Sometimes Heritage Does Harm

This article was published online with the title “Sometimes Heritage Does Harm,” and in print, with the title “‘Heritage’ Argument Overlooks History.” It is republished here with permission. Click on the image or here to open a scan of the printed version, or here for a PDF of the online version. The text from the online version is included here below.

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Flags communicate pride for heritage, but, for some, so do nooses.

Unqualified love of heritage inflames America’s deepest moral wounds. Heritage is palpable in places like Mississippi and South Carolina, where it is prized wholesale, the good with the bad. In the wake of Charleston’s mass murders, it could not be clearer that heritage is harming the country.

In 2012, James Craig Anderson was murdered out of racial hatred in Jackson,. Two years later, young men hung a noose and the old Georgia flag, featuring the Confederate stars and bars, on the statue of civil rights pioneer James Meredith in Oxford. Some courageous public officials and university leaders have begun to speak up about the need to transform our cultural symbols, while others stand in the way of progress.

In the name of loving heritage, those opposed to moving forward leave out the unpleasant parts of our history. Mississippi and South Carolina were among the states most honest about their defense of slavery in their justifications for secession. Nevertheless, South Carolina until this week flew the Confederate flag in the state’s capital. Mississippi’s state flag bears the stars and bars alluding to the Confederacy.

Symbols matter.

Concern over the injustice of white supremacy and the fight to maintain it is not some radical interpretation of American society or the South. The University of Mississippi is home to a number of buildings still named after notoriously racist figures, such as Gov. James Vardaman. “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” he once said. “It will be done to maintain white supremacy.”

The university recently renamed Confederate Drive, calling it Chapel Lane. The change prompted protests from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who gathered at the university’s Confederate Cemetery. Since the killing of nine black Christians in their Charleston church, tragedy has united many more people in an outpour of sympathy and loving sorrow for victims, whose murders are reminiscent of a past the South does not want back.

The defense of Southern symbols has strangely rested on the denial that the Civil War had to do with slavery. In places that trumpet history and heritage, however, the irony of such ignorance would be unbelievable if it were not so commonplace. If we are to respect our heritage, we should look at it again, unvarnished, particularly in South Carolina and Mississippi.

South Carolina’s declaration of its causes for secession explains that the “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery,” and “the current of anti-slavery feeling” led to the Civil War. Among egregious wrongdoings, the federal government had “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery,” and “encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.” In the same breath that denied African Americans’ liberty, South Carolina framed its goals in terms of freedom from its foe in the “war … waged against slavery.”

Mississippi’s declaration was even more direct. The very first statement explaining “the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part” makes plain that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery–the greatest material interest of the world.” It says that “by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun,” and that “a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Confederate symbols remain throughout the South, like Confederate monuments or buildings named after white supremacists. If we are to create a welcoming culture for all in our state, such as in our colleges and universities, we must make clear for all to see that the state’s participation in the Confederacy had everything to do with the defense of slavery, explicitly, and without any room for doubt. It is love of willful ignorance, not of heritage that would deny this history.

Romanticizing participation in the Confederacy attracts people like the young men who hung a noose on the statue of James Meredith. It also prompts mass murders like the one in Charleston. It is true no one symbol alone, such as the flag, will change everything. It is the fabric of our culture, not just of the flag, that most fundamentally needs changing. Symbols represent our culture and the Mississippi state flag expresses love for a period in our history when Mississippi was one of the loudest holdouts in the fight to end slavery.

Racists like Dylann Roof harken back to old white supremacist tropes, such as in his line to African-American men: “You’ve raped our women.” The white supremacist might be thought to not want mixing, yet slavery permitted an incalculable amount of rape of slaves, male and female, to the point that a substantial proportion of white and black Southerners are related genetically.

The most remarkable omission from acknowledged heritage is the recognition of countless slaves who endured generations of struggle for their freedom. It is time that we confess our history more fully and with open dialogue.

It is not some empty plea for political correctness that motivates recent calls for taking down the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state capital. Symbols can do harm in their contribution to a culture that inspired the killings of Anderson and Roof’s nine victims in church.

Mississippi and South Carolina are said to be some of the most religious states in the country, yet even their churches participate in division and inhumanity. Black members of Mississippi’s Crystal Springs Church were not allowed to marry there in 2012. Compassion and love are not the messages conveyed in Mississippi’s flag, yet they are supposed to be among the central values of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

There is great reason for hope, however, in the courage we have seen recently among those calling for progress. The day Mississippi achieves unity — in symbols and in deeds — the state’s economy will see the start of unprecedented growth. People and businesses around the country will come with excitement to Mississippi, wanting to be part of our promising future.

While South Carolina and Mississippi have a long way to go, we are not alone. Americans have begun to reexamine lauded figures like Washington and Jefferson, whose slaveholding actions failed to live up to their rhetoric. At the same time, people are not proud of the Founding Fathers’ slave-holding. Those aspects of their history should temper our respect. We can be proud of their universalizing moral language, about the ideals they expressed, which eventually contributed to justifying the fight against slavery and other injustices. Without such distinctions about our history, however, love of our heritage will only continue to do us harm, preventing the healing that the United States and Mississippi so desperately need.

Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of “Democracy and Leadership” (2013) and “Uniting Mississippi” (September 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him @erictweber on Twitter.