MASTER 1

The representation of slavery in Britain and the United States

Anne-Claire Faucquez

2019-2020

This seminar will explore the various ways in which the Atlantic Slave Trade and the institution of slavery are remembered, taught, and memorialized in Britain and the United States (and to a lesser extent in France).

We will first analyze what collective memory is and question who rightfully defines the events, images, symbols, rituals, and beliefs that constitute the knowledge of the past. What responsibilities do public custodians of collective heritage—historians, novelists, filmmakers, museum curators, archivists, artists— have to the truth and to the communities in which they function? What is public history? Who are public historians and what is their role?

Taking Britain and the United States as examples of contemporary societies, we will contrast how these two countries deal with public history and the collective memory of slavery. If Britain was a major participant in the slave trade, it never experienced slavery on its soil, contrary to the United States, which can explain a different approach to the memorialization of slavery. So we will contrast the differences in the representations of slavery in these two societies. How is slavery both remembered and silenced? What is commemorated: slavery, the slave trade or the abolition of slavery and why does it matter? How do British and American public authorities fashion their own collective memory of slavery? How do the countries as a whole embrace or perhaps deny what some deem a stain in their history? What do those choices tell about the way the two nations envision their past?

We will be looking at the various ways used to represent and materialize the memory of slavery, be it through contemporary art, museum exhibits, historical tours, monuments, memorials, or commemorative occasions and anniversaries. For each event or artistic form, we will question its origin/source, we will describe its content and try to assess its impact on each society. What was the intention of the author, artist, architect, curator etc.? To what extent did the sources of funding influence the events? How did the authors use history vs memory? How did they manage to transmit the bleak details of slavery? Did they try to reveal the blunt truth of the history of slavery or did they try to embellish it for artistic and aesthetical purposes?

Students will be looking at and comparing American and British works of art, architectural projects like monuments and memorials (the African Burial Ground Memorial in New York vs the City of London Memorial to the Abolition of the Slave Trade) ; they will question the absence/existence of museums dedicated to the history of slavery (The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington vs the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool), as well as the absence/existence of national holidays celebrating the abolition of slavery (Black History Month vs Slavery Remembrance Day).

The materials used in the seminar will range from scholarly and press articles, artists’ interviews, pictures of works of art, documentaries, or websites (blogs, forums, museum websites, interactive tours). As for the assignment, students will have to conduct a research project on a site/work of art/event of their own choice.

2 SEMESTER 2019-2020

17 Sept : INTRODUCTION : History and memory 24 Sept : Commemorating slavery 1 Oct : Patrimonial Memory: Monuments, Memorials (I) 8 Oct : CANCELLED 15 Oct : Patrimonial Memory: Monuments, Memorials (II) 22 Oct/29 Oct : BREAK 5 Nov : Museums and Historic sites (I) 12 Nov: Museums and Historic Sites (II) 19 Nov : Slavery, Memory and Art (I) 26 Nov : Slavery, Memory and Art (II) FRIDAY 29 Nov: Journée d’études “Objets et enjeux de la commémoration de l’esclavage” 3 Dec : Slavery on Screen (I) : Hollywood 10 Dec : Slavery on Screen (II) : TV series 17 Dec : END-OF-THE SEMESTER EXAM

Continual assessment:

- Oral presentation + research paper = 50% - Conference report = 20% - End-of the-semester exam = 30%

List of subjects you can choose from for your oral presentation:

- City of London Memorial to the Abolition of the Slave Trade - African Burial Ground Memorial in New York - The Ark of Return in New York (UNO) - Alabama Memorial for Lynching and/or Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomory, Alabama - The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington - The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool - Captured Africans, Lancaster, England - Gilt of Cain, London - The Memorial for the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes - The Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux - Whitney Plantation Museum (Louisiana) - Black History Month vs Slavery Remembrance Day - Movies: Birth of a Nation (1917), Gone with the Wind (1939), Amistad (1997), Beloved (1998), Django Unchained (2012), 12 Year a Slave (2013), The Birth of a Nation (2016) - TV Series: Roots (1977), The Book of Negroes (2015), “Black Museum” Episode, Black Mirror series

3

1 - Teaching Slavery : Why History Matters?

© 2018 TEACHING TOLERANCE 6-12

Test your knowledge about the history of American slavery. Review each question and select the best answer (even if you’re not sure).

1. How was indentured servitude different from enslavement of Africans in the British North American colonies? a. Indentured servants were freed at the end of a set number of years. b. Children born during an indentured servant’s term had to serve until adulthood. c. Only men could be indentured. d. Indentured servants came from the West Indies.

2. Which of the following was NOT true of chattel slavery as it developed in the British colonies? a. Enslaved people were considered personal property. b. Enslaved people had no human rights. c. Enslaved people could be bought, sold or inherited. d. Enslaved people inherited the status of their father.

3. Which was NOT a common form of resistance among enslaved people? a. Violent armed rebellion b. Running away c. Feigning illness d. Breaking tools and slowing the pace of work

4. In the Declaration of Independence, what percentage of enslaved people were included in the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” a. 0% b. 25% c. 50% d. 75% e. 100%

5. Which was NOT a condition of life for enslaved people? a. Hard work, even for women and children b. Isolation, subjugation and fear of punishment c. The ability to always keep families intact d. The ability to hunt, fish and grow gardens to supplement their diets

6. Which formally ended slavery in the United States? a. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution b. Emancipation Proclamation c. Treaty ending the Civil War d. Civil Rights Act of 1968

7. Which was the reason the South seceded from the Union?

4 a. To preserve states’ rights b. To preserve slavery c. To protest taxes on imported goods d. To avoid rapid industrialization

8. Communities of enslaved people created music to... a. Entertain enslavers in the Big House b. Pass the time c. Express dreams and frustrations d. Influence popular culture

9. People enslaved by colonists in North America included all of the following except: a. Irish people b. Muslims c. West Africans d. Native Americans

10. Just before the Civil War, what was true of the North? a. Most people there opposed slavery. b. Northern banks, industries and shipping pro ted from slavery. c. It was separate from the South, with few economic or social ties. d. Free black people could vote and had other civil rights there.

11. Why did slavery grow in the United States after the importation of enslaved people was banned in 1808? a. The international slave trade continued unabated despite the law. b. A large number of free black people were captured and sold into slavery. c. High birth rates (enslavers treated women as “breeders”) led to natural increase in the population. d. Enslaved people were smuggled into the country from Canada.

12. Enslaved people had all the following connections to American colleges except: a. Their labor built parts of the University of Virginia. b. Their sale secured the nancial future of Georgetown. c. Pro ts from the slave trade helped fund Harvard, Yale and Brown. d. Princeton set aside spaces for men who had escaped slavery beginning in 1845.

Doc 1: Jason Silverstein, “The Persistence of Whitewashing: How can Americans have such different memories of slavery?”, May 31, 2018

In early April, Southern Charm—a reality show about Charleston’s aristocracy—invited viewers for a fifth season inside “the gates of their centuries-old plantation homes.” It is a disturbing thought for anyone who stops to consider the experiences of the men and women who were enslaved there. Yet this form of nostalgia remains surprisingly common. Until recently, you could rent Southern Charm star Thomas Ravenel’s manicured Brookland Plantation, whose slave cabins were abandoned during “the War Between the States,” according to the architect who renovated it. You can still “add a little southern elegance” to the happiest day of your life with a plantation wedding, at a venue such as Boone Plantation, where parts of The Notebook were filmed and nine slave cabins (of 27) still stand.

The plantation is the Rorschach test for America’s soul: You either see moonlight and magnolias or a crime scene. How can Americans have such different memories of slavery? That is the driving question in historians Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts’s book Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, a work that, for the first time, maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country. The

5 aim of the book is not simply to reject “whitewashed memories of slavery.” What matters most for Kytle and Roberts is “how whitewashed memories have been used in modern America,” from the Black Codes and Jim Crow to debates over affirmative action and reparations, to deny the suffering that slavery and its legacies still cause today.

