of depression and anxiety, we need to ask whose interest that impression serves. Cui bono? Follow the numbers: between 1995 and 2002 the number of children and teens diagnosed with depression doubled. American doctors are five times more likely than British doctors to prescribe antidepressants to minors.
Follow the politics: while minimizing poverty, irrelevant schooling and epidemic violence, the psychiatric priesthood maintains a symbiotic relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, which annually spends $25 billion on marketing worldwide and employs more Washington lobbyists than there are legislators. Prior to the Covid pandemic, the top class of drug by revenue ($14.5 billion in 2009) was antipsychotics. In 2008 the New York Times reported on Psychiatrist Joseph Biederman:
A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful anti-psychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials.
Due in part to Biederman’s influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003.
Simply put, madness is big business: labeling others (Others) as sick, scaring parents and pushing (prescribing) drugs as the only cure. Each edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(DSM) has included more mental disorders than the previous one.
One of those “disorders”, “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder” (PMDD), has defined premenstrual emotional swings as mental illness. A 1992 study took the symptoms listed for PMDD – then called Late Luteal Phase Dysphoric Disorder (LLPDD) – and asked three groups of people to document every day for two months the symptoms they experienced. The groups were women who reported severe premenstrual problems, women who reported no such problems, and men. The answers did not differ among the three groups.
Why did the DSM demonize a natural condition? Follow the money: shortly before, with the patent on Prozac about to expire, its manufacturer, Eli Lilly, rebranded it as “Sarafem” and marketed it as the cure for this new condition. The DSM complied, and recommended antidepressants as the only psychiatric therapy for PMDD. Lilly’s patent on Prozac – and its profits – were extended for seven years.
Deinstitutionalization reduced the asylum population from 500,000 in 1955 (half of all hospital beds) to around 60,000 in 2010. But Reagan-era budget cuts decimated the community mental health systems that had supported the released patients, instantly creating a population of tens of thousands of homeless people. Now, our largest warehouses of the mentally ill are the Los Angeles and Chicago jails.
Drastic overbuilding of hospitals in the 1970s left many institutions in serious financial trouble. Psychiatry provided the answer to this problem in 1980 with new diagnoses like “oppositional defiant disorder.” Marketing campaigns convinced thirty thousand families that only private hospitalization would keep their children from suicide. Ten years later, six times more adolescents – primarily white and middle-class – were confined to locked psychiatric wards. Skeptics, however, called the new disease “KID” (Kid-with-Insurance Disorder), pointing out the amazing rate of “recovery” once the insurance ran out and parents had to start paying out-of-pocket.
But in public facilities, the numbers of teens have actually decreased, because minority kids go to jails and, unsurprisingly, receive no treatment at all.
Enforced hospitalization exemplifies the shadow of a society that claims personal liberty as its highest value. The “therapeutic state,” says Szasz, uses psychiatric justifications to strip individuals of their rights. It creates two classes: those who are stigmatized as crazy and subject to coercive intervention, and “us,” whose conventional behavior and well-concealed abnormalities indicate our innocence. No one else – neither priest nor judge – has the psychiatrist’s power to have someone committed, even if he came into his office of his own free will:
Only in psychiatry are there ‘patients’ who don’t want to be patients…If you’re in a building that you can’t get out of, that’s not a hospital; it’s a prison.
Certainly, many of the involuntarily committed are dangerous to themselves or others. Yet too often, psychiatrists function as the Church once did, as agents of the state, as gatekeepers who determine who is or isn’t the Other.
What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? – Theodore Roethke
Divide us those in darkness from those who walk in light. – Kurt Weill
Part One
Dionysus was the ancient Greek god of wine, drunkenness, masks, frenzy, ecstatic joy, paradox, suffering, tragedy – and madness. Wherever he appeared, he subverted the classical Greek consensus of reason, exalted discourse, and refined culture. He posed annoying questions upon king and philosopher alike, tore down the walls of the isolated ego and insisted that everyone was fundamentally animal, social, instinctual, sexual and irrational.
In terms of Depth Psychology, he represents the paradoxical archetype of the Other. He is an aspect of nature – and human nature – that is both outside the boundaries of the known, familiar and acceptable, but also deep within, at its very core. Since he confronts us with the mystery behind the reconciliation of opposites – male/female, active/passive, light/dark, mortal/immortal, sacred/profane – we can only define him by what he isn’t. Simply by showing up at the gates of the city (or the mind), he threatens our carefully built sense of who we are. He reminds us that identity is constantly shifting.
Consequently, patriarchs and authoritarians have attempted to repress the Dionysian impulse for well over two millennia. However, his modern incarnations persist in our imagination as the Other. He is everything that America has cast into the shadows: women, gays, non-bindery or transgender people, people of color and poor people. But this happens at a great cost. By denying this innate archetype, we deny much of who we are, because, as Walt Whitman taught us, we all contain multitudes.
If Dionysus were to speak to Psychology and the medical establishment in the Age of Covid, economic instability, Black Lives Matter, climate change and a collapsing American empire, he might ask certain annoying questions, such as:
Is a child molester a criminal, a sinner or a sick person? Why do we think of a terrorist or a tyrant as evil rather than sick? Why are convicted murderers not considered insane? Why do we punish criminals instead of rehabilitating them? Why does America demonize its children simply because their parents are poor? Why are we so violent? Why are the mentally ill disproportionately female and poor? In a dysfunctional culture, what is a dysfunctional family? What is functional? Why do we take so many drugs, legal or otherwise? Why, in these maddening times, isn’t everyone running through the streets raving and grieving? Isn’t willful innocence a form of madness?
Invoking this god as my guide, I want to circle around these themes in a Hermetic, Dionysian, soulful, non-linear manner, showing more interest in surprising connections and brief liftings of the veil than in logical proof. In his realm, the questions are more interesting than the answers.
Dionysus
The god of madness lives in our asylums and halfway houses and among the homeless. And at home: In any given year one in four adult Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. Six percent are seriously debilitated; and half will develop a mental disorder at some time in our lives. Depression has doubled since World War II, with each generation showing increasing rates. It now impacts twenty million American adults. One in ten women and six percent of children take antidepressants.
Nearly half of young people have been diagnosed with some sort of psychiatric condition (counting substance abuse), and almost twenty percent have a personality disorder that interferes with everyday life. Eighteen percent of college students take prescription psychological medications, and fifteen percent are clinically depressed. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students.
Although the percentage of Americans confined to mental hospitals has declined since the 1960s, the numbers of those seeking professional help has increased. Still, nearly three-quarters of those with serious psychiatric problems never get professional help, turning instead to alcohol and other forms of self-medication.
The statistics indicate that many of us are going crazy. But, asks Dionysus, who defines sanity? For decades, Benjamin Rush’s nineteenth-century definition prevailed: “…an aptitude to judge of things like other men, and regular habits, etc.”
But for those considered abnormal, Rush, the father of American psychiatry, advised, “…TERROR…should be employed in the cure of madness…FEAR, accompanied with PAIN, and a sense of SHAME, has sometimes cured this disease.” His name evokes the history of the brutal treatment of the mentally ill, in which all manner of torture was used well into the 20th century, including mustard baths, application of hot irons, “punishment chairs,” bleeding with leaches, electroshock and “refrigeration therapy.”
Freud saw sanity as the abilities to love and work. This meant fitting in with one’s cultural norms. One of his disciples stated that the goal of psychoanalysis is “the eradication of mystery.”
The libertarian psychotherapist Thomas Szasz, however, insisted that most mental illness is composed only of behaviors that psychiatrists – white, middle-class men – disapprove of.
Dionysus also asks, who should die because they commit crimes even though they know right from wrong? America no longer executes the mentally retarded, and Psychiatry has drawn the I.Q. line at 70. Paula Caplan, however, argues that I.Q. testing is notoriously inaccurate:
Like ‘intelligence,’ ‘retardation’ is a construct. Why should anyone decide that a prisoner who scores 69 on an IQ test should live but one who scores 71 should die?
We know what is acceptable by identifying those who, as John Jervis writes, “contradict the official self-image, disturb its clarity, question its necessity.” “Female” behavior has long been the baseline. Doctors committed nineteenth century women to asylums for such “symptoms” as flirting too much, refusing to marry men chosen by their fathers and excessive religious fervor. Asylums, writes Phyliss Chesler, functioned as “… penalties for being “female,” as well as desiring…not to be.” The gender imbalance still exists, even if such behaviors are no longer valid excuses for institutionalization. It remains safer for women to turn their dissatisfaction inward through depression rather than outward through violence (more typically male behavior). One in eight women will be diagnosed with depression during their lifetime, and they are twice as likely as men to receive electroshock treatment.
Middle-class women utilize private therapy, but often consider hospitalization in midlife (if they can afford it), when they are both overworked and beginning to feel sexually and maternally expendable. Chesler claims that, prior to 1970’s feminism, most women simply gave in to mixed expectations of their social condition, which provided them few options. Now, single, divorced, and widowed women all have lower rates of mental illness than married women, and the reverse is true for men. Poor women, however, have few options but the penal system and state mental hospitals.
If “female” behavior – collective, emotional, “hysterical” – defines the shadow of our value system – and of the prejudices of psychology – then the perspective within the pale is American radical individualism, which emphasizes the individual differentiating out of the family – the heroic ego, as James Hillman described, in a hostile world.
