When you grow up in the south - the actual south - no one knows how to talk about the Civil War. Especially not after the Civil Rights Movement.
You're ten years old, and you're sitting in a classroom, and the history book's on the Civil War chapter. Maybe your teacher is just out of college, or maybe they've been teaching for decades, and maybe they're from the area, or maybe they moved from somewhere else. Any of these elements could result in a completely different lesson, but what typically happens is "let's not talk too much about it."
There's a reason for this, and it comes down to the classroom. On the one hand, you have kids with kin who fought for the Union. On the other, you have kids with Confederate soldier ancestry. Then you have kids whose relatives were enslaved during that time. Do you as the teacher really want to get into the gritty details with that combination? Probably not, so it's easier to take the "it happened, here's the important bits, now let's move on."
No one wants to talk about the times we, as Americans, as southerners, screwed up. (And let's put "enslaving a race of people for our own gain, fighting to keep the right to own them, and repeatedly denying them rights once freed" up there pretty high on the list.) We especially don't want to get into this with kids, because kids ask questions and that means we have to be prepared with some sort of answer. It's easier to just move on to another war, one where we were the "good guys" because that's what the kids want, right? We're the good guys.
It's hard to talk about being wrong. I get it.
So we don't talk about it, but then we still use the Confederate flag or name streets after Confederate generals, and we don't question it. Instead, we call it Southern pride and heritage. And we don't really understand what that means and the message it sends. And then we wonder why Black people think we don't understand racism, because as kids we never talked about what the war meant. Or what it means now.
History's usually taught as just memorization of facts and dates and names. Here's the Confederate general, here's the Union general, here's the battle, here's the start and end date. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. But that's not how it works in reality. Modern pedagogy argues teaching history in context, as a series of events that build and build to create where we are now. Hindsight's always 20/20 but as a student you can understand things better if you see how they are all connected. Unfortunately, that means talking about the past - talking about it truthfully.
And y'know, maybe if we had that conversation early, it would be easier to understand where we are now. Why we are quick to dismiss what happened in Charleston as a "tragic incident" instead of a hate crime. Or why we can say it was an attack on Christians but not Blacks. Why we are fine with saying Dylann Roof was mentally unstable, but not agree that he was indoctrinated with racism left over from the 1800s and before.
We can't admit this, because we never talked about how clinging to elements of "Southern pride" also means clinging to the idea of "the government shouldn't keep me from owning people," whether we mean for it to or not.
It's been 150 years and we are still failing at conversation. Well, more than that, we are failing to listen and see history beyond names and dates. We as white Southerners have this past that we only see from our perspective - the one we heard from our families and barely from school and in our street names and flags - and we can't see what this means to the Black community because we never talked about it in the first place.
Would talking about it stop hate crimes? Doubt it. There's definitely truth that Dylann Roof is mentally unwell. There are plenty of racists who do not kill people. So it isn't a definite solution. But, it would at least change our response when this shit happens. We wouldn't feel so defensive to proclaim "but not all Southerners are racist!" No, but it's a hard case to make when you happily, and without question, live in an area where your Southern pride effectively reminds a race of people that, at one time, they were owned. They were less than human.
You can't go back and stop your ancestors from doing what they did. You're not responsible for that. But you are responsible for admitting we've done a terrible job of having actual conversation about our American, Southern history. And because of that, here we are. One hundred and fifty years later we're still fighting it, and everyone's on the losing side.