In Denmark Vesey’s Garden, Kytle and Roberts focus on slavery denial in Charleston, South Carolina, which earned at various points the nicknames capital of slavery, cradle of the Confederacy, and cradle of the Lost Cause. There were nearly as many enslaved people in Charleston in 1790 as the total number of residents of Charleston today. Nearly half of all enslaved people in the United States passed through the city, which, by the 1850s, was home to every euphemism for human trafficker: brokers, auctioneers, commision agents, slave-trading firms. Slavery was the “very blood of their veins,” according to Robert Bunch, a British spy who infiltrated the Charleston elite. Indeed, Kytle and Roberts tell us, by the mid- 1850s three out of four white Charleston families enslaved another human being.

White residents began to deny the brutal realities of slavery as a way of suppressing anti-slavery ideas and possible rebellion. They reacted particularly to an uprising in July 1822 led by Denmark Vesey. A formerly enslaved man whose family was still held captive, he planned to revolt with other members of the church they had formed. Vesey’s plot was foiled and he, along with more than 30 others, was executed. Soon after, the South Carolina legislature started to put measures in place to prevent another such attempt. They passed the Negro Seaman Act, which prevented free black sailors from leaving Charleston Harbor and spreading “subversive ideas.” South Carolina Congressman James Henry Hammond and Senator John C. Calhoun created “gag orders” in the House and Senate against anti- slavery petitions. As Calhoun and Hammond suppressed antislavery ideas, they promoted euphemisms (“peculiar institution” was Calhoun’s invention) and fictions about the benevolence of slavery.

It is astonishing to read the words of many slaveholders who actually came to believe that slavery was a benevolent system and were sincerely shocked to learn otherwise. Kytle and Roberts document how the “cherished fantasies” of Charleston’s wealthy white planters were “turned on their head” with several moments of clarity after emancipation. “The conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion,” wrote Augustin Taveau in letter published by the New-York Tribune. “I believed that these people were content, happy and attached to their masters … If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need[?]” So too wondered John S. Wise, a congressman and slaveholder, “Were the negroes not perfectly content and happy? Had I not often talked to them on the subject? Had not every one of them told me repeatedly that they loved ‘old Marster’ better than anybody in the world, and would not have freedom if he offered it to them?”

For a decade after emancipation, black Charlestonians largely won the battle for the memory of slavery. Festivals of freedom were held on the Citadel Green, where cadets were trained to guard against insurrection. Funeral marches for slavery, complete with a hearse and coffin marked “Slavery Is Dead,” proceeded down the streets (which was “by no means pleasant to the old residents,” reported The New York Times). Two hundred and fifty-seven Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate prison camp were given proper burial in what historian David Blight calls the first Memorial Day in his book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; three thousand black children sang “John Brown’s Body” at the event.

But soon the whitewashing of the memory of slavery gained ground, and the paternalist logic for slavery was now used to justify Black Codes that restricted the rights of freed-people. “The general interest of both the white man and the negro requires that he should be kept … as near to the condition of slavery as possible,” wrote Edmund Rhett, a former Virginia slaveholder. The general interest of whites was not only a reassertion of their social status, but also a fear of black competition and “negro rule.” “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them,” reported Sidney Andrews for The Atlantic Monthly. “Even the best men hold that each State must have a negro code.” While the Black Codes were outlawed in 1866, only to be replaced by the regime

6 of Jim Crow ten years later, white Charlestonians began to hold their own Memorial Day services for Confederates and claimed to be truly responsible for abolishing slavery.

In the early decades of twentieth century, education, Kytle and Roberts write, “became a chief front in the memory battle.” South Carolina blocked textbooks from the North; instead, Mary C. Simms Oliphant revised and, ultimately rewrote, a history book by her proslavery novelist grandfather William Gilmore Simms, one that taught “most slaves were treated well.” It remained in classrooms through nine editions from 1917 to 1985. The South Carolina Negro Writers’ Project began in the 1930s as a project of the Works Progress Administration, with the goal of collecting essays by black writers based on interviews with formerly enslaved people, but folded in just 16 months. Meanwhile, tourist brochures and guidebooks from the 1930s included pictures and descriptions of black people working as “loyal, true, and faithful house servants” and greeting visitors at the city gates, inviting white out-of-towners to visit a world that had been otherwise lost to time and law. From Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben in the kitchen pantry to the “Heart of Dixie” stamped on Alabama license plates, images of a whitewashed South had proliferated by the mid-twentieth century.

At the center of the battle over slavery’s memory is a question: How much truth about their ancestors can the descendants of enslavers bear? Perhaps the clearest answer is found in the presentation of plantations today, or what Edward Baptist argues ought to be called slave labor camps. Neils Eichhorn, writing in The Journal of the Civil War Era, recalls one tour guide referring to enslaved people as “servants” and “like family.” A study by David Butler surveyed 1,000 tourists at Laura Plantation in Louisiana. The groups most interested in learning about slavery are foreign-born whites and, secondly, black Americans; white Americans were interested in almost anything but slavery. “Few things troubled white Southerners more than the notion that their ancestors had actively engaged in the sale of men women and children and facilitated the destruction of families,” write Kytle and Roberts.

On such tours, visitors will rarely get to see the physical reminders of slavery—the dwellings and other buildings where enslaved people lived and worked. There is no record of how many slave cabins remain, according to preservationists, since many that may exist would be on private property and others were recorded, and forgotten, as “minor buildings” on the National Register of Historic Places. Stephen Small, an African American studies professor at Berkeley, has conducted research on slave cabins since 1995 in eight states and estimates merely several hundred remain from “an original pool of hundreds of thousands of cabins.” Some might argue that plantation owners did not always make a choice to erase the physical evidence of slavery on their property: Many slave cabins were wooden structures that were allowed to rot whereas the main house was either kept up or renovated.

On plantation tours, visitors will rarely get to see the physical reminders of slavery—the dwellings and other buildings where enslaved people lived and worked.

Yet it is very convenient, according to Derek Alderman, founder of the Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism project, that such structures no longer remain. It allows tour guides to redirect visitors’ attention to the “big house” with its pristine artifacts and to avoid any mention of the terror that made all that spectacular wealth and grandeur possible. Through this process, according to one group of anthropologists studying colonial Williamsburg, the whitewashed past becomes something visible, tangible, and factual, while slavery becomes intangible and difficult to grasp. Even when slave cabins are preserved, they are not always preserved respectfully; at the Hofwyl- Broadfield Plantation in Georgia, one of the slave cabins now houses a restroom.

Denmark Vesey’s Garden tries to land on a hopeful note, highlighting those plantations that have attempted to present an unvarnished memory of slavery. Drayton Hall, for example, has added tours that focus on enslaved people and Eliza’s House at Middleton Place now features a wall with the names of more than 2,600 human beings who were enslaved there. Elsewhere, Whitney Plantation in Louisiana includes a wall inspired by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Danny Drain’s now-closed Slave Relics Museum allowed visitors to hold and bear the weight, at least for a few moments, of shackles and

7 instruments of torture; Joseph McGill’s Slave Dwelling Project seeks to preserve and educate on the remaining cabins before they disappear.

While Denmark Vesey’s Garden shows the persistent fight for honest memory, the authors harbor no illusions that now is a time to celebrate. Indeed, the very church founded by Denmark Vesey was the site where Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in 2015, an act he carried out after visiting plantations and Confederate landmarks. The next year, a New Orleans contractor hired to remove confederate monuments faced not only death threats, but the torching of his $200,000 car. And in Charleston, an 80-foot-tall statue of a proud John Calhoun—seventh vice president, defender of slavery as a “positive good,” and ancestor of Southern Charm regular Kathryn Calhoun Dennis—towers over the city’s Holocaust memorial, dedicated with the words, “we will never forget you.”