People who cannot weep together are people who cannot laugh together…The other side of real grief is real joy. – Malidoma Some´
Be joyful even though you’ve considered all the facts. – Wendell Berry
Why do we express our condolences with the hope that a recently deceased soul can be “at rest?” Why do we pay our last respects? Why indeed must we pay? Why do (white) Americans cry so sparingly at funerals? What do we mean by “closure?”
But there is a great opportunity before us: the revival on American soil of indigenous mourning rituals.
In the old thinking death is a communal process, and it requires deep commitment and attention on the part of the survivors. The dead need specific forms of action by the living to complete their transition to the other world. The living need this as well, because completion of their ritual responsibilities moves them into a new phase of life.
When survivors aren’t allowed sufficient time to grieve, however, the wounds close too soon, remain infected and may never heal. In many traditions, the unburied or ungrieved dead haunt those who should have performed the appropriate rites. In ritual terms, such souls are stuck in liminality; they have not accomplished the final phase of the transition – incorporation or initiation into the other world. Like vampires, they are “undead,” “betwixt and between.”
The Balinese, among many other people, believe that the recently deceased are dangerous, even demonic. But once the community completes the rituals of closure, everyone is free to venerate them as ancestral gods (Are we getting into cultural appropriation here? Here’s an essay of mine on that subject). Such traditions are also found in the West. In both Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, souls that are not sufficiently sinless to enter heaven must first be purified in Purgatory, and the prayers of the living decrease the time the dead must spend there. Both the requiem mass and the Jewish Kaddish were originally intended to aid the dead in these transitions.
Then, but only when they complete their journey to the other world, they may be able to respond to the prayers of the living. The Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala take this notion further. They claim that the ancestors must be fed through two actions. The first is the willingness to live a full emotional life, especially through mourning. The second is commitment to the regular expression in art, ritual and language of beauty. The Maya feed their ancestors through aesthetic responses to the world.
Extended emotional catharsis and completion of ritual obligation can give closure, to a degree almost inconceivable to the modern mind. Our Protestant culture of denial and tearless, controlled funerals, however, completely overlooks the indigenous insight that properly conducted funerals give everyone who attends (in West Africa, the entire village as well as any visitors) the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to regularly attend to unfinished business with their own dead, or with anyone else.
But the “real” thing continues to bubble up from the margins where the indigenous soul still thrives. I address the recent, widespread popularity of Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos)here. This essay is about how the African imagination of ritual closure has long taken root in New Orleans’ Jazz funeral parades. As I have written extensively in Chapter Twelve of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: the Myth of American Innocence, and here, the traditional Jazz funerals provide us with a profoundly meaningful example of public, communal mourning and the needed closure that can result.
The funeral parade has two sections, or lines. The “first line” consists of the grand marshals (otherwise known as ritual elders), musicians, the family of the deceased, close friends and pallbearers. The “second line” is composed of local people who follow those who are actively mourning.
After the church service the procession begins to move toward the cemetery, while the band plays hymns and dirges and the mourners march in an extremely slow, ritualized cadence. This is the first stage of the universal, three-part ritual format of initiation, which Joseph Campbell also saw in the mythic Hero’s Journey. The community is leaving the familiar and stepping out into the unknown.
The second stage is the actual internment of the deceased at the cemetery, where both the dead and the living briefly share the same liminal space, but outside of time.
The third stage is the procession home. Now the second line takes over and the overall spirit changes from melancholy to joyful celebration. The band shifts into high-spirited tunes, and the mourners change from their earlier, slow cadence into wild dancing, or “second lining.”
This is sophisticated ritual, although it may not seem so to those still influenced by American Puritanism. The return to the neighborhood becomes a shift from lamenting the loss of the deceased to celebration of their – and everyone’s – life. Closure with the dead also marks closure with old indentities. The mourners themselves are acknowledging that they themselves are now fundamentally different, because one who composed part of the group is gone. The funeral helps them achieve re-integration into their community, and the community itself is re-constituted.
But why do so many people who probably didn’t even know the deceased join in the dancing so enthusiastically? Because they understand from a lifetime of enduring the African American experience in the South that each funeral is another opportunity to make peace with their own losses. They know that entering into the grief/burial/return process for any individual offers an opening into the universal.
This video clip from the last few minutes of the first season of the HBO TV series “Treme” (pronounced trem-ay), depicts a fictional jazz funeral in a particularly sensitive fashion.
LaDonna, the thin Black woman with upswept hair, stands with family members at the end of the funeral service for her brother, who’d been murdered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To signal the beginning of the homeward-bound procession, the band begins to play “When I Die, You Better Second Line.” Another common tune at this point is “Didn’t He Ramble?” Consider the lyrics:
Didn’t he ramble, didn’t he ramble
He rambled all around, in and out of town
Didn’t he ramble, didn’t he ramble
He rambled till the butcher cut him down.
Till the butcher cut him down. This is a culture that does not deny death. And in accepting death’s reality, a culture (or a person) can open itself to the possibility of joyful renewal. I recall an anecdote told by a friend who spent time in Malidoma Some´s village in Burkina Faso, where traditional funerals take three full days. One woman appeared to be the happiest person he’d ever met. What was her secret? “I cry a lot,” she said.
At the beginning of the Second Line return, LaDonna is consumed with grief and anger, and seems to be struggling, but she eventually gives in to the rhythm and joins the second-line dancers in the procession. She is on her way toward achieving closure with her lost one. By contrast, Toni (the white, redheaded woman), hasn’t yet been able to fully access her grief, cannot join the dancing, and walks off alone, passing LaDonna, who is holding her children. (Hint: Toni won’t approach closure until the second season of “Treme,” when she can no longer hold back the sweet tears of grief.)
Later (in many versions), the band may switch to “I’ll Fly Away”:
Some glad morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away;
To a home on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away.
I’ll fly away, Oh Glory, I’ll fly away; (in the morning)
When I die, Hallelujah, by and by, I’ll fly away.
The lyrics (which look to the future) seem to imply envy of the deceased and condemnation of this earthly existence in the human body. But the African-American aesthetic knows better: the lyrics are clearly secondary to the joyous dancing and singing. It is the living who are flying away, but not toward the afterlife, at least not yet. They are flying back toward their neighborhood, to celebrate their dead – and to acknowledge one more day of life for the survivors, in this moment. Full acceptance and attention to the moment – as mourning – leads to the closure that opens one to gratitude for this life in this body, and for those who have gone over to the other side. Then, for some of them, we can offer the hope that they might “rest in power.”
For a deeper understanding of the contrast between the lyrics and the musical form, see Michael Ventura’s great essay, “Hear That Long Snake Moan”.
Ironically, in the last few frames of the video (7:27, to be exact), the camera catches one of the actual band members, a thin, aged Black man with a bass drum.He is “Uncle Lionel” Batiste, who died after a very long career in community-oriented music, two years after this scene was taped. In July 2012, New Orleans pulled out all the stops to give him the biggest Second-line send-off in years. Art imitates reality, which imitates art. And that’s just how it should be.
We consider our racial world-views as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable – the mere suggestion that being white has a meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses…Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. – Robin DiAngelo
American reality is dictated by what they’re trying to avoid. – James Baldwin
I mentioned in Part One of this series that Woodrow Wilson was the first Southern President since the Civil war. But during the past half century, the country has had more presidents from the former Confederacy than from the former Union.
As I noted earlier, most antebellum Presidents had been slaveholders. Indeed, 34 of the 47 men depicted in John Trumbull’s famous “Declaration of Independence” painting were human traffickers. Southern politicians took advantage of the infamous “three-fifths clause” in the Constitution, which determined how enslaved people would be counted when determining a state’s total population. This number determined a state’s number of seats in Congress; and it gave Southern states a third more representatives and a third more presidential electoral votes than if slaves had not been counted. As a result, most of those slaveholding Presidents were elected only because of these inflated numbers.
This means that if we were to divide presidential history into periods (1789-1860, 1860-1972 and 1972-2021), then the South takes two out of three.
It has become for the Republicans what it had previously been for the Democrats, the core of a national, racist coalition. In the early 1980s a lawyer in Reagan’s Justice Department wrote memos passionately opposing aggressive enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. It took three decades for that lawyer – Chief Justice John Roberts – to lead a Supreme Court majority that struck down the major enforcement provision of the act.
That decision ensured Trumpus’ election, and even since his defeat, it has helped enable the current wave of voter suppression bills in over forty states. Philip Dray writes:
When election officials in Florida, Georgia, or North Carolina force voters in minority districts to wait for hours in line before casting a ballot and send “poll monitors” to intimidate voters, they are reviving methods used by their forebears a century and a half ago. Accounts of racial profiling and state violence toward blacks, the presumption of black criminality, and white panic at the appearance of black people in “white spaces” would be largely familiar to Americans of the 1870s and 1880s, when newspapers carried almost daily stories of black citizens denied their rights, frequently in the form of white vigilantism.
But we can also see how Southern priorities have impacted the Democrats. We all remember the “Solid South” of Democrats that lasted roughly from 1890 to 1970 and that is now nearly as solidly Republican. I’m talking, however, about the lamentable trends that were on full public display in recent Democratic primaries. These numbers are from 2016, but they were similar in 2020:
The count of pledged delegates (not counting conservative super delegates) through April 27th showed Hillary Clinton with 1,644 (including 761 from the former Confederate states) and Bernie Sanders with 1,316 (352 from those states). Without including them, Sanders was actually leading by 964 to 883. Of course, it’s silly and unrealistic to theoretically eliminate the Southern votes, but these numbers do show their overwhelming influence.
