I’m going to probably really get it for this, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Not everyone that upholds Confederate leaders or their statues is in favor of slavery, white supremacy, or racism of any kind. I served my mission in Atlanta, GA, and there were many people who idolized the leadership of the Confederacy and minimizing the slavery aspect.
You see, I believe that a large part of people’s unwillingness to let go of that side of history is due to the very nature of the Civil War and its loss. Sociology is an interesting thing, and people often shape their self-image based on complex factors. After the loss of the Civil War, people had to reshape their thinking. It was a crushing blow to their self-image. As those states were restructuring their laws, economy, and moral outlook, people had to adopt different means of accepting the loss of the War. The South has a very distinct culture, and that loss was a threat to their own culture. Over time, many came to accept that slavery and racism were wrong, but adopted a view that the Civil War was about much bigger things than that, and that slavery was merely a secondary issue. As with any nation’s or culture’s history, a certain amount of apologetics and whitewashing go into it in order to avoid the psychological dissonance one feels of being part of something unethical. Remember, many Germans should have known that their own Third Reich was engaged in an unjust and evil war with accompanying horrors, but they turned a blind eye because they could not believe that they could engage in something so immoral.
My point to this is that there may be good qualities to many Confederate leaders. There are many good qualities of Southerners who uphold them as idols.
BUT
What they and we need to understand is that there really was an evil issue at the heart of the CSA. We need to be understanding of their cultural identity as it is so wrapped up in the good of that short-lived nation. We do need to remove those statues and flags from places of prominence. However, we must do so with respect and with accompanying education so that the people whose identities are threatened understand the true nature of the Confederate cause. This will avoid violent situations and will result in a better educated, and possibly less resentful and racist, nation. When you rip down a deeply ingrained cultural icon, sometimes all it does is validate certain misguided beliefs.
While I disagree with a few points of this*, I’d like to add more nuance to the counter-argument than you’ll typically find. The easy counter-argument is: the Germans as a whole eventually owned up to their terrible past, didn’t whitewash nearly as much as we still do, and came out of this truthful soul-searching a decent people with a strong sense of national identity in spite of their history. The nuance: more in the West than the East. You see, Nazism is on the rise in Germany as well, but it’s far more prevalent in the East. I blame the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan jump-started a period of enormous prosperity in Germany, but only in West Germany. Nazism thrives on the fabrication of a distant past golden age, and the West was simply too prosperous for many to look beyond the present. The East on the other hand jumped from hardship to hardship, and imagining that things were better in the past was an easier thing to swallow.
As I said, culture is a complex thing. German identity is not what it used to be. National socialism was so much about national identity that your self worth was swallowed up in the greater good of the fatherland. Your wants and needs are secondary and your value depends entirely on your contribution to the well-being of the Reich. The development of European integration was a major step in reducing future war after the devastation caused by extreme nationalism through the centuries, climaxing in WWI and WWII. Today, the German identity is rather weak, especially compared to the Germany of the past, and has in a sense been replaced with trans-European identity.
Acceptance of the wrongs of the nation and the push for a broader unity allowed for the German people as a whole to adapt to loss of the war. On top of that, many in Nazi Germany were unaware of the full scope of the horrors the Nazis were inflicting upon the Jews, Roma, and other minorities or undesirables. The sudden revelation of such evil (as opposed to acclamation over time) jolted many into recognizing the errors in that policy, and the nation as a whole rejected that ideology.
In the South, I believe the situation was ripe for a different means of trying to cope with the loss of the Civil War and realization of the wrongs of their cause. The entire populace knew that they were engaging in slavery. Even after its fall and the subsequent economic upheaval, people clung the ideas of black inferiority because they never had been taught differently. It took a lot longer for it to sink in that, yes, the Confederate cause was wrong. Out of this realization grew a desire to justify the existence of Southern culture. “We couldn’t have been all wrong, could we? There must have been some nobility to our cause!” Thus the Lost Cause movement was born.
I’d also like to strongly agree that the South has a very distinct identity from the rest of the nation. It also extends beyond the historical boundaries of the Confederacy–I’d say the portions of the Voting Rights Act that were recently excised probably form a much more accurate boundary, sometimes going very far north indeed. The so-called melting pot bubbles a lot less in this part of the country. The idea of waves of immigrants bringing prosperity is something they read about happening elsewhere, with suspicion. The history of military victories starting with the Revolution and only failing in Vietnam was nonsense – the South has been losing battles far longer than that, what was one more defeat to add to the pile?
You bring up a good point here. There has always existed greater cultural homogeneity in the South, as it has always been a place of less exposure to outside influence and less immigration. As such, I am certain it has taken longer to adapt to the notion of right and wrong in terms of race and ethnicity. Bear in mind that it is human nature to be suspicious of anything unfamiliar. If you grew up in an all-white family in an all-white neighborhood in an all-white city where education was geared towards whites, then you would likely be racist when encountering blacks for the first time. So yes, the South has taken longer to adapt to tolerance that much of the rest of the nation has already adopted.
That said, I do not believe those statues and flags necessarily mean that everyone who adores them wishes to maintain a nation of white superiority. I feel that, in most cases, they are simply ignorant to the offense it may cause, instead clinging to the pseudo-religious yearnings of a regional (not necessarily racial) identity they are afraid of losing.
Taken in combination, I think the South needs a Marshall Plan. They may take it as a second Reconstruction, and I suppose in many ways it could be fairly called that. But the point is that as long as so much of the South is left out of economic prosperity, the past will keep beckoning, as it does in the former East Germany. But this is only part one – the Democrats pulled this off already once before with the upper midwest, using unions as the foothold to prosperity, which for a time overrode the inherent racism there. The problem is, like good socialists (and I include myself as a self-critical member of that group), they thought that once they solved the economic problem, the racial problem would solve itself. And that was baloney.
A Marshall Plan for the South…A Second Reconstruction…It’s an interesting idea, but not one I’m certain I can get behind. Bear in mind that there are some very wealthy people in the South, and much of the poverty is in fact among the black population. When I lived there, I saw a great deal of prosperity, especially among the whites. I feel a Second Reconstruction could be overall beneficial, but it would still leave the large disparities in socioeconomic and racial groups. Perhaps an economic plan that fosters independence, investment, and changes in behavior instead of simply investment in infrastructure. I just took a class on how certain economic programs find greater lasting benefit when they target only the poorest and change behavior, rather than simply throwing funding at social programs. They are both more fiscally responsible and find greater lasting change.
* Specifically, I’d say that at some point, self-delusion and denial adds up to effectively justifying slavery, white supremacy, and racism (because turning a blind eye to the past is not so much different than turning a blind eye to the present, and the motivations can be similar). And I’d add there’s more going on than self-delusion and denial in many or even most cases, such as our current Attorney General, who is a Confederate-botherer of the first order.
I don’t disagree there is a great deal of self-delusion. I am saying that such is not always malicious in intent, even if the consequences may be more serious than recognized by the deluded (i.e. allowing Confederate statues to remain for historical value also gives further justification to those who in fact still support the CSA’s true primary cause).