The New York Times - USA (2020-06-28)

4 SR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020

ATLANTA

T

HIS, anold saying goes, is “the

city too busy to hate,” one of the

few places in America where en-

lightened leaders, black and

white, chose prosperity over prejudice

and a large black middle class emerged

decades ago. Birthplace of Martin Luther

King Jr., cradle of the civil rights move-

ment, Atlanta, with its gleaming towers

and porch swings, was an American ex-

ception. The city managed racial conflict

through compromise. It was the black

mecca. Or so the story went.

James Forman Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-win-

ning professor at Yale Law School, and the

son of the prominent civil rights activist

James Forman Sr., recalled how, at age 12,

he moved from New York to Atlanta be-

cause “my mother, as a divorced white

woman raising black children, wanted us

surrounded by black success. She wanted

my brother and me to open the paper ev-

ery day and see black people making deci-

sions.” That was the 1970s. Every Atlanta

mayor since 1974 has been black.

Yet now, the city is an epicenter of

America’s double meltdown: over racial

injustice and over the coronavirus that

has hit marginalized African-Americans

particularly hard. This is the home of the

Centers for Disease Control and Preven-

tion, which went AWOL on the virus. This

is where a young black man, Rayshard

Brooks, was killed on June 12 by a white

police officer.

Over the course of a two-week stay, I en-

countered swirling fury over the Brooks

killing; a primary election debacle that, by

design or Republican dereliction, included

hourslong waits in polling stations in pre-

dominantly black counties; and a protest

march on the State Capitol where a banner

saying “Legalize Being Black” conveyed

the rampant ire.

What became of the dream of Atlanta?

It was always a progressive enclave sur-

rounded by reactionary forces. If City Hall

was the nexus of racial cooperation, the

State Capitol was the nexus of segregation

now and forever. African-Americans re-

mained disproportionately poor and vul-

nerable. When Atlanta hosted the 1996

Olympics, Georgia’s flag was still, in

essence, the Confederate flag.

Progress on race issues is not resolution

of race issues. Not in Atlanta, not any-

where, as Derek Chauvin’s white knee on

George Floyd’s black neck demonstrated.

Police brutality, mass black incarceration,

poor education, redlining all told a story so

routine as to be invisible: A black life is

worth less than a white life in America.

That idea is woven into the psyches of

even people loath to admit it.

The Floyd detonation was long in the

making. With its large African-American

population, about a third of the electorate,

Georgia was bound to feel the reverbera-

tions. Democrats have not won Georgia

since 1992, and Donald Trump had a clear

victory here in 2016. Now, several polls

suggest that Joe Biden is leading by a

small margin (and is considering driving

home his ascendancy here by choosing ei-

ther Stacey Abrams or the Atlanta mayor,

Keisha Lance Bottoms, as his running

mate). This is the Covid-Floyd election,

and Georgia has become a bellwether.

The narrow 2018 defeat of Abrams,

campaigning to become the nation’s first

black female governor, showed how demo-

graphic shifts have changed Georgia. The

metropolitan-rural political and cultural

chasm, evident across the nation, is par-

ticularly acute here. Fast-growing Metro

Atlanta, with its diverse Democratic-lean-

ing population, faces a hinterland where,

for many white rural Georgians, Trump is

still the tough, straight-talking dude the

country needs. The vote will be close. If

Trump loses Georgia to Biden, he likely

loses everything. But that’s still a big “if.”

The bungled June 9 primary has sharp-

ened fears of voter suppression in a state

where the governor, Brian Kemp, is a Re-

publican and the House and Senate are

Republican-controlled. “We never

AUDRA MELTON FOR THE NEW Y

Atlanta’s lesson is that progress on race

issues is not resolution of race issues.

‘Let Freedom

NASHVILLE

I

HAVE rape-colored skin. My light-

brown-blackness is a living testa-

ment to the rules, the practices, the

causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remem-

ber the legacy of the Confederacy, if they

want monuments, well, then, my body is

a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all

over this country — with cartoonish pri-

vate statues, solemn public monuments

and even in the names of United States

Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me

to witness the protests against this prac-

tice and the growing clamor from seri-

ous, nonpartisan public servants to re-

dress it. But there are still those — like

President Trump and the Senate major-

ity leader, Mitch McConnell — who can-

not understand the difference between

rewriting and reframing the past. I say it

is not a matter of “airbrushing” history,

but of adding a new perspective.

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 grand-

daughter 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. Vol-

untary. 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 ex-

traordinary power, and then failed to

claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing

memory? An artifact to make tangible

the truth of the past. My body and blood

are a tangible truth of the South and its

past. The black people I come from were

owned by the white people I come from.

The white people I come from fought and

died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you

now, who dares to tell me to celebrate

them? Who dares to ask me to accept

their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone

who doesn’t understand. You cannot say

it wasn’t my family members who fought

and died. My blackness does not put me

on the other side of anything. It puts me

squarely at the heart of the debate. I

don’t just come from the South. I come

from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray

blue blood coursing my veins. My great-

grandfather Will was raised with the

knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his

father. Pettus, the storied Confederate

general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux

Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody

Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an

outsider who makes these demands. I

am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is

much about the South that is precious to

me. I do my best teaching and writing

here. There is, however, a peculiar model

of Southern pride that must now, at long

last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defi-

ant one. It is a pride that says, “Our his-

tory is rich, our causes are justified, our

ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a

pining for greatness, if you will, a wish

again for a certain kind of American

memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors

don’t deserve your unconditional pride.

Yes, I am proud of every one of my black

ancestors who survived slavery. They

earned that pride, by any decent per-

son’s reckoning. But I am not proud of

the white ancestors whom I know, by

virtue of my very existence, to be bad ac-

tors.

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 griev-

ous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South

never existed. Any manufactured monu-

ment to that time in that place tells half a

truth at best. The ideas and ideals it pur-

ports 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 oppres-

sors at the expense of the oppressed, and

you must at last acknowledge your emo-

tional 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 monu-

ments, must come down. I defy any sen-

timental Southerner to defend our ances-

tors to me. I am quite literally made of

the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

My Body Is

A Confederate

Monument

JAY PAUL/REUTERS

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES

The black people I come from were raped

by the white people I come from. Who

dares to tell me to celebrate them?

OPINION

BY CAROLINE

RANDALL

WILLIAMS

Author of “Lucy

Negro, Redux” and

“Soul Food Love,”

and a writer in

residence at

Vanderbilt

University.

Top, an image of

Harriet Tubman

projected on the

statue of Robert

E. Lee in

Richmond, Va.;

above, the

Edmund Pettus

Bridge in Selma,

Ala.