Doc 2: Melinda D. Anderson, “What Kids Are Really Learning About Slavery”, The Atlantic, Feb 1, 2018.

A new report finds that the topic is mistaught and often sentimentalized—and students are alarmingly misinformed as a result.

A class of middle-schoolers in Charlotte, North Carolina, was asked to cite “four reasons why Africans made good slaves.” Nine third-grade teachers in suburban Atlanta assigned math word problems about slavery and beatings. A high school in the Los Angeles-area reenacted a slave ship—with students’ lying on the dark classroom floor, wrists taped, as staff play the role of slave ship captains. And for a lesson on Colonial America, fifth-graders at a school in northern New Jersey had to create posters advertising slave auctions.

School assignments on slavery routinely draw national headlines and scorn. Yet beyond the outraged parents and school-district apologies lies a complex and entrenched set of education challenges. A new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project points to the widespread failure to accurately teach the hard, and nuanced, history of American slavery and enslaved people. Collectively, the report finds that slavery is mistaught, mischaracterized, sanitized, and sentimentalized—leaving students poorly educated, and contemporary issues of race and racism misunderstood.

In what it describes as the first analysis of its kind, Teaching Tolerance conducted online surveys of 1,000 American high-school seniors and more than 1,700 social-studies teachers across the country. The group also reviewed 10 commonly used U.S.-history textbooks, and examined 15 sets of state standards to assess what students know, what educators teach, what publishers include, and what standards require vis-à-vis slavery.

Among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Fewer than one-third (32 percent) correctly named the 13th Amendment as the formal end of U.S. slavery, with a slightly higher share (35 percent) choosing the Emancipation Proclamation. And fewer than half (46 percent) identified the “Middle Passage” as the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America.

Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, said the research, conducted in 2017, revealed the urgent need for schools to do a better job of teaching slavery. “Students are being deprived of the truth about our history [and] the materials that teachers have are not particularly good,” she said. “I would hope that students would look at this and realize that they deserve to know better … and teachers need to know there are better ways to teach this [topic].”

8 The student results, which the report labels “dismal,” extend beyond factual errors to a failure to grasp key concepts underpinning the nature and legacy of slavery. Fewer than one-quarter (22 percent) of participating high-school seniors knew that “protections for slavery were embedded in [America’s] founding documents”—that rather than a “peculiar institution” of the South, slavery was a Constitutionally enshrined right. And fewer than four in 10 students surveyed (39 percent) understood how slavery “shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness.”

Examining the teachers’ survey results might help explain why students struggled to answer questions on American enslavement: Educators are struggling themselves. While teachers overwhelmingly (92 percent) claim they are “comfortable discussing slavery” in their classroom, their teaching practices reveal profound lapses. Only slightly more than half (52 percent) teach their students about slavery’s legal roots in the nation’s founding documents, while just 53 percent emphasize the extent of slavery outside of the antebellum South. And 54 percent teach the continuing legacy of slavery in today’s society.

Additionally, dozens of teachers rely on “simulations”—role-playing and games—to teach slavery, a method that Teaching Tolerance has warned against on the grounds that it can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification. Meanwhile, a large majority—73 percent—use “slaves” when talking about slavery in the classroom instead of “enslaved persons” (49 percent), the latter term of which has gained favor for emphasizing the humanity of those forced into bondage.

The overwhelming majority of teachers who participated in the survey (90 percent) are somehow affiliated with Teaching Tolerance and its learning materials. Costello said this indicates the problems revealed in the survey results could be much more pervasive than the findings suggest. “If anything, I think [this collection of survey respondents] is a group that’s more sensitive to issues of race, more likely to confront them in classrooms” compared to the broader teacher workforce, she explained, adding that the findings are “a silhouette of the problem.” Similarly, many of those surveyed were elementary- school teachers, which Costello said was noteworthy considering the ability of slavery education in the early grades to form the narrative—the “fake history”—that students carry through high school.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, a high-school U.S.-history teacher in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a Portland suburb, has encountered students’ common misconceptions—such as the belief that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and that the Civil War was really about states’ rights. Her straightforward solution is assigning original documents: “Read Lincoln’s first inaugural address and you do not find a fiery abolitionist, but someone promising to enforce the fugitive slave clause; read the articles of secession, and you find striking declarations from slave states that their actions are rooted in a desire to protect [slavery].”

Still, Wolfe-Rocca echoed the report’s teacher respondents in stressing the inherent challenges in tackling the subject well. As a white teacher, she admittedly struggles with presenting an unsanitized version of slavery that doesn’t desensitize her students at Lake Oswego High School to the violence and black pain. “Kids walk into my class ‘knowing’ about slavery. But their recitation of this knowledge is dull, lifeless, and bored,” she said. “It has the feel of something memorized [and] rote, rather than internalized and meaningful.” She uses personal narratives of enslaved people to teach the ugliness and injustice of the past while being “careful to keep the rape and whipping to a minimum.”

Wolfe-Rocca aims to strike a delicate balance, but she wonders whether she’s whitewashing history: “How do we surface the realities of slavery without resorting to spectacle?” Like teachers cited in the report, she finds that exploring the true costs of slavery is difficult but essential.

Further compounding teachers’ difficulties is the quality of textbooks and state content standards. Teaching Tolerance found that textbooks generally lacked comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved people—the best textbook earned a score of 70 on the project’s rubric of essential elements for bringing slavery into the classroom—and state standards were generally “timid,” focused more on abolitionists than on the everyday experiences of slavery.

9 Taken together, the study exposes a number of unsettling facts about slavery education in U.S. classrooms: Slavery is taught without context, prioritizing “feel good” stories over harsh realities; slavery is taught as an exclusively southern institution, masking the complicity of northern institutions and citizens in America’s slave-based economy; slavery is rarely connected to white supremacy—the ideology that justified its perpetuation; and slavery is seldom connected to the present, drawing the arc from enslavement to Jim Crow, the civil-rights movement, and the persistence of structural racism.

LaGarrett King, an assistant professor of social-studies education at the University of Missouri, served on the Teaching Tolerance advisory board that developed a framework for teaching American slavery— basically, the concepts that every graduating high-school senior should know—as part of the report’s recommendations. As a teacher educator, he said the study fills a significant void.

Students training to be teachers, especially those being educated to teach in elementary schools, know little about the history of slavery, he stated, noting that “much curriculum and teaching around racially and ethnically diverse [people] features a fun—foods and festival—approach to learning.” By contrast, King said, the framework provides a guide to delve into topics such as slavery and black history with a thorough and academically sound approach, versus teaching slavery in reductive and superficial ways.

“Can you teach slavery without it being psychologically violent to the children? The answer is no, violence will occur and is expected,” he said. “The key is the recognition of white supremacy and [of] the humanity of black people that helps aid in the complexity of the subject.”

Relatedly, the study also drew attention to teachers who struggle to have open and honest conversations in mixed-race classrooms about the atrocities of slavery. Antoinette Dempsey-Waters, a black social- studies educator at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, said she relies on autobiographies to give a vivid picture of enslavement that helps all students in her highly diverse school “walk away with the knowledge of the evil of slavery,” as they come to “understand and respect … the fight for freedom” waged by enslaved people.

Notably, Teaching Tolerance recommends using primary sources and original historical materials to improve instruction, and making textbooks better to reflect a more accurate and inclusive view of slavery.

“It’s clear that the United States is still struggling with how to talk about the history of slavery and its aftermath,” the report concludes. “The front lines of this struggle are in schools, as teachers do the hard work of explaining this country’s history and helping students to understand how the present relates to the past.”