Clearly, Sanders all-but conceded most Southern primaries because they occurred too early. Certainly, Clinton’s victories had much to do with the high percentages of African-Americans in those states who supported the Clinton brand. But does this really explain her 44 – 10 delegate margin in Alabama? I tried but couldn’t find any voting patterns by white democrats (who remain the great majority) in these primaries, but I doubt if those voters supported Sanders either. We could just as easily say that it was conservative, white, Southern Democrats who gave Clinton (and, four years later, Biden) her victory margins.
And what about this pattern of having almost all the Southern primaries early? David V. Johnson argues that the South has had too large a say too early in the primaries – and that this is no accident:
The effect of the Southern-leaning calendar is far more profound than the straight delegate numbers, because of what psychologists and political scientists call the bandwagon effect — the proven tendency individuals have to follow the beliefs and behaviors of what is seen as popular. The more the voting public appears to favor Clinton, the more voters will tend to do so in the future…This effect is likely even more pronounced due to the influence of superdelegates…This year’s Southern-fried scheduling is profoundly undemocratic.
As the primary season continued and Sanders’ name recognition increased, that bandwagon effect decreased. When Kentucky finally voted on May 17, Clinton won exactly one more delegate than Sanders did (28-27). We might well ask what if the entire south had waited until that date, and why the Democratic National Committee annually determines such a time sequence that inevitably gives its most conservative candidate early momentum.
Clinton won the nomination because she swept the Southern states – none of which the Democrats had any hope of winning in November. Stated differently, the typical strategy that moderate Democrats use to triumph in the primaries almost guarantees their loss (or at least extremely close votes) in November.
What few analysts could see (because it was too obvious) was that, due to this Solid South, and gerrymandering elsewhere, the Republicans could have put up any clown (and they did!) and still claim at least 45% of the Electoral College vote. Add in electronic thievery and that’s all they needed.
This bears repeating: Clinton swept the Old South in the primaries, but received none of their votes in the Electoral College. Partially because of voter suppression made possible by the Supreme Court majority (most of whom were appointed after elections determined by the same Southern Strategy) and partially because of old-fashioned racism and misogyny, these states all went to Trumpus. In 2020, these patterns persisted, with the exceptions of Georgia and Virginia.
Let’s be clear about this issue. Corrupt voting patterns and voter suppression are as American as bad food. But legalized voter suppression – segregating those who are allowed to vote from those who are prevented from doing so – is a Southern legacy, stemming from three hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow. And the DNC’s willingness to engage in voter suppression in the primaries also proved to be useless against the acknowledged masters of the art, the Republicans, in the general election.
Clinton’s negative numbers were as low as Trumpus’. Most Americans, right or left, voted for the lesser of two evils, and millions of young voters who had so enthusiastically supported Sanders stayed home. Consequently, countless progressive candidates, from the Senate to the local dogcatcher, also lost for lack of interest and low turnout. In this climate, even if Clinton had prevailed, she’d have had no mandate and no Democratic Senate. The American Empire – with its heritage of Southern militarism – would have endured undisturbed and unquestioned. And the obstructionist Republican Congress would have been happy to destroy even the mildest of liberal legislation, just as they had for the previous eight years, and blame the mess on her and Obama.
In July of 2021, Biden faces the same problems, for the same reasons.
On January 6th of this year insurrectionists carried the Confederate battle flag (and Trumpus flags, and Nazi flags) into the Capitol, and there was no mistaking its meaning. The lineage from Confederates to this mob was clear. Both were willing to destroy the union. Both used racialized violence to deflect their own fear of losing privilege. And both were shamelessly manipulated by cynical politicians.
It fit a pattern going back to the 1876 election, where Republicans traded away Reconstruction in return for a presidential victory. That compromise guaranteed that the Confederate leadership would suffer no consequences for having waged and lost a war to destroy the Union. This year, there was no compromise. Many members of the mob will serve jail time, but the politicians who enabled, inspired and sent them forth will not. In each case, white supremacy went unchallenged.
For nearly two centuries, ever since the times of Andrew Jackson – or should we begin with Washington and Jefferson? – almost all racist demagogues (political or religious) have arisen from the same Southern and Western areas that staunchly defended Indian removal, Chinese exclusion, imperial war, Jim Crow segregation and 4,000 lynchings. Cynical as most of these men undoubtedly were, at least they could lay some claim to being men of the (white) people and could speak their language without seeming utterly mendacious. The fact that so many could fall for Trumpus’ New York version of the Con Man remains a mystery to liberals who cannot understand the depths of grievance these people seem to experience, nor the TV celebrity culture that birthed him, nor the historical patterns that had long preceded him.
And he might well have faded away in January but for his months-long prediction that Democrats would steal the election. It was, however, a form of political genius to revive the memory of the Lost Cause, an idea that sits so deeply engrained in the Southern consciousness that it is like an archetype, always available to be activated. And so it has been by these people, except that now it has a new subject – the “stolen election”. This new lost cause is connected in many minds (and right-wing media) with the idea of a new civil war. Historian David Blight says:
We really have arrived at, it appears, two irreconcilable Americas with their own information systems, their own facts, their own story, their own narrative…In search of a story – in search of a history, in search of a leader, in search of anything they can attach to – lost causes tend to become these great mythologies whose great conspiracy theories tend to explain everything.
The new civil war isn’t new; it’s been happening at least since the 1950s, even if people experience it mostly on the economic and cultural levels. And it has a very specific purpose. As Americans fret over transexual bathrooms, medical cannabis and minor tweaks to the tax codes, the Empire abides and Covid vaccine profits mint 10 new Pharma billionaires.
The narrative of the stolen 2020 election is, of course, baseless. But we should understand that in addition to its propaganda value, it serves another purpose that may have longer lasting effect. As I showed in my analyses of the last two elections (and going back at least as far as 2000) of course there was massive corruption, and it was perpetrated primarily through Republican control of electronic voting machines in over half of the states.
Every time a Democrat denies that there were no irregularities, he or she is adding, consciously or not, to a massive coverup of actual crimes that the nation must address eventually.
Once again, in 2021, two Democratic senators (Arizona’s Kirsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin) are blocking all progressive legislation, from ending the Filibuster to protecting voter rights to making Washington, DC the 51st state. Ironically, the state of West Virginia was formed by anti-slavery whites who seceded from Virginia, and many ex-Confederates settled Arizona. Even among the Democrats, the South/West alliance is in control.
What are the deeper lessons here? One aspect of the myth of American innocence is the narrative of an America that put aside its differences, resolved its racial problems, unified after the Civil War and then turned its face outward to become the savior of the world (or: join the other white European empires in their frenzy to divide up the Third World for capitalism). From the mythological perspective, Trumpus’ inauguration, unpopular as it was, began the next installment of our four-year cycle in which the political establishment and most middle-class Americans come together in the great ceremony of re-affirming America’s divinely inspired purpose.
Yes, yes, I know there are differences. Tell that to a child in Palestine. Neither a Trumpus nor a Biden presidency would care to change these aspects of our national myth. Indeed, it would solidify them further and lay the groundwork for further imperial atrocities, further divisions between rich and poor and irreversible environmental decline.
But it may well destroy – perhaps forever – the notion that our political system has the built-in capacity to re-invigorate itself, to inspire millions of new, young voters to work for real change, and to encourage them to see their idealism reflected back at them by their elders.
Does facing the truth make us any freer? At this point I have little to offer but an invitation to drop our innocence. The truth is that such dark conclusions are of value only if they inspire us – make us willing – to re-write, or reframe, our history. And this requires the ability to think mythologically. Perhaps our national story – not the official story of freedom and opportunity, but the actual one, the one that acknowledges that the South really did win the Civil War – is losing its hold on us.
But because the new story has not been written yet, we are all living in liminal times, an initiatory period that produces more of the same anxiety that drives white rage. The bad news is that this condition will certainly give us more mass shootings, more brutal cops, more drone attacks and more Trumpus’s, and that more innocents will suffer.
Thinking mythologically allows us only one privilege: to entertain the possibility – just as Southerners did in 1876 – that the new story may well be in its birth stages. Thinking mythologically requires us to hold irreconcilable opposites in our minds. As Wendell Berry writes,
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Meanwhile, as Malcolm X said,
As long as you are south of the Canadian border, you are South.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell
No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history. – Cornell West
Shortly after I posted an earlier version of this essay (June 2015), the Charleston church murders occurred. Then came the debate over the Confederate flag and the predictable Republican rants that the South had fought the Civil War primarily over state’s rights (which, I argue, it won on that question), not over slavery (in a very real sense, it won on that one as well). Then Trumpus, even before he became President, gave every angry white man in the country permission to act out his self-hatred. Soon, they burned down seven African American churches.
The South had already won the war in yet another category, one that few could have imagined in 1865. It won the war of memory.
In pondering these ideas let’s keep in mind that we are talking about how mythology trumps historical accuracy. As Amos Elon writes in a different context (Palestine), “Then as now, a myth was not necessarily a fact, but the existence of a myth was a very great fact indeed.” A broken mythology such as ours serves powerful interests that naturally prefer to perpetuate their advantages. People, however – even white Americans – are not naturally stupid or insensitive; nor are they born racist. They must be dumbed down, proselytized, and propagandized to tolerate and support those who do violence in their names. This helps explain why those in power have gone to such massive lengths – for 160 years – to control our dominant narratives of who we are as a nation and how we got here.
