Slate - "White Americans Have to Make a Choice"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/white_americans_can_end_the_fight_over_confederate_monuments.html

The fight over Confederate monuments is a fight over who this country is for. And only white Americans can end it.

By Jamelle Bouie

“The problem of race in America, insofar as that problem is related to packets of melanin in men’s skin, is a white problem,” began historian and Ebony editor Lerone Bennett Jr. in a 1965 essay for the magazine titled “The White Problem in America.” He continued: “When we say that the causes of the race problem are rooted in the white American and the white community, we mean that the power is the white American’s and so is the responsibility. We mean that the white American created, invented the race problem and that his fears and frailties are responsible for the urgency of the problem.”


Bennett wasn’t the first to state this truth about “race relations” in the United States. Two years earlier in The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin made a similar point in more elegiac terms: “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

This point is especially relevant in the wake of Charlottesville, Virginia, where a demonstration by armed white supremacists culminated in the death of one person. That event, which will likely define the city for the foreseeable future, has laid bare the question of the Donald Trump era: Who is America for? Is this country a multiracial republic, or is it a herrenvolk democracy where whiteness alone confers full citizenship and equal standing? And in turn, Charlottesville has made clear that the final say belongs to white Americans. For as much as blacks and other people of color can fight for the former, it’s up to white people to make a choice—will they share the country and its story, or will they reject equality for hierarchy and caste?

The fight over Confederate memorials is a proxy for this question. Their origin is in the myth-making of the Jim Crow South as symbols of white supremacy over a “redeemed” South and building blocks in a narrative of national innocence meant to unify a divided white polity. In the myth, a figure like Robert E. Lee is transformed from the disgraced general of a brutal effort to expand an empire of bondage to the glorious figure represented in monuments like the one in Charlottesville, a valiant leader in a fight for independence. A man worthy of honor.

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