Caroline Randall Williams essay...

[handmade34]

"You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument"
"The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?"

…..I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.....

….Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.
To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.
The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Here's a link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html

[handmade34]

2. thanks

I did forget the link... what an excellent essay and story!!!

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

3. Yes, it was very thought-provoking.

[elleng]

4. On Lawrence show, NOW.

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

[Jeebo]

6. I think it's interesting that she is descended from Edmund Pettus.

The Edmund Pettus the bridge is named for. One of the white rapists who owned one of her black female ancestors. I hear they're talking about re-naming that bridge. They're talking about naming it for John Lewis. A few years ago they re-named Jefferson Davis Avenue in Selma for one of the civil rights attorneys who was among the principals in the Selma-to-Montgomery march. It's not just monuments and flags, it's bridges and streets too, all of the vestiges of our ugly racist past.

-- Ron