The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread…
Neo-Confederates achieved their mythologizing through generations of fictionalized literature and films (Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind), newspaper editorials and religious sermons that depicted a postwar South invaded by carpetbaggers and rootless black people and punished by heartless federal misrule. The Dunning historians were very active in this process. Indeed, they managed to rebrand the war itself, calling it the “War Between the States.” Due to their influence, this was one of the primary ways Americans (not just Southerners) referred to the war up to the middle of the 20th century.
Eventually, they named hundreds of schools, courthouses, military bases, streets and entire cities after their heroes. Their romantic narratives converted brutal slavers such as Robert E. Lee and KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest into men of deep and noble intention. Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, the site of that 2015 mass shooting, is located on Calhoun Street, named after one of the most infamous racists.
With the growth of the Lost Cause story, from 1900 into the 1930s, Confederate monuments sprang up everywhere in the South. But there was a huge resurgence in the 1950s when the Civil Rights Movement challenged the basic assumptions of white supremacy. In other words, most of these monuments (honoring 184 named Confederates, almost all on public property) are not about “heritage.” Their real purpose is to perpetuate racist ideology and repress contemporary expression of Black freedom and progress. Alabama governor George Wallace unfurled the Confederate flag above the state Capitol in 1963, vowing “segregation forever.” The massive Stone Mountain site officially opened on April 14, 1965 – 100 years to the day after Lincoln’s assassination. Eight years later, when the Jefferson Davis Monument opened in Kentucky it was the 4th largest monument in the country.
Over a hundred of these monuments and symbols have been removed in the past five years, including from all U.S. Marine bases, but as of early 2019, 780 monuments and thousands of historical markers still stood, and the effort to maintain them is costing taxpayers $4 million per year. Over a hundred public schools, three colleges and eighty counties and cities named after Confederate icons remained, along with nine observed (paid) holidays in five states, which still flew the flag. These monuments are found in 23 states, including California, Arizona and the District of Columbia. Even Massachusetts (!) had one, which it didn’t remove until 2017. The Confederate standard flies over four county courthouses and was part of the Mississippi state flag until 2020.
White supremacists found a suitably provocative cause, staging hundreds of rallies across the country to protest monument removals and attacking anti-racist protesters. In Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd calling for the removal of a statue of Lee, killing Heather Heyer. They held over 350 rallies in the six months after the Charleston attack. Trumpus, always looking for opportunities to pander to the worst in us, called the removal of these “beautiful” monuments “foolish” and threatened to veto the 2020 defense bill if it included a provision to rename military installations named for Confederates.
After Reconstruction, in the “reborn” nation – now an unapologetic, expanding empire – war monuments in the North helped replace the farmer with the soldier as the prototypical American citizen in this new age of inequality. The soldier (rather than the factory worker) personified the conformity and vigor that government expected from ordinary citizens. Thomas Brown writes:
…over time, many northern memorials shifted from Union monuments to soldier monuments, indicative of a general military readiness…a few northern sponsors eager to reach national audiences dismissed the moral gulf between blue and grey. Yale listed its Union and Confederate dead on the university memorial installed in 1915. Princeton did not even identify the sides on which its former students fought.
The mythologizing reaches the federal bureaucracy, including the process of becoming an American citizen and its American History test:
Item No. 74 asks them to “name one problem that led to the Civil War.” It then gives three acceptable answers: slavery, economic reasons and states’ rights. (No other question on this 100-item test has more than one right answer.) If by “economic reasons” it means issues with tariffs and taxes, which most people infer, then two of its three “correct answers” are wrong.
It certainly infects public education, such as The American Journey, “…perhaps the best-selling U.S. history textbook.” And here is where we can ask once again, Cui bono?Who profits? “Publishers mystify secession because they don’t want to offend Southern school districts and thereby lose sales.”
Five million public school students in Texas use social studies textbooks based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws. Children learn that the Civil War was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” – written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict. And most states follow the example of Texas, since it is the second-largest school textbook market. Owing to economies of scale, some 50-80% of American high school students read history textbooks that do not mention the Crusades or the New Deal, and science textbooks that challenge evolution and global warming.
Creating and maintaining political myths involves two major efforts. The first is what is shown: everything from monuments and flags to films, TV shows, books, coffee mugs and t-shirts. The second is what is not shown. There were 1.2 million slave sales between 1760 and 1860. Yet the 1619 Project has found fewer than 50 marked auction sites. Sites of African-American focus represent 2 percent of those registered on the National Register of Historic Places, and only a small portion of these are devoted to slavery. Similarly, writes Tim Wise,
…we have weddings at former plantations. Check that: We have weddings on the grounds of forced labor camps, whose history we elide because they’re so “beautiful.”…Just forget that these places were prisons and the people who ran them were jailers and kidnappers engaged in a vile and murderous enterprise. And don’t worry, they’ll make sure the reception for your guests is well away from the slave quarters…That we would do all this, while no one in Germany would think to have their wedding at Dachau…tells us all we need to know about America.
For a refreshing contrast, read about the Whitney Plantation, “the only museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the lives of enslaved people.” No weddings are performed here.
Whoever controls the narrative – deliberate construction of ignorance – controls behavior. Due to well over a century of disinformation and mythologizing, nearly half of Americans – and 60% of people under age thirty – believe that the primary cause of secession was state’s rights. In practical terms, the Confederate flag now symbolizes both state’s rights and racism, as well as a host of other reactionary positions.
Why is this important? Because even though in 1860 state’s rights was not a major issue, in 2021 it is. Ask any resident of a Red state hoping for a living wage or an abortion or federal health insurance or medical marijuana or equal employment rights for gays, or the simple right to vote. Ask any African-American. Ask Dylann Roof.
I don’t believe what you say, because I see what you do. – James Baldwin
Let’s recap the South’s objectives prior to the Civil War:
1 – Preservation of slavery
2 – Acceptance by the whole nation of white supremacy and patriarchy
3 – Division of the working class by motivating white people through fear
4 – The further prosecution of American imperialism
5 – Acceptance of “state’s rights” and the erosion of federal authority
6 – Free trade, or low tariffs on foreign manufactured goods
The first three of the South’s objectives – preserving slavery and white supremacy – were essentially met. For at least a hundred years after the war, the great majority of African Americans, even if they were legally free, were unable to control their destinies. They were not slaves, but most could not vote, most could not live or work where they chose to, and participation in the American Dream remained an abstract ideal. Meanwhile, white supremacy was the dominant, de facto thinking in government, educational, security and cultural policies. And (with some exceptions) poor, working class and even unionized whites throughout the country had traded away the possibilities of solidarity with Blacks and improvement in their material lives in favor of white privilege.
What about those other Southern objectives of 1860?
It was the South that strongly believed in the establishment and prosecution of American Imperialism. Before the Civil War, much of the leadership for U.S. imperial expansion, first on the North American continent, came from Southerners.
Thomas Jefferson, who purchased the Louisiana territories in 1804 that enabled the westward expansion, also advocated for the annexation of Cuba. Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War in the Pierce Administration, agreed. And President James Polk, a North Carolina slave owner, prosecuted the War on Mexico. By the mid-1890s (a time precisely coinciding with the establishment of universal legal segregation throughout the South), the nation was unashamedly proclaiming its imperial designs all across the world. Greg Grandin reminds us of
…the role endless war played in sustaining domestic racism. Starting around 1898, well before it became an icon of redneck backlash, the Confederate Battle Flag served for half a century as an important pennant in the expanding American empire and a symbol of national unification, not polarization.
Much longer than half a century, as we’ll see. Woodrow Wilson, another Southerner, manipulated the nation into World War One and savagely prosecuted dissenters. In World War Two, Southern officers carried the Confederate battle flag into combat. After a two-month battle for the island of Okinawa, the first flag Marines raised over the Japanese headquarters was the Confederate one. In Viet Nam, a Black serviceman told a journalist that, in the barracks at the U.S. base in Cam Ranh Bay, “there would be nothing but Confederate flags all over the place.” There, white soldiers celebrated the death of Martin Luther King by raising the Confederate flag and burning crosses. As recently as 2003, American soldiers carried it into Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2016, writes Grandin, “The flag’s current presence in American culture is ubiquitous. It adorns license plates, bumper stickers, mugs, bodies (via tattoos), and even baby diapers.” And once the primary season got into full gear, the flags were a constant presence at Trump rallies. As I wrote in We contain multitudes, some of the least likely people still display it. And, as we know, many of the thugs who attacked the Capitol on January 6th carried it as well.
It should be no surprise that Southern politicians are our fiercest warmongers, that 40% of recruits, most officers and 80% of military chaplains are from the South, and that most domestic military bases are located there. Imperialism is the South’s biggest business and has more than made up for the decline of its agriculture. Internationally, the U.S. has military bases in over 150 countries and its expenditures exceed all other nations combined.
Consider even deeper implications, how different things might have been. It is at least possible that without the reactionary Southern Republican takeover of Congress and the Electoral College, there would have been no Ronald Reagan, no Bush (I, II or III), no invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, no demonizing of Muslims, no FOX News, no War on Terror, no War on Drugs, no mass incarceration of Black people, no Tea Party and no refusal to heal the wounds of Global Warming. And no Trumpus, who received 160 Electoral College votes from Southern states in 2016, well over half of the 306 he won.
We can’t put all the blame on the Republicans; Democrats regularly played along. But this is the truth: all of the sordid history of the past seventy years has played out because the Southerners’ philosophies of racist imperialism and white supremacy were never excised from our national mythology.