Doc 3: Stefan Spath, “What’s Wrong with Reparations for Slavery? Should Americans of African Descent Receive Financial Damages?”, Foundation for Economic Education, June 30, 2010

There has been much debate recently about reparations for slavery. According to its proponents, the federal government should award Americans of African descent financial damages solely because slavery, as an institution, existed in the United States from the founding until almost a century later. Three principal arguments are offered: (1) The legacy of slavery has hindered the economic progress of blacks in America; (2) reparations would serve as a damage award that would rectify a historical wrong committed by the United States; and (3) reparations would give poor blacks more disposable income, which would increase their living standards and lift entire black communities.

10 On the surface, these arguments seem to have a modicum of legitimacy. However, because of the potential divisiveness that the issue is sure to have, it is important to closely examine the premise on which these arguments are based. ...

Has Slavery Hindered the Economic Progress of Blacks?

Economist Thomas Sowell, in his seminal work Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, concluded after exhaustive statistical research that the vast majority of whites and blacks believe there are a higher percentage of blacks in poverty than there actually are. Indeed, when surveyed, most whites and blacks believe three-quarters of black Americans live below the official poverty line, when in reality only one in four do, according to the 2001 Census.

Why is there so much confusion Part of the problem is the perception that “black” and “poor” are synonymous. In the 1960s it was politically expedient to associate the state of being poor, uneducated, and oppressed with being black. The civil rights establishment found this association rhetorically necessary to focus public attention on the plight of southern blacks and to engage the emotions of the white majority against overt southern racism.

However, this political strategy had an unexpected impact on the emerging black middle class. According to the black-equals poor logic, when the black middle class achieved more opportunity and became more educated and affluent, it essentially became less “black.” ... Unfortunately, the image of poverty stricken blacks in need of government handouts to get by is still perpetuated by race demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who stand to gain politically by fostering that stereotype. It is a truism of politics that charlatans in search of political power will always benefit from having a constituency with a chip on its shoulder....

In addition to being a wealthy demographic group (richer than 90 percent of the people in the world), blacks in America have a longer life expectancy than African and Caribbean blacks, as well as whites in many parts of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Black Americans have higher rates of literacy and achieve more postsecondary degrees as a percentage of the population than blacks in Africa. Black Americans’ upward mobility from Reconstruction to the present is a testament to their creativity and ability to adapt. Reparations are not only unnecessary as a financial corrective, but they would also be an insult to the multitudes of successful black Americans who lifted themselves out of poverty before and after the civil rights movement. ...

Who Gets What?

If the proponents of reparations take to the courts, it will be interesting to see their principle for determining who is entitled to what. For many reasons that will be a Herculean task. Because of centuries of migration, conquests, and intermixing, racial purity is more of a social construct than a biological fact. Intermarriage between whites and blacks in America over the past two centuries has produced a large population of individuals who defy the stark dichotomy. ...

In an effort to deny inheritance rights to illegitimate progeny born by slave women, racist plantation owners in the antebellum South created the dreaded “one-drop rule” to discourage the courts from calling their miscegenational offspring anything but Negro. The nomenclature of this racist practice has survived to this day and is embraced by both blacks and whites, who for the most part are unaware of its discriminatory beginnings. Consider how Vanessa Williams and Colin Powell are labeled black despite their interracial heritage.

With so much racial intermixture, will those who dole out the potential reparations demand certificates of racial purity? The thought is preposterous. Another quagmire in paying reparations is that a small percentage of blacks were free before slavery ended, having bought their freedom or having had it bequeathed to them by sympathetic slave owners. Are their descendants eligible for reparations?

11 In antebellum New Orleans it wasn’t uncommon for freemen of color to own slaves. That blacks owned slaves has been a hotly debated point. It is true that a vast majority of blacks who bought slaves did so to emancipate relatives and friends. However, there are several well-documented cases of black slave owners in Louisiana who kept their slaves in servitude for life.

Then there is the case of African and Caribbean émigrés from the post-Civil War era. It is estimated that this subgroup of the black community comprises between 3 to 5 percent of the total black population in the United States. Will they pay or receive reparations?

More Reparations?

In some respects one could argue that reparations for slavery have already been paid. These implicit reparations, the argument goes, have taken the form of direct monetary transfers such as welfare payments or nonmonetary benefits such as hiring and admission quotas. Indeed, policies based on racial preferences such as affirmative action have allowed hundreds of thousands of blacks to enter universities and obtain employment based on criteria different from those applied to other groups of people. ...

Are Current Taxpayers Culpable?

Of the three primary arguments for reparations, the argument for damages is the most irrational. Though slavery was widespread in the southern United States, slave ownership was not. It is estimated that less than 10 percent of whites owned slaves. The vast majority did not; they had neither financial nor agricultural resources to warrant slave labor. Slave ownership was restricted to a highly concentrated group of wealthy southern elites—the landed aristocracy.

Today we live in a country with a population of 285 million people. Because of immigration, it is safe to argue that the majority of white people in this country are descended from post-Civil War immigrants who had nothing to do with slavery.

Many ethnic groups that arrived on American shores in the early twentieth century, including the Irish, European Jews, and Chinese, were subject to severe discrimination. However, with every passing generation, ethnic groups developed the occupational skills, knowledge, and cultural norms necessary to fully assimilate and rise to higher socioeconomic levels within the mainstream American culture.

Why, then, should the descendants of these groups, let alone first-generation Americans, be financially liable to blacks as a group? In the American legal system, damages hinge on the principle of cause and effect — one pays for the damage one causes. In the case of slavery, there is no culpable person alive to pay for the crime.

Perhaps the most important error made by those who argue for reparations is not economic at all but philosophical. The idea of achieving justice by taking money from one group to pay another for an act that was neither committed nor suffered by the parties is a collectivist affront to the American ideal of individualism. People are not interchangeable pawns but individuals responsible for their own actions. Slaves and slave owners are dead, and we cannot bring them back. Our Constitution provided the framework for legal equality for all individuals, and later legislation eliminated remaining race-based government barriers to freedom, assuring that blacks, like whites, can be beneficiaries of this great system. Thus the only solution to the race problem in America is a commitment to individualism.

1. Who should get financial reparations and why? 2. Why are Black people believed to be poorer than Whites? 3. What happened to the black middle class? 4. Who are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton ? Why are they considered as demagogues ? 5. How do Black Americans compare with other black communities ? 6. Why is it difficult to determine who is entitled to reparations (4 reasons)?

12 7. Why was the one-drop rule initially created? 8. Why is it almost impossible to determine who will pay? 9. Can you explain what the author means by “a collectivist affront to the American ideal of individualism » ?

Doc 4: “Slavery apologies are empty rhetoric, not a real way forward” Jason D. HILL, 06/22/18, THE HILL

This week Charleston, S.C., became the latest city in the United States to apologize to African- Americans for its role in the slave trade. This port city, to which about 40 percent of America's enslaved Africans arrived, promised tolerance and proposed an office of racial reconciliation in its resolution.

Will this apology be beneficial to racial healing in America? Will it make a difference to African- Americans?

The first question is difficult to answer since it depends, statistics notwithstanding, on the perceived distrust and fissures between whites and African-Americans in this country and whether a single act such as an apology could play a role significant enough for any healing process.

But undoubtedly it will make a difference to some African-Americans, most notably those who believe they are the legatees of an evil tradition that still confers harm and injustice.

Others see themselves as free citizens of a republic that recognizes their inalienable rights and safeguards them against the encroachments of others, and they have long passed the need for an apology.