What about Obama? This is a long and difficult subject. I address his image (or brand) and his function in Stories We Tell Each Other About Barack Obama. But in terms of this essay, I suggest that he served the aims of the Empire in two ways:
1 – He was a hired gun. Right from the start, his role, wrote Greg Palast, was to “…soothe America’s conscience with the happy fairy tale that his election marked the end of racism in the USA.” Obama was chosen for his role because he could successfully sell the Deep State’s agenda to the American public. Once elected, he followed all of his predecessors in extending the arms race and supporting the most brutal dictatorships on the planet. By faithfully executing the Empire’s international priorities, he gave militarism the implicit endorsement of Black people.
2 – With his regressive domestic policies, he re-established a Black face on the projection screen for anxious whites, adding to their growing rage and setting the stage for Trumpus, who reflected mass disillusionment at an economy that Obama’s financial backers helped destroy.
So, on one hand Obama helped re-invigorate the myth of American Innocence. And on the other, deliberately or not, he provoked a newer, more lethal white backlash. He showed that he could play the inspirational role of the King. But it was only a role; and it was played by a trickster. The archetypal King imagines for us all; the Trickster (a poor version of the Trickster – the Con Man) is out for himself. In this sense, from the empire’s perspective, the Republicans (had they spoken honestly for once, off the record) would have given him a straight-A. We got Trumpus not despite Obama, but because of Obama.
Point 5 – Acceptance of “state’s rights” and opposition to centralized federal authority. This is a hugely complicated issue, but I will offer a few examples. Due to gerrymandering and removal of literally millions of blacks from the voting roles, reactionaries dominate over thirty state governments. This means that they have permanent control of at least 40% of electoral votes in national elections and nearly majority control of both Senate and House votes. At local levels, this has meant that public education in the South is as segregated as it was in 1954,and access to affordable abortion is almost impossible in half the states. Today, despite the successes of a few celebrities, fewer Black people are eligible to vote than in 1965, and 80% of metropolitan regions are more segregated than they were in 1990.
This situation is due not only to Southerners, but, as I wrote in Part Four, of the lightly-populated but well-represented Western states that commonly vote with them. Heather Cox Richardson writes that in the West, aided by migration of white southerners, “Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.” After the end of Reconstruction, anti-lynching and voting rights legislation lost because of the votes of westerners, and new states aligned for decades more “with the hierarchical structure of the south than with the democratic principles of the civil war Republicans”, thanks to their reliance on extractive industries and agribusiness. Aided by migration of white Southerners, “Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.”
On the cultural level, as always, Hollywood colludes with the dominant myths. Seventy-four years after the end of the Civil War, the classic Western Stagecoach depicted the post-reconciliation world. Happy audiences cheered a former Confederate officer fighting alongside U.S. Calvary soldiers against the “savage” Apaches. Stagecoach, to Richardson, is a cinematic representation of the South-West alliance.
Of more universal consequence, both trust in government and voting rates have plummeted to their lowest numbers ever, at least until the last election. And voter suppression bills in over forty states will likely reverse that trend.
These changes are the results of deliberate policy. The Republican agenda – led by Southerners – has been to so corrupt and degrade the political process, public participation, civic engagement and the idea of even voting so fully as to speed up the already existing process of withdrawal from those realms. For whatever reason we choose – from Tea Partiers to Occupiers to vaccine refusers – nearly all of us now hate the government.
This idea of state’s rights is an example of one of the central contradictions of American conservatism. It meant, then and now, independence of federal oversight combined with authoritarian legal and political domination on the local level over minorities and unions.
Independence from federal regulations and civil rights enforcement, however, does not mean some kind of principled refusal of federal aid. Forty-two states receive more money from the federal government than they receive. Politicians such as Mitch McConnell are masters at this game: eight of the ten most government dependent states, and 19 of the top 25 are red states.
Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge the effect of the Southern agenda of destroying faith in the authority of the federal government (except of course for “Defense” appropriations, potential outlawing of abortion rights and foreign trade – see below) in favor of State’s rights has simply not been looking. It may have taken over 150 years, but the South has succeeded, even if its attempt to secede failed. Now it no longer needs to.
Point 6– In 1860 northern voters favored high tariffs on foreign manufactured goods to protect their domestic industrial development, while the South strongly supported low tariffs. Some writers argue that this issue was the most important factor in Southern secession and the Northern military response.
Pre-war white Southerners were usually defenders of local rights. However, they favored robust national action when it suited their needs, and they invoked federal power often to strengthen slavery. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, writes Eric Foner, was the most vigorous expansion of federal authority over the states, and over individual Americans, of the antebellum era. It wasn’t repealed until 1864, over a year after the Emancipation Proclamation.
This was another example of conservatives manipulating the ideals of freedom and equality to fit their political aims. Southerners have always muted their defense of personal or local rights to attack anti-war movements or legislate morality around abortion and other issues.
After the war, as the influence of corporations increased, tariff-related disputes increased. But the long-term results are clear. By the late twentieth century, due mainly to Southern political clout, so-called “free trade” policies such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization led to the free export of American capital, its subsequent de-industrialization and the loss of millions of jobs (by the way, it was Bill Clinton, a Democrat and a Southerner, who was most influential in enabling this situation). The same clout has resulted in 28 states having passed “Right-to-Work” (otherwise known as union busting) laws. Southern Republicans, when it suits their purposes, and thanks to moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin, have managed to enshrine the idea of state’s rights in the national consciousness.
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. – Lyndon Johnson
Ours is a political myth not because it is untrue, but because its pervasiveness and its unexamined assumptions produce a consensus reality among a majority of those who subscribe to it; that is, to a majority of those who identify with its primary narratives; that is, with a majority of White people. It is a container of multiple and inconsistent meanings, allowing the powerful to manipulate the two polar American values of freedom and equality to suit their purposes. This is perhaps the central contradiction of American life.
Segregation (as the preposterous notion of “separate but equal”) was legal for sixty years. Now, reactionaries invoke the ideal of equality by claiming that legal equality is sufficient and calling affirmative action “reverse discrimination”. Some even argue that since prejudice no longer exists, minorities should require no assistance (which only encourages the sin of laziness). This false argument has potency because it contains some truth; since individuals have occasionally “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps,” then conservatives claim that everyone should. If they can’t, says the myth, Puritan at its core, then failure is their own fault. As Jerry Falwell, one of the nation’s best known preachers of the 1980s, said, “This is America. If you’re not a winner, it’s your own fault.”
To attack economic redistribution, however, conservatives invoke the opposite pole of individualism and freedom, which becomes the right to accumulate and invest wealth without government intrusion and regulation. Many if not most of the Republican Party’s recent leaders have described themselves as libertarian gun-lovers, and for thirty years their most prominent intellectuals have spoken openly of destroying the concept of government itself. GOP strategist Grover Norquist said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Others have bragged of undoing the New Deal. This, along with the new voter suppression drives, does great damage to working class Whites as well as to Blacks. The calculus would appear to be that wrecking interracial solidarity, combined with gerrymandering, is worth the risk.
But we all know that the same forces have consistently backed agricultural and industrial subsidies, a massive military budget and a carceral state, while also attempting to legislate morality, including the demonization of non-violent drug use and regular attempts to ban abortion. Any one of these examples would completely negate their anti-statist rhetoric. The fact that millions of their supporters (concentrated, once again, in the old Confederate and western states) do not see or do nor mind such massive hypocrisy is a tribute to the power of myth. Indeed, at this level, the function of a mythology is to resolve these contradictions.
In 1913, Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner elected president since the Civil War, (before the war, ten of the first twelve presidents had owned slaves, eight of them while in office) declared that it was “a quarrel forgotten” – and then proceeded to segregate federal government offices. Two years later, he endorsed a well-publicized White House showing of the Lost-Cause fantasy Birth of a Nation (originally titled The Clansman). The film’s deeply racist ideology was heightened by its technical virtuosity, its three-hour length and its musical score. It became a national phenomenon, convincing millions that the fiction they saw on screen was actual history. It led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which, a few years later literally ran several states, not all of them in the South.
The Birth of a Nation (1915)Directed by D.W. GriffithShown: Walter Long (as Gus) surrounded by Ku Klux Klan members
Wilson and many Southerners, oddly enough, did support unions, and this is a clue to white attitudes. Throughout the century, white people, even in the South, tended to support civil rights legislation, but only when they perceived the economy as growing. When they believed that it was contracting, they quickly perceived themselves as victims, not of the rich but of liberals who were redistributing resources toward the “undeserving” poor. This, again, is rooted in Protestant religion.
In the 1930s, as I have written in “Affirmative Action for Whites,” Franklin Roosevelt unified northern liberals and southern conservatives. But he had no choice but to maintain silence on race, fearing that his coalition would disintegrate. Southern politicians defeated over 200 anti-lynching bills (the Senate would not make lynching a federal crime until 2018). And they supported Social Security only if it excluded agricultural laborers and domestic servants. This compromise deliberately kept most Blacks outside of the welfare state. The Homeowner’s Loan Corporation, for example, gave out a million loans, none of them to Black homeowners in white neighborhoods, and “redlined” countless African American neighborhoods, preventing Blacks from getting mortgages even in those areas. These policies continued for decades, with the Federal government, despite its progressive rhetoric, acting as a proactive instrument of white privilege.
Federal policies shifted in the mid sixties with progressive voting legislation and continued through the seventies. Those policies were influenced by changes in public opinion and in turn helped change public speech. Eventually, as minorities more fully entered the political and entertainment realms, it was no longer quite so acceptable to use the old language of uncensored bigotry. Racist politicians (until the advent of Trumpus) were forced to use commonly understood code words(“law and order,” “states’ rights,” “inner city,” “super-predators,” “gangs,” “thugs,” “rapists,” “drug dealers,” etc.) to manipulate White fear. A Black middle class rose from the ashes of Tulsa and the other massacres. As I write in my book, the terribly long process of welcoming the Other into the Polis seemed to be concluding.
But the government’s attempt to fund its “Great Society” policies without raising taxes on the rich led to economic crises that have perpetuated themselves ever since. This was the beginning of the vast disparities of wealth that we lament today.
Soon after the Democratic Party finally committed itself to full support of Civil Rights in the mid-1960s, Richard Nixon lured Southern Dixiecrats to the Republican side and convinced even Northern white workers to vote against their own economic interests. His success in this strategy showed that the old mythic narrative was still potent. It was still possible – even easy – to divide and conquer the working class by appealing to their fear that they might lose their privileges. Major financial interests took note and soon bankrolled hundreds of think tanks and conservative radio and TV stations with their pundits and “shock-jocks.” The massive propaganda of overt fearmongering and thinly disguised hate set the tone for our current civic discourse.
Factory owners left the industrial Northeast and Midwest, and working-class whites became susceptible, once again, to backlash. This led to George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and their successors who pursued regressive policies including increased policing and mass incarceration to curry favor among yet a new generation of whites who perceived themselves as victims rather than as privileged. This has been perhaps the South’s greatest victory. Now the South is nearly as solidly Republican as it once was solidly Democratic. And America remains the only advanced industrial nation without a powerful, organized, working-class political party.
Despite federal legislation, many American schools were never fully desegregated. Countless school districts across the South defunded their schools, now primarily Black-attended, and shifted support to all-White private schools. Less than twenty years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, schools across the entire country quietly resegregated. After the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley, which ruled that school districts could legally be segregated as long as it was not intentional, most students once again began attending schools in which nearly everyone looks like them. Now, 45 percent of African Americans and Hispanics attend high-poverty schools while only eight percent of white students do.
These themes have played out with devastating effect since the end of the 1960s, when conservatives, far more mythologically literate than liberals, began to masquerade as “rebels” against the establishment. In symbolism if not in name, the South was rising.
Indeed, nearly every serious presidential candidate of either party since 1976, regardless of his Ivy League credentials (think of George H.W. Bush’s Connecticut accent, despite his residence in Texas) has presented himself as a Protestant and a rebel of some sort.
It has been said that most elected Democrats attended law schools, while most Republicans emerged out of business schools, where motivation and indeed brain science are part of the curriculum. For fifty years, Democrats have tried to appeal to the mind, while Republicans aim for the gut. Reagan (or his advisors) was deeply conversant with the driving themes of American myth. Wearing a cowboy hat, he launched his presidential campaign in the same Mississippi town where three civil rights workers had been murdered only 15 years before, declaring, “I believe in states’ rights.” As I write in Chapter Eight of my book,
Evoking both ends of the mythic spectrum, he told Americans they could have it both ways. They could get rich and have their traditional values, while paying no price.
Republicans continued to distil these basically mythic and religious messages even further, down to their Pre-Civil War essence:
You (whites) have your privileges because God has ordained them. If you have nothing else, it is because you have been victimized by the Other – People of Color – and we will punish them for their sins.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were abandoning their working-class roots and siding with corporate donors, leading to a huge drop in voting rates. This all culminated in the Trumpus years and beyond, as opportunistic politicians and media spewed their bigotry, no longer needing to water it down with euphemistic language. I wrote about the new racial permissiveness in this essay: The Dionysian Moment – Trump Lets the Dogs Out
Most observers interpreted “Make America Great Again” to be a return to the 1950s, but it could just as well have been about the 1850s. As Rebecca Solnit writes, “Inequality is the central platform of the right and Trumpism.”
Two current issues exemplify this legacy. One is the revived effort to make Washington, DC a state. I write “revived” because this is certainly not the first attempt. All previous ones were defeated by Southern senators, who clearly preferred to keep the city’s large black population under federal control and without Congressional representation. We can understand the second, the controversy over the filibuster, through the same lens. Those same Southern Senators used it in the 19th century to control the admission of anti-slavery states; they used in the 20th century to control New Deal legislation and block anti-lynching bills; and they will block Biden’s mildly progressive agenda if it isn’t abolished.
But through all these years hasn’t it been obvious to intelligent, educated whites everywhere that segregation and discrimination were moral abominations that had no acceptable philosophical grounds? Hardly, writes Jim Powell:
The South was victorious ideologically. Its view of the Civil War was the prevailing view in the North for a century. Columbia University Professor William A. Dunning, a founder of the American Historical Association and its president in 1913, was perhaps the most influential promoter of the Southern view. He portrayed Radical Republicans as villains…(and) defended segregation by claiming that blacks were incapable of self-government. A star of the so-called “Dunning School” of post-Civil War historical writing was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who finished his teaching career at Yale. He defended slaveholders against charges that they were brutal, and he claimed they did much to civilize the slaves. Dunning School historians dominated American textbooks well into the 1950s and even the 1960s.
Racist historiography was entirely consistent with Eugenics among a wide range of American intellectuals who argued that moral character was inherited, that “inferior” southern and eastern Europeans polluted Anglo-Saxon racial purity, and that Black blood was far worse. The movement hid nothing, because it claimed to be backed by “science”. Its leader, Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color against White World‑Supremacy, wrote:
…black blood, once entering a human stock, seems never really bred out again…The whole white race is exposed, immediately or ultimately, to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored race…segregation of defectives and abolition of handicaps penalizing the better stocks will put an end to our present racial decline.
From its beginning, the leadership of the eugenics movement has been drawn exclusively from influential white elitists. And those targeted by eugenics measures have invariably been minorities, the poor and the powerless…Stoddard’s books won him wide acclaim in Nazi Germany, and, when he visited that country, he was allowed access to the highest elements of the Reich’s hierarchy (including) Adolf Hitler himself.
Twenty-seven states passed laws to sterilize “undesirables.” A 1911 Carnegie Foundation report recommended euthanasia of the mentally retarded through the use of gas chambers. Yes, you read that right.
The solution was too controversial, but in 1927 the Supreme Court, in a ruling written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed coercive sterilization, ultimately of 60,000 Americans, mostly people of color. The last of these laws were not struck down until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in Mein Kampf, Hitler praised American eugenic ideology, and in the 1930s, Germany copied American racial and sterilization laws. Years later, at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis quoted Holmes’s words in their own defense.
Well into the 1960s, state legislatures considered laws that would mandate the sterilization of all welfare mothers after they had borne two children out of wedlock. These laws directly targeted Black and Native American women. In New York, municipal judges commonly offered women the choice of sterilization or a cutoff of welfare benefits. Even today, many argue that racism is at the base of the population control movement.
I mean literally today, 6/27/21, when the San Francisco Chronicle is carrying a long article about an economics professor at Cal State East Bay who taught Eugenics-inspired racist nonsense for years until quite recently.
In 2021 – A hundred years after the Tulsa massacre, we can still trace the influence of these racist gatekeepers in the thinking of many politicians and even academics. We can follow it further in the media pundits who fan the flames of racial hatred in the minds of deranged “individuals” such as the mass murderer Dylann Roof and the white policemen who shoot unarmed POC every 28 hours. Sure there’s been progress; tell that to the aggrieved families.
…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. – James Baldwin
To really understand America’s myth of innocence and how much Southern values are American values, we must see these tragedies in the proper perspective. Every 28 hours, a police officer, a security guard or a self-appointed vigilante shoots a person of color to death. Forty-three percent of these murders occur after incidents of racial profiling, and 80% of the victims are unarmed.
This violence has not decreased in the past several years, despite the fact that so many of the shootings have been documented in bodycam or bystander videos. What’s going on? My essay Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: The Sacrifice of American Dionysus investigates this question from a mythological perspective:
Apparently, the police…knowing how rarely they are held accountable, want you to see the evidence. In the age of cell phone photography and instant publicity through social media, these police killings have become increasingly, audaciously, proudly, brazenly public affairs…we have to ask, “Does this pattern have a function?… Throughout history, when a community needs to resolve some fundamental social transition, human sacrifice becomes its method. American Southern whites faced precisely such a period of acute liminal transition in the decades after the Civil War, and they performed regular rituals of human sacrifice well into the 1930s…The community achieves temporary unity and restored innocence by focusing its shadow upon the Other (usually accused of having the Dionysian qualities of sexuality or irrational violence) and projecting it outwards where all can safely view it. However, as in all addictive conditions, the need to be cleansed of the unacceptable feelings always continues to build up, and so does the need to sacrifice a scapegoat… Human sacrifice must be a public spectacle, or it has no value…
We as a society have given local cops and other enforcers the right and privilege to carry out these rituals of sacrifice – approximately five times a week, out on the streets, brazenly, proudly, especially before videotaping witnesses, with practically no interference from the legal system. The George Floyd verdict was a very rare exception. But even in that case, the cop / murderer stared directly at the camera for most of those nine minutes.
Derek Chauvin gazed at the Black woman with her cell phone camera as if to ask, “What you looking at? Nothing unusual happening here! This could happen to you, too.”
The image is a direct descendant of the many photos of lynchings (some of which were printed as post cards) in which large crowds of well-dressed whites stare proudly and comfortably at cameras.