Looking at this philosophically, the issuance of an apology cashes itself out as an act of symbolic sentimentality that is the political equivalent of an empty set. Let me explain. We have political actors unauthorized to issue an apology because they were not the perpetrators, on a personal or state level, of any such evil. And the beneficiaries of the apology, descendants of slaves who are held up as eternal certified moral icons of state victimization, are not in any way the actual victims of chattel slavery.

PAST PERPETRATORS AND PAST VICTIMS

The notion of a collective apology — by servants of the people in the name of past state actors to whom they have no relation — attempts to speak for dead men who literally might not have wanted to apologize for practicing and promoting slavery. The apology purports to exonerate guilt from the conscience of those who legitimized and legalized slavery by issuing them a moral dispensation. Politicians today can acknowledge the moral harms done to individuals and groups of people, but they cannot apologize on behalf of the perpetrators.

A sincere apology relies on a logical corollary: forgiveness by those to whom the apology is issued and a pardoning of the wrong. The moral conundrum here is that descendants of slaves cannot be the deputized stand-ins for their ancestors. The apology, in essence, is being issued to a freed people — among the freest people on earth. What qualifies a descendent of a slave to accept an apology made by a current iteration of the U.S. government that has no ties to the overseers of a nefarious form of human trafficking?

The apology itself strikes me — a descendant of slaves and an immigrant from the Caribbean — as implicitly, if unintentionally, racist. It is predicated on a theme of guilt-by-association. Let us be clear about the existential nature of the apology. It is meant to not just abstractly acknowledge the role played in the slave trade by Charleston and other jurisdictions that have issued apologies — such as Macon, Ga.; Annapolis, Md.; and New Jersey, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama — it is also meant

13 to explicitly indict white people today for the moral crimes that their ancestors may or may not have committed against the ancestors of African-Americans.

Any predication of ancestral guilt is problematic. It asks one to bear the moral responsibilities for crimes one has not undertaken, and to be responsible for the sins of his or her ancestors. But how can we know that each white person’s ancestor was an owner of slaves rather than, say, an objector or simply a skilled or unskilled laborer? If collective guilt is, as I have argued, a disguised form of codified collective ancestral guilt, then this type of codified guilt and its inverse corollary — collective entitlement to an apology — is based on the crudest form of racism: biological collectivism.

I see no way that this can lead to racial healing among blacks and whites, and, concomitantly, I see no reason why any African-American would accept this.

The debt to African-Americans has been paid. The implicit apology was issued in the “Third Founding of America” (taking Lincoln’s promise at Gettysburg as the second) with the momentous passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the legal ending of Jim Crow-based segregation in the South. The inclusive promise of “We The People” was delivered to all peoples in this country and, legally, blacks now enjoy the same freedoms as whites.

An apology to African-Americans might be necessary, for example, if the United States were a white supremacist society. However, it is not. It does not have an official ideology of the superiority of the white race and there are no laws explicitly preferring whites, or laws that are exclusionary or punitive of nonwhites simply based on race.

The United States no longer needs to apologize to African-Americans for slavery. It abolished slavery, set the slaves free, conferred upon them all of the inalienable rights, and recognized them as equal. Let us not now engage in empty rhetoric that seems more like a publicity stunt than a real way forward to a progressive future where we all respect each other’s rights and dignity.

Doc 5: David Olusoga, “Why are so many afraid to confront Britain’s historical links with the slave trade?”, The Guardian, Sun 5 May 2019

Cambridge University has been accused of opening old wounds, but in curing itself of amnesia it might help Britain understand its past.

Seldom have so many people taken to print and the airwaves to make the case for academic incuriosity. Rarely has the search for new knowledge, undertaken by a university of world renown, been so vocally condemned. That is what happened when Cambridge University announced a new academic research project to determine the extent to which the university (although not its wealthy colleges) “contributed to, benefited from or challenged” slavery and the slave trade.

Cambridge and its colleges are rich. Staggeringly rich. And – spoiler alert – some of the gifts and bequests buried deep within that mountain of wealth will have come from benefactors who were slave traders and slave owners. This is true of other universities, here and abroad. Yet the same commentators who endlessly accuse students of being closed to new ideas and unwilling to face uncomfortable facts have rushed to condemn the university’s investigation into its own past. Their argument, in essence, is that we’re better off not knowing.

Given that it was the right that began the culture wars, it is perhaps surprising that they failed to use the years leading up to their declaration of hostilities to build up a stockpile of rhetorical weaponry. One result of this oversight is that now, decades into the conflict, they are forced to field painfully antiquated

14 arguments, many of them riddled with holes from previous engagements. Most of the old favourites were sent into action last week.

First came a real golden oldie, that paper-thin, disingenuous line that claims that any discussion of slavery or colonialism traps 21st-century black Britons in a culture of victimhood. It’s not that discussing how Britain trafficked millions of Africans into slavery makes us uncomfortable, it’s just that it’s bad for you guys. Then we had that ever-adaptable staple – the false dichotomy. Always useful for muddying the waters, this claims that the money being spent on an investigation into the university’s past would be better spent on increasing Bame access to top UK universities. Why dwell on the past?, they ask; we should look to the future.

It is of course perfectly possible for a university, or any institution, to carry out a rigorous investigation into the historical origins of its accumulated wealth, while at the same time putting in place systems to address modern inequalities of access and attainment. It’s not a case of either/or. Black students and would-be students are not being sacrificed in the name of what the new right like to call “grievance archaeology”. The dichotomy is false and the motivations for its fabrication equally phoney.

It is also difficult not to notice that the parts of the past that it seems unhealthy to dwell on tend to be those in which non-white people were exploited or exterminated. It’s always too long ago or not appropriate. Yet if Cambridge, the university from which the abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson both graduated, had set up a project to explore its role in the ending of slavery, there would have been back-slaps all round. Everyone is happy for the history of slavery to be investigated so long as the investigation examines the parts in which we look good.

What has been started at Cambridge is not just about the money and not just about the slavery. It is also about ideas. Another aim of the investigation is to determine if previous generations of Cambridge academics “reinforced and validated race-based thinking”. What the architects of the project recognise is that universities did not just benefit financially from slavery and colonialism, they played a role in the creation of the racial theories that underwrote both of those grim projects.

Racism is a belief system. It was assembled over centuries from many component parts – bits of biblical scripture, the propaganda of the slave-owning lobby and the pseudo-science of academics working in universities in Europe and America. Theories, books and ideas created within ivory towers had real- world consequences.

Some universities have concluded that it is time to confront these realities. In the US, the Universities Studying Slavery project links a number of institutions currently examining their role in US slavery. Last year, Glasgow University announced that a considerable proportion of its historical funding had come from slavery, information generated by a research project very similar to that announced by Cambridge. That there was no comparable howl of derision at the news from Glasgow reveals part of the problem here. Cambridge, and therefore its links to slavery, is close to Britain’s elite – 54% of the UK’s top journalists, for instance, attended Oxbridge.

What Cambridge has announced is not about dredging up the past, self-flagellation or any of the other blithe dismissals we’ve heard. It is about breaking the historical silence and uncovering a past that was whitewashed. Cambridge never forgot its role in the lives of Wilberforce and Clarkson, the better angels of our history, but, like other universities across Britain, there was amnesia about the men who made their money from the slavery business. This research is needed because of that amnesia.

History will not be “rewritten”, no one is to be blamed for the past, the “standards of today” will not be misapplied to historical events and the sins of the fathers will not be visited upon the sons. All that will happen is that a couple of postdoctoral researchers will carry out some rigorous archival work that will enable us to know how one of the nation’s oldest and richest institutions benefited from the enslavement of Africans.

15 What actions that new knowledge inspires will be up to Cambridge University. That is the real question.

Doc 6: David Olusoga, “The Treasury’s tweet shows slavery is still misunderstood”, The Guardian, 12 Feb 2018.