Certainly, our current age – with women and gays continuing to question traditional notions of masculinity; with men rapidly losing jobs and their authority in the family; with immigrants questioning our notions of who is a member of the Polis; with technology driving change faster than we can assimilate it; as we wake up from the American dream to discover the nightmare we have been living – certainly our age qualifies as one of fundamental transition. Hence the search for scapegoats and the need to sacrifice them.
Around 2015 activists replaced “Hands up, don’t shoot” with “Black lives matter!” Why? Because the earlier chant was ironic; it was intended (like the old chants of the Civil Rights movement) to shame police – and the nation – a into moral action. But in this dark time, we have become shameless. And without irony we have to ask, Do Black Lives Really Matter?
We are talking about the situation of advanced capitalism in a world of austerity and lowered expectations; a nation in which the population greatly exceeds the available jobs. From this point of view, we have a very large number of essentially useless people. These are people who, because of the exporting of jobs to the Third World, have no marketable skills in what is essentially a service economy and – because of a failed education system – will never have those skills. Perhaps “failed” is the wrong word, since many critics argue that schooling is deliberately intended to dumb us down.
In the eyes and schemes of our corporate masters, such people are valuable only as consumers or as cannon fodder. As for the first, a person without a job doesn’t qualify as a consumer. As for the second, since the Empire now outsources much of its mayhem to “contractors” (otherwise known as mercenaries) and Third-World dictators, even the cannon fodder option has been reduced. So millions of them, primarily people of color, have become, quite simply, expendable.
Capitalism no longer needs them as it needed their grandparents who worked the factory jobs that once sustained a middle class. From that point of view, it makes no difference whatsoever if people starve on the streets. But they can still fill our prisons. They are the raw material, the natural resource (exactly like oil or slave-produced cotton) without which our massive and lucrative prison-industrial complex could not exist. Among the two million persons in federal and state prisons are 80,000 people in solitary confinement.Cui bono: follow the money. With 30,000 members, the prison guards union is one of the largest unions in California.
Ironically, once poor people are committed to those hell-holes, they do assume the function of working at absurdly low wages for over 4,000 businesses, either through production or through services. The junk call you received today probably originated in a penitentiary.
Mythology adds a dark dimension to our analysis. When we think in terms of the myths that govern our thinking at the deepest levels and provide a sense of identity in fast-changing times, it is difficult not to conclude that Black (and Brown and Red) lives do matter – but only to serve as the Other. America as it exists today will always need a dark, demonized Other to measure its own lightness by. In religious terms, in order to convince themselves that they are still among the elect, white people need to know, to see – on video – exactly who is not worthy of being saved, and that they are being punished. The simple truth is that, in order to remain “America,” this nation requires a population of suffering – deservedly suffering, as whites prefer – Others within the borders just as it needs an identifiably evil population of terrorist Others (now that the Communist Other has receded) outside the borders.
It remains a marker of white innocence, denial and privilege that, despite this long and well-documented history of white-on-black violence, and despite the fact that white men commit the vast majority of mass murders, despite the fact that blacks and whites commit crimes at similar rates, when psychologists ask people to mentally imagine a violent criminal, ninety-five percent of us picture a Black man.
If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they never would have become so dependent on what they call “the Negro problem”. This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything Blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the Blacks. – James Baldwin
Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life. – Senator Orrin Hatch
The oligarchs of the Old South knew that perpetuating slavery meant extending it into the western territories and new states. After the war, new versions of this goal appeared. The first was keeping the newly freed Blacks in virtual servitude in the South. The second was influencing conditions in the West.
After 1865, the idea of “free” was no longer one of the primary definitions of whiteness. Those who had previously been defined by the characteristics of “not-white” and “non-free” were suddenly free, and this change set off yet another in a very long historical process in which white fragility was heightened. So the ideas of white supremacy and white privilege required new thinking.
This included limiting the freedom to escape the hellish conditions that persisted in the South, even as Blacks briefly held some power. Some of these laws outlawed the selling or leasing of land to blacks and prevented them from buying liquor or carrying weapons. Extreme poverty, combined with these legal restrictions prevented most Blacks from moving west and kept them de facto slaves in the South. In the Southwest, similar systems targeted Latinos.
Over time, the Homestead Acts gave away over 160 million acres of public land (nearly ten percent of the nations’ total area). They were theoretically open to everyone. But in reality, homesteading became a privilege of whiteness, yet another example of affirmative action for whites, in which they received free land, federal protection from the natives and access to railroads. Thousands of ex-Confederates took advantage of the situation and moved west.
Although most Southern states completely undermined federal Reconstruction efforts to promote landowning as the blacks’ ticket to economic freedom and equality, there was a much smaller, briefer and poorly administered program of homesteading on poor land, mostly in Florida, for Blacks. About a thousand families (a sixth of those who had applied) received land. And in 1879, nearly 40,000 “Exodusters” settled in Kansas and Oklahoma, creating many Freedman’s towns.
But that number amounted to one percent of the Black population of the South. Since the vast majority of the 1.6 million homesteading families were white, it is no wonder that our mythic picture of the hardy “pioneers” is lily-white. A hundred and forty years later, their 45 million descendants compose much of the population of the states west of the Mississippi River. No wonder these states tend to be aligned politically with the far right. No wonder Oregon entered the Union in 1859 with an exclusion clause in its constitution banning all Black People that was not repealed until 1927. Each of these states, despite their relatively small populations, sends as many Senators to Washington as does California. In this regard, the Confederacy certainly won the war.
With the end of Reconstruction, Northerners gradually forgot the ex-slaves, consigning them to the reign of terror that would last for another century. In 1892, as the nation celebrated the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World, at least 240 Black persons were lynched. By 1896 legal segregation was in place throughout the South. Thirty states enforced anti-miscegenation laws, sixteen of them lasting until 1967, over a hundred years after the “defeat” of the Confederacy.
Let’s be clear about the conditions. The 1865 Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery generally, but it left an enormous opening by permitting it as a punishment for crime. Southern states quickly enacted Black Codes to restrict the freedom of blacks and restore slavery in everything but name. This provoked the North to send federal troops and institute martial law. But once the troops withdrew, the South quickly reinstated the codes at all levels of government.
Their defining features included vagrancy laws, which allowed local authorities to arrest freed people for minor infractions and commit them to long periods of involuntary labor, often on the same plantations they’d recently left. The state essentially conspired with Big Business. Historian Alex Lichtenstein notes that
…only in the South did the state entirely give up its control to the contractor; and only in the South did the physical “penitentiary” become virtually synonymous with the various private enterprises in which convicts labored.
Thousands of Black men were forced to work in conditions so brutal – and so familiar – that 25 % of them died while serving their sentences. Cui Bono? As always, we follow the money. In addition to being harsh and unfair, the convict lease system was lucrative. In 1898, for example, it supplied 73% of Alabama’s entire state revenue. It was the last state to formally outlaw it – in 1928.
The Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations ensured that these conditions would last for decades. Estimates of the violence vary greatly, but one source states that in Louisiana alone over 2,000 people were killed or wounded prior to the Presidential election of 1868. Glen Ford writes:
After crushing Black Reconstruction, the southern states invented, from the bottom up, the world’s first totally racially regimented society. U.S. “Jim Crow” inspired Adolph Hitler’s vision for nation-building under Aryan supremacy, as documented in James Q. Whitman’s recent book, Hitler’s American Model...It is generally accepted that fascist states are characterized, to one degree or another, by:
* Extreme nationalism
* Frequent resort to mob rule
* Oppression of an internal “Other” as an organizing principle
* Militarism
* The political dominance of the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie
The end of Reconstruction led to disenfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, thousands of unpunished lynchings and tens of thousands of unpunished police murders. We cannot minimize its long term, epistemic trauma (added on to the trauma of slavery itself). But neither can we minimize the long term effect on the entire nation of a solid block of white, segregationist Senators who soon had veto power on most federal legislation.
When lawmakers from the South strongly favored a bill, such as the Federal Reserve Act or the 16th Amendment allowing Congress to impose an income tax, it passed. When they opposed a bill, such as the one proposed by Republicans in the late 1880s that would have enabled federal officials to supervise the conduct of elections all across the country, they nearly always managed to kill it…By the early 20th century, most Republicans had essentially given up the battle to secure the right to vote that the 15th Amendment had guaranteed to black men—a right that the Democrats, who ruled every Southern state, had gradually stripped away from them.
The effort to maintain the South’s obsession with segregation and white supremacy has always carried with it the threat of violence. And it has – far more often than we’d like to think – overflowed into literal, mass violence, including over 4,000 lynchings and countless massacres of Native, Latino and Chinese Americans.
I’m writing this on the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa / Black Wall Street massacre. Joe Biden has just spoken eloquently about remembering history. What he didn’t mention, however, is that Tulsa, even if it was the worst, was part of a very widespread pattern. In the sixty years between 1863 and 1923, there were nearly two dozen events in which white mobs killed large numbers of Black people and destroyed their accumulated wealth. Here is a searchable database of these massacres.
Epistemic traumas are the psychic/emotional consequences; long-term losses of equity comprise the physical/economic after-effects. Manuel Canales and Scott Elder have calculated the numbers for Tulsa alone:
The Black victims filed insurance claims, but the insurance companies cited riot clauses in their policies and rejected them all. The policyholders sued for damages: Total claimed losses of the 193 lawsuits were $1.8 million in 1921 dollars. Simply adjusted for inflation, that would equal $26,752,705 in today’s dollars. Had the claimed losses grown for 100 years at 6 percent compound interest, a benchmark for investment returns, the lost projected wealth would total $610,743,750—resources that could have been passed down to generations of descendants.
Two of the worst massacres occurred only a year after the end of the Civil War, in Memphis and New Orleans.
These events followed a much older pattern. There were at least 46 White-on-Black massacres in Northern cities, including New Haven, Cincinnati (3 times), Philadelphia (twice), Providence (twice) and New York City between 1824 and 1841. Christy Clark-Pujara and Anna-Lisa Cox write,
There is a toxic myth that encourages white people in the North to see themselves as free from racism…White people in nearly every northern state before the Civil War adopted measures to prohibit or restrict equal rights and the further migration of Black people into their jurisdictions…
Once again, when we consider American violence and the related issue of gun control, the South has won most of the battles if not the war. Seventeenth century laws prevented slaves from ever possessing guns. Each white man, however, was required by law to own a gun and serve on the slave patrols, which later evolved into police departments. After independence, argues Carol Anderson, the Second Amendment was designed not so much to protect the right to bear arms as to keep them away from African Americans. Its writers didn’t trust federal control of their militias. So they crafted the language of the amendment to ensure that slave owners could quickly crush any slave rebellions without appealing to centralized authority.
By contrast, the right to bear arms, presumably guaranteed to all citizens, has been repeatedly denied to Black people, both slaves and freemen, from 1800 to the experience of the Black Panthers in the 1960s (when the NRA briefly supported gun control) to the present.
…the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don’t), their life – as surely as Philando Castile’s, Tamir Rice’s, Alton Sterling’s – may be snatched away in that single, fatal second.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. – William Faulkner
Religion in the South evolved as another tool to legitimize white supremacy.
How did Puritanism continue to grow there long after it had been greatly transformed into the capitalist impulse in the North? In the 18th century, as free land became scarce in the east, most immigrants, including thousands of Scots-Irish Presbyterians, headed toward southern and western frontier areas. There, they fought savage wars with the native people long after the indigenous population of the East coast had been eliminated.
Later, in the Deep South of the 19th century these poor Whites existed side-by-side with millions of Blacks. One can imagine that they must have felt guilt, conscious or not, for participating in the systematic dehumanization of the slaves. They learned to live with these moral contradictions by projecting their own worst intentions upon both Red and Black people. This meant that rural Southerners, far more than Northerners, were obsessed with evil in their daily lives. Meanwhile, travelling country preachers, always in competition with one another, were evolving highly emotional styles to gather converts, styles that eventually absorbed African influences from the slaves themselves. Here is the central contradiction of Southern Puritanism, as Michael Ventura has written: Its hatred of the body is conveyed in religious forms that excite the body.
From the first, there was no mind-body split in the practice of African Christianism, though the doctrine was just as fundamentalist, just as Puritan. The style of southern fundamentalism, as we know it today, white and black, came straight out of African churches…This is the bind the South has been in for at least a century and a half. A religion of denial worshipped with a religious practice that is anything but denial – the church sending out two contradictory signals at the same time, one to the body and one to the mind…A doctrine that denied the body, preached by a practice that excited the body, would eventually drive the body into fulfilling itself elsewhere…The style of a Jimmy Swaggart (who, by the way, is Jerry Lee Lewis’ cousin) would contradict every word he preached, and both he and his listeners would be ensnared in that contradiction, and this would be the source of the terrible tension that drives their unchecked paranoias.
The Bible occupied a prominent place on the frontier. With few educated clergy around, people interpreted it quite literally, rarely reading it for its symbolic context. It has been said that it was venerated more than it was read and read more than it was understood. The Bible was often the only book in the house (a situation that still prevails in many American homes). The result was a dogmatism and anti-intellectualism that became as characteristic as their disdain for Northern liberals.
The three major protestant churches split over slavery into northern and southern factions (Presbyterians in 1837, Methodists in 1844, Baptists in 1845). The segregation of the clergy into pro- and anti-slavery camps spelled an end to meaningful dialogue, leaving Southern preachers to talk to Southern audiences without contradiction. For them, to attack slavery was to attack the word of God.
So, while urban Northerners transmuted their self-abnegation into the sense of deferred gratification required to amass wealth, rural Southerners built up their fear of the Other to such a fever pitch that the Devil – and their own sense of sinfulness – remained as constant presences. Belief in predestination died out, but Original Sin remained. This meant fear of judgment, repressed sexuality, an older sense of deferred gratification, not to wealth but to the next life, and the inevitable projection of all these issues onto Black people, who became scapegoats for the entire region. When the Ku Klux Klan re-appeared during and after World War One, among its four million members were 30,000 Protestant ministers.
Belief in Original Sin meant longing for release from this life. Ironically, focus on the other world meant dismissal of this one and contempt for political participation. As a result, many fundamentalists didn’t vote until the 1970s, when cynical politicians manipulated the old fears and images of predatory Black men to swing the South from Democrat to Republican.
The fact that conservatives – and too often, liberals – regularly admonish progressives for speaking about race (from actually saying the word “race”) indicates the terrifying truth that the subject is taboo. Anthropology teaches us that what is taboo is sacred. Like the Hebrew god Yahweh, this secret is too holy to be named.
I contend that race (as white privilege, as identification in terms of the “Other”, as the prison-industrial complex, as the underpinning of our entire economy and all of our politics, and as the quite justified fear of retribution) is the great unspoken – and therefore sacred – basis of white American identity.
These attitudes are essentially religious, even if we now articulate them in secular terms. We no longer speak of original sin – not because we have matured as a culture, but because we don’t have to anymore. This brutal and childish theology is lodged in our American bones. Underneath the clichés lies our Puritan contempt for the poor, still as severe as it was in the 17th century, along with our association of dark skin with poverty.
Indeed, surveys still show that Americans of all social classes believe that losers are corrupt, that their condition is their own fault. To fail economically (regardless of the causes) is not simple failure but – in America – moral failure. The mind of the literalist condemns this moral corruption to future generations. Why else would this society condemn one of every four of its children to poverty and ill health because their parents can’t find suitable work?
With most white, older Americans perfectly content to have their cake (government services) without having to pay for it (taxes going toward lazy “welfare cheats”), too many of us are still willing to collude with the great secret.
“Original sin” is religious terminology, and so is “secret.” African slavery existed in Virginia before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. This fact has been referred to as America’s original sin. Ever since, every single white person who has ever set foot on this continent has benefitted from this secret. It is a holy secret because we still will not name it.
The ultimate expression of Europe’s sickness, the division of humanity’s innately diverse nature into the false dichotomy of Christ and the Devil, played out on American soil, where whites encountered their dark projections in dark African bodies. Everyone involved was perfectly aware of the symbolic connection between tree and cross. Orlando Patterson writes that well into the 20th century, “The cross – Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death – became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.”
We ask in our own innocence, didn’t they notice the irony? Recall that clergymen presided over many lynchings. Photographs – often printed as postcards – show crowds of well-dressed adults and children grinning at the camera while black men roast over bonfires behind them. These images, like those of the Holocaust (“burnt offering”), always elicit disbelief. How can people become so fully dehumanized as to enjoy such horror? Who are the real victims?
The Southern Baptist Convention is now the second largest denomination (after the Catholics) in the nation, with some 15 million members in 48,000 congregations. In the 1960s it staunchly supported white supremacy and was described as “the last bastion of segregation.” It didn’t formally apologize for its racist history until 1995.
Regardless, a third of Americans describe themselves as fundamentalists or Evangelicals and believe that all other religions serve Satan. Half of us deny evolution. We listen to 1,600 Christian radio stations and watch 250 Christian TV stations. Fundamentalists control the Republican Party. To ingratiate himself among them, every President from Carter to Bush II claimed to be reborn or fundamentalist. Even the religiously moderate Obama asked the anti-abortion extremist Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. Seven states still ban non-believers from holding office.
By the advent of Trumpus, however, white fundamentalists had been identified with the far right for so long that even his indiscretions, his brutal misogyny and his palpable, blatant ignorance of basic Christian principles was no impediment to his popularity. The bottom line was and is race; his invitation to racist exclusion and violence was all they needed to hear.
I stress white fundamentalists to counter the simplistic notion that Trumpus and the right wing have attracted the “fundamentalist vote.” The fact that Black fundamentalists rejected him at the same rates as all other African Americans is a clear reminder that the issue is not religion but race.
Without the vast influence of these people (and their tax-exempt political organizations), the world political landscape, from the population explosion to global warming to the wars on drugs and terror to the tens of millions of refugees they have engendered, would look completely different. Their resistance to birth control has condemned millions to death by AIDS or poverty.
For forty years, their literalistic visions of apocalypse have utterly determined American policy in the Middle East. Frank Schaeffer, formerly a major televangelist, knows that for these people, “The ‘purpose’ of the Jews is to be there to be killed after the Second Coming. Christian Zionists love Israel the way oncologists love cancer.”
Their susceptibility to a very long series of con men allows for an extraordinary capacity to hold vast contradictions. When they (we can certainly assume that most of them were Southerners) attacked the Capitol on January 6th, some carried Israeli flags while others wore “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts.
Muslim extremism might not exist as a major force at all without Christian-American support for Israel. Three generations of anti-communist repression has ensured that the only organized, nationalist resistance to the American empire has been by fundamentalists, who (ironically, like their American counterparts) were not politically active until the 1970s, when Catholics essentially invented the abortion issue and other elements of the Culture Wars.
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