The modern equivalent of £17bn was paid out to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. Some people believe we should be proud

It is hard to imagine why somebody at the Treasury thought that the subject of slavery was fertile territory from which they might harvest their weekly “surprising #FridayFact”. Just after lunchtime on 9 February the department’s Twitter page presented its third of a million followers with its latest offering. “Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes,” it trumpeted.

Below, under an image of Africans being marched, in yokes and ropes, into slavery, the tweet continued: “Did you know? In 1833, Britain used £20 million, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015. Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.”

The “fact” had the unctuous feel of a pat on the back. A little over a week after millions had been given their self-assessment tax bills, the good people at the Treasury threw us something to cheer us up. You might be skint, you might want to weep when you see your bank balance but look, you helped to end slavery, at least it’s all for a good cause, eh?

What the Treasury didn’t mention, though, was that the £20m was paid out to the 46,000 slave owners, to compensate them for the loss of their human property. By one calculation that is the modern equivalent of about £17bn. Is this really something we should regard with collective pride?

Few people in the 1830s would have seen it that way. Compensation was a mechanism by which Britain was finally able to end a system that millions of people had come to regard as abhorrent, and a national disgrace. It was a way out. The abolitionists agonised over it. To accept the principle of compensation was at odds with their fundamental moral position: that it was impossible for one human being to own another, to hold “property in men”, as they put it. The only people who saw the payment of compensation as a positive were the people who had spent three decades campaigning for it and would be the beneficiaries of it – the slave owners.

16 And the slave owners not only received compensation from the British taxpayer, they won another concession, the euphemistically titled “apprenticeship” system. What this meant was that the slaves themselves were forced to work the fields for a further six years after the supposed abolition of slavery – 45 hours a week for no pay.

Within hours of the Treasury’s tweet being posted it was evident that surprise was not the dominant emotion it was eliciting. Anger and incredulity were more in evidence. Lexington Wright tweeted: “So basically, my father and his children and grandchildren have been paying taxes to compensate those who enslaved our ancestors, and you want me to be proud of that fact. Are you f**king insane???”

To pay the £20m to the slave owners, the government set up the Slave Compensation Commission, which like all bureaucracies left behind detailed records of its financial outgoings. By accident, the process of compensation created a nearly complete census of British slavery: the names of all the slave owners on 1 August 1834, the day on which slavery ended – and of course “apprenticeship” began. This is how we know the scale of slave ownership of the so-called plantocracy, the super-rich of their age: men such as John Gladstone, the father of prime minister William Ewart Gladstone.

The Gladstones were paid £100,000 – the modern equivalent of about £80m – in compensation for 2,500 men, women and children they regarded as property. Also in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission are the ancestors of George Orwell, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Gilbert Scott and David Cameron – all owned slaves and received compensation. All of this information is publicly and freely available on the website of the University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project.

Although called a #FridayFact, what we are dealing with here is a factoid: a fact-like entity that crumbles on proper examination. It was not only wrongly judged, in numerous respects it was just wrong. Compensation was not paid at the end of “the slave trade”. That ended in 1807. The slave trade and slavery – confusing as that may be to us – were regarded almost as separate issues at the time. Compensation was paid 30 years later, at the end of slavery.

To make matters worse, the picture chosen to illustrate the #FridayFact was (again) of the slave trade rather than slavery; and, judging by the dress of the slave traders depicted, it was a Victorian image of the eastern slave trade, through which Arab and African-Arab slave traders trafficked millions of Africans to lives of enslavement in the Middle East – a too often neglected aspect of the global story of slavery.

Even the most essential details were wrong. The 1833 act did not free “all slaves in the Empire”, as the most rudimentary research would have shown.

Someone at the Treasury wisely deleted the tweet within hours. Yet its inaccuracy shows what happens if we as a nation focus on abolition but stay largely silent on the centuries of slave-trading and slave- owning that predated it. It is what happens when those communities for whom this history can never be reduced to a Friday factoid remain poorly represented within our national institutions.

17 2- Patrimonial Memory: Monuments, Memorials

Doc 1 : Renée Ater, « Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments », American Art, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 20-23

18

19

20 Doc 2 : David A. Graham, “Where Will the Removal of Confederate Monuments Stop?”, Jun 28, 2017, The Atlantic

An eminent historian explains why taking down Civil War statues doesn’t erase history—and why statues to slaveholding Founding Fathers aren’t next.

Perhaps not since the collapse of the Soviet Union has there been such a vogue for tearing down statues. And just as the removal of images of Lenin and Stalin rubbed nerves across the former Soviet Socialist Republics, the effacing of statues in the United States has become an acrimonious debate.

The most recent flashpoint came in New Orleans, where Mayor Mitch Landrieu ordered the removal of statues of several Confederate generals. In the face of massive protests, Landrieu was forced to resort to both heavy police presence and unannounced nighttime removal to get the statues down. But there are plenty of other examples, beginning with South Carolina’s decision to quit flying the Confederate battle flag at the state capitol and running through more recent skirmishes from St. Louis to Charlottesville, Virginia.

Some of those who oppose the removal of those statues are racist—some proudly so, others less openly. (One need only read quotes from those rallying at sites in New Orleans, or the white supremacists organizing in Charlottesville, to see this.) But others bring different objections to the debate. Some objections, for example, are borne out of a sense that removing monuments is a rebuke to the memory of ancestors who fought bravely for the Confederacy. And a final group sees some wisdom in removing some statues, but worries about a slippery slope—foreseeing a future in which even statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are torn down.

The first group cannot, and should not, be accommodated. But the others raise questions that are at least worth answering, and a panel Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-presented by Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, wrestled with how to do that.

Landrieu, whose speech justifying the removal became an improbable viral sensation, confessed that he hadn’t anticipated the level of backlash that removing the statues would cause. He figured that the more than 150 years since the war ended would have provided sufficient distance—but he was wrong.

“I thought it was really important to say that the Confederacy lost,” he said, “The cause of the south was not a just cause.”

The idea that taking down the monuments dishonored the Confederate dead is one commonly refuted. The statues being removed were not in cemeteries, nor were they dedicated to the Confederate dead— but to specific men. But even that was a charade. As Landrieu pointed out, many of today’s contested Confederate monuments were raised long after the war, during periods of white backlash against civil rights: in the Redemption period, or during the mid-20th century civil-rights movement.

“They were not statues that were put up to honor those particular men,” he said. “It was to send a message that the Confederacy was really the right cause, and not the wrong cause.”

The Lost Cause narrative was allowed to take root in part because of a desire among whites in both the North and South to foster reconciliation.

“The idea was to bring the country back together, and that’s what whites did,” said Annette Gordon- Reed, the Harvard professor of American history. “It’s like beating up your little brother and then you feel guilty and then you let him have his way.”

21 Viewed in this light, the removal of monuments is not an erasure of history, but an effort to revise the popular account toward a more accurate one: “We’re just beginning, in the last 40 years, to tell the true story of the country,” she said.

Some hesitation about removing monuments is grounded in a sense among Southerners of still being condescended to, Landrieu said. “I think some of the pushback is [the sense that] if we admit this and we admit we were wrong, it will feed into the misapprehension that people have” about continued racism in the South. Of course, it is just the opposite—the backlash only brings unwanted attention to the persistence of Confederate monuments—but as the poet Elizabeth Alexander pointed out, the North is hardly immune to racism itself. “As Bree Newsome said,” referring to the activist who, as part of a protest removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house grounds in 2015, “the Confederacy may be a southern issue, but white supremacy is an American issue,” Alexander said.

Nevertheless, the concerns about erasure of history remain perhaps the most potent objection, espoused not only by irredentist rebels but even by those who declare strong disdain for the Confederacy. And Gordon-Reed offered two rejoinders.

The first was that removing a statue hardly constitutes erasing history. “We’re always going to know who Robert E. Lee is,” she said. “The question is where these monuments are. The public sphere should be comfortable for everybody.”

But what about the idea that once the Lees and Stonewall Jacksons and P.G.T. Beauregards are pulled down, the revisionists will inevitably start agitating for pulling down monuments to slave-owning Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

But Gordon-Reed, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, said it was not hard to draw a bright line separating Jefferson’s generation of Virginians from the ones who tried to secede.

“We can distinguish between people who wanted to build the United States of America and people who wanted to destroy it,” she said. “It’s possible to recognize people’s contributions at the same time as recognizing their flaws.”

“You’re not going to have American history without Jefferson,” Gordon-Reed said. Alluding not to the demise of the Lenin statues but to the infamous deletion of disgraced figures from Kremlin photographs, she added, “It’s not the Soviet Union.”

Doc 2 : Carolyn E. Holmes, “Should Confederate monuments come down? Here’s what South Africa did after apartheid”, The Washington Post, August 21, 2018.

Outraged protesters demanded the removal of statues and monuments celebrating racism and oppression. Traditionalists objected to “erasing history,” even though the memorials were erected years after that history, specifically to remind viewers of white domination and superiority.

Sound like the recent U.S. debate over Confederate symbols? It’s also the story of South Africa’s recent debate over monuments to white minority rule.

So what, if anything, can the United States learn from South Africa’s similar controversies?

Here’s the background to this debate, in the United States and South Africa.

22 Since 2015, after a white supremacist shot and killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., the United States has been debating whether to remove public displays of Confederate symbols such as flags, statues and monuments. Protesters often try to “protect” or “defend” those monuments, sometimes violently. That includes the recent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, in which white supremacists rallied on behalf of a statue of Robert E. Lee, resulting in dozens of injuries and the death of one counterprotester. Within a few days, in cities across the country, municipal officials and unofficial protesters removed or covered similar statues, whether legally or otherwise.

South Africans would feel right at home.

Starting in March 2015, in a movement called #RhodesMustFall, University of Cape Town students demanded that the university remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist who helped colonize South Africa and believed whites to be a superior race. On editorial pages around the world, writers claimed that the students wanted to erase history.

In April of the same year, a statue of Afrikaner leader Paul Kruger was vandalized in Pretoria’s Church Square. Counterprotesters gathered to protect the statue. Some chained themselves to it; others held signs demanding the defense of “our heritage” and a place for “our children” in South Africa.

Something similar happened in Cape Town when a protester chained himself to a statue of Jan van Riebeeck, the first Dutch settler at the Cape Colony, in response to threats to vandalize or tear down the statue. The protester held a sign reading, “keep your hands off my body.”

The rhetoric was similar Charlottesville white supremacist protesters used much of the same language. They objected to the erasure of history, and said they wanted to ensure “a future for our children and for our culture.” In both cases, the protesters seeking to preserve the monuments used nationalist metaphors of family, claiming that the future of their children was being threatened. They called for the protection of their heritage. And they charged that white people were being not just targeted but victimized.

Meanwhile, those who wanted to remove the symbols pointed to the leaders’ racist history and causes. They noted that the monuments were erected decades after their causes had been defeated — and in fact had been installed to remind audiences that white power, even after those defeats, was reasserting itself, whether in the United States after Reconstruction or during South Africa’s period of apartheid rule.

So how has South Africa responded to this controversy? Right after apartheid fell and was replaced by multiracial democracy, during the early 1990s, the South African government removed many statues of apartheid-era leaders from city parks and government buildings, giving them to private heritage organizations. Some are now on display in private museums or in private sculpture gardens.

From the mid-1990s onward, the African National Congress-run government has used a different strategy: construct new monuments alongside the old ones. For instance, Pretoria’s Voortrekker monument celebrates the Afrikaner pioneers of the mid-1800s. About a mile away, the government built Freedom Park, a monument to the anti-apartheid struggle. While this strategy has met with mixed reactions, the idea was that the new South Africa would have monuments for everyone. Rather than destroying the past, it would be peacefully transformed into a multiracial present.

Which statues were removed and which left in place? Two factors appear to have been critical: 1) how close a relationship the figure in the monument had to the apartheid and colonial governments; 2) who supported the statues.

23 Depictions of apartheid-era leaders, especially those associated with the most repressive periods of apartheid, were quickly removed — but statues of leaders before apartheid were often left standing. The idea was that the latter did not represent the political and moral hazards of apartheid, but a more distant and more complicated period of South African history.

Consider the Pretoria statue of Paul Kruger, who was the president of a white-minority ruled state — but was also a central figure in the fight against British imperialism in Africa. Many Afrikaners refer to the statue and the man it depicts as “Uncle Paul,” suggesting a very familial and familiar relationship. Since the protests, the government has decided to add other monuments nearby, reframing the grouping as one celebrating “freedom of speech.”

Cecil Rhodes, on the other hand, has been removed from the plinth his image occupied for 81 years. The statue is being held in storage at a secret location. Rhodes, the foreign imperialist, has fallen, but Uncle Paul will remain standing.

What can the U.S. learn from South Africa’s approach? Will similar considerations influence U.S. cities’ and states’ decisions about their Confederate symbols?

On the one hand, some protesters argue that the statues celebrate slavery and Jim Crow. On the other, constituencies rising to support these statues say they celebrate Southern heritage and pride. White supremacist violence in support of these monuments seems to be persuading observers that they do, in fact, stand for white supremacy — and should be taken down.

That, at least has been the reaction in Austin, North Carolina, Kentucky, Maryland, Florida, Missouri, Wisconsin and New York. As with the removal of statues of apartheid leaders in South Africa, the cause that is celebrated by these memorials cannot be defended, and so the statues will not be either. Of course dozens — if not hundreds — more such symbols stand in a wide variety of spots. The debate is likely to be alive for years to come.

Doc 3 : Afua Hirsch, « Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next”, The Guardian, 22 August 2017

The area I grew up in, leafy Wimbledon in south-west London, is bordered by memorials to two towering historical figures. One side dedicates its streets and walls to the legacy of the abolitionist William Wilberforce: the remnants of a house where he lounged with his friends, and the mounting block he used to get on his horse to ride to the Houses of Parliament, still stand.

The other side is devoted to Admiral Horatio Nelson, who having defeated the French navy bought a romantic estate where he stayed with his lover, Emma Hamilton. So many streets, pubs, shops and other local businesses recall this history that local estate agents refer to the area as The Battles.

These two contemporaneous, though contrasting, histories are symbolic of the problems Britain faces in confronting its past. Wilberforce, unquestionably a force for good, helped end, in 1807, Britain’s official involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. But he was not alone. The enormous contribution of black people in Britain at the time – especially activists and writers who were slaves themselves – has no equivalent site of glory, in London or anywhere in the country.

One of the obstacles all these abolitionists had to overcome was the influence of Nelson, who was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist. While many around him were denouncing slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it. Britain’s best known naval hero – so idealised that after his death in 1805 he was compared to no less than “the God who made him” – used his seat in the House of Lords and his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he counted among his closest friends.

24 It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials – more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas – have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past. But when these statues begin to fulfil their intended purpose of energising white supremacist groups, the issue periodically attracts more mainstream interest.

The reaction in Britain has been, as in the rest of the world, almost entirely condemnatory of neo-Nazis in the US and of its president for failing to denounce them. But when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward. The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised: despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious slaver Edward Colston. When I tweeted this weekend that it’s time we in Britain look again at our own landscape, the reaction was hostile.

“I don’t want that nonsense spreading here from America. Past is past, we have moved on,” one person said. Another accused me of being a “#ClosetRacist” for even raising the question. But the most common sentiment was summed up in this tweet: “Its History – we cant & shouldn’t re-write it – we learn from it. Removing statues would make us no different to terrorists at Palmyra.” Therein lies the point. Britain has committed unquantifiable acts of cultural terrorism – tearing down statues and palaces, and erasing the historical memory of other great civilisations during an imperial era whose supposed greatness we are now, so ironically, very precious about preserving intact.

And we knew what we were doing at the time. One detail that has always struck me is how, when the British destroyed the centuries-old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860 and gave a little dog they’d stolen as a gift to Queen Victoria, she humorously named it “Looty”. This is one of the long list of things we are content to forget while sucking on the opium of “historical integrity” we claim our colonial statues represent.

We have “moved on” from this era no more than the US has from its slavery and segregationist past. The difference is that America is now in the midst of frenzied debate on what to do about it, whereas Britain – in our inertia, arrogance and intellectual laziness – is not.

The statues that remain are not being “put in their historical context”, as is often claimed. Take Nelson’s column. Yes, it does include the figure of a black sailor, cast in bronze in the bas-relief. He was probably one of the thousands of slaves promised freedom if they fought for the British military, only to be later left destitute, begging and homeless, on London’s streets when the war was over.

But nothing about this “context” is accessible to the people who crane their necks in awe of Nelson. The black slaves whose brutalisation made Britain the global power it then was remain invisible, erased and unseen.

The people so energetically defending statues of Britain’s white supremacists remain entirely unconcerned about righting this persistent wrong. They are content to leave the other side of the story where it is now – in Nelson’s case, among the dust and the pigeons, 52 metres below the admiral’s feet. The message seems to be that is the only place where the memory of the black contribution to Britain’s past belongs.

25 Doc 4: “What silly nonsense - Nelson's towering virtues dwarf his vices: As a campaign is launched to pull down the hero's statue because he was a 'white supremacist', Max Hastings is exasperated,” 24 August 2017, The Daily Mail

Afua Hirsch is a 36-year-old half-British, half- Ghanaian journalist brought up in London who, until this week, scarcely anybody had heard of. She has now, however, achieved her five minutes of notoriety, space in the Guardian and a television debate, by proposing that Nelson’s statue in Trafalgar Square should be torn from its plinth among the pigeons because he was a ‘white supremacist’.

She is pursuing the trail blazed by the Oxford protesters who seek to depose Cecil Rhodes, the Bristol campaigners who have secured the rebranding of the Colston Hall concert venue, and the Americans who are everywhere overthrowing images of Confederate Civil War heroes.

All those whose monuments are being challenged face similar charges — exploitation of black people, engagement in slavery. Some modern black or mixed-race British and American people find it offensive that representations of historic figures who cruelly mistreated their forefathers should continue to occupy places of honour in our communities.

Her attention focuses on Nelson’s friendships with West Indian slave traders, and his description of the ideals of abolitionist William Wilberforce as ‘a damnable and cruel doctrine’.

Putting about such ideas, Nelson wrote to a friend in June 1805, encouraged rebellion in Britain’s West Indian islands.

Nelson’s finest biographer, John Sugden, observes that it is uncertain how far this remark reflected the Admiral’s considered view.

He was exemplarily kind to black sailors who did good service on his ships, and in 1802 wrote another letter in support of a proposal by one of his own officers to employ free Chinese labour in the West Indies instead of slaves.

To most of us, all nit-picking about these things is ridiculous. Nelson was a man of his time. He would have mocked the notion of women being granted the vote; though he disliked the ‘cat’, offenders were cruelly flogged on his ships.

There is no record that he was much troubled by the hanging of sheep-stealers or the impressment of poachers into ships’ crews, any more than were the ruling classes of the civilised world.

All that matters, in the eyes of sensible British people, is that Nelson wrought wonderful service against his country’s foes. Without his genius at sea, it is conceivable that the tyrant Bonaparte could have prevailed over our ancestors.

His towering virtues make his vices, among which conceit and nastiness to his wife were conspicuous, visible only through a microscope — one which is now in the hands of Afua Hirsch and her friends, whom I venture to guess know little and care less about the Napoleonic Wars.

I will offer them comfort, however, on another such case: that against America’s statues of Confederate Civil War heroes. Most were erected in the early 20th century by Southern segregationist politicians, for the explicit purpose of glorifying the cause of white supremacy in their lifetimes.

In other words, they were created not as authentic acts of commemoration, as was Nelson’s Column in the 1840s, but instead to support an ugly and indeed indefensible racist case, and in pursuit of Southern hopes of reversing the consequences of the U.S. Civil War, their own fathers’ defeat.

It is thus understandable why black Americans, and many white ones, too, want them removed.

26 Contrarily, while the mining tycoon and nation-builder Cecil Rhodes was an unpleasant human being, he made a notable contribution to the British Empire of his day — when even the best people were imperialists — and to philanthropy after his death.

Edward Colston is commemorated not because he was a successful 17th and 18th-century slave trader, but because he was a prominent citizen of Bristol, who did many good things for that city.

History is shot through with bad behaviour. In the heyday of empire, West Indian sugar processed by slaves was a cornerstone of Britain’s prosperity.

Likewise many imperial generals, up to and including Kitchener, were at best cavalier, at worst brutal, in their treatment of native races, including prisoners. We no longer treat people so cruelly, any more than we hang convicted homosexuals as did the courts-martial of Nelson’s Royal Navy, but it is childish to pretend that we can undo their customs and reverse their verdicts, hundreds of years later.

The Welsh might as well demand the right to tear down the ruins of Edward I’s magnificent castles in their country, because they were built to hold Wales under English subjection.

In this silly season, we should laugh off Afua Hirsch’s spasm of silliness about Nelson. But if a day comes when our rulers take seriously such demands, agree to erase portions of our heritage as Stalin erased Trotsky from every photograph of the Russian Revolutionaries, then we shall relinquish essential cultural values, rooted in a proper understanding of history.The past is another country in which matters were done differently, but we must continue to revere our great men and women, heedless of the odd blot on their escutcheons.

27 3 - Museums and Historic Sites

Doc 1 : Eugene Thomas, “Slavery museum at upriver plantation stirs controversy on both sides of racial divide”, The Lens, (Focused on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast), 1 Dec 2014

The City of New Orleans is the nation’s slavery museum. Take a walk around the Central Business District, the French Quarter, Congo Square, Marigny/Bywater, the Garden District and Audubon Park. With a few historical city maps or pre-Civil War business directories as a guide, you’ll be able to locate the former sites of the city’s numerous slave markets, slave pens, slave auction houses, slave exchanges, slave trading firms and plantations within the current city limits.

Slavery was big business in New Orleans. It drove much of the South’s economy. New Orleans was the largest slave market in the country in the years leading up to the Civil War. As The Times-Picayune noted in its 175th anniversary look back at area history: “In 1854, the city claimed to have at least 19 slave yards, many of them concentrated in what is now the Central Business District. An estimated 135,000 people were sold in the city between 1804 and 1862.”

Slavery is fact, historical truth. It shaped the city we know today as it did the state and, for that matter, the United States. And yet we Americans tend to avoid the topic. We whitewash the history of slavery, distort reality by viewing it through the lens of current political concerns, and deny the lingering social and economic effects. Slavery isn’t a topic much taught in school. It mostly gets relegated to Black History Month in February, and most adults don’t care to know or learn about it.

So I was intrigued to read that a rich white man, New Orleans lawyer John Cummings, is preparing to open a slavery museum in the ante-bellum plantation he owns up the river in Wallace. I was equally intrigued (and not at all surprised) by the clash of opinions among folks who chose to comment on Mimi Read’s article about Cummings’ plans and the follow- up exchanges on Facebook.

Black and white folks alike — some of them skeptics, some of them cynics — seemed to be mightily opposed to the idea of a slave museum.

Some of the white folk saw it as a threat to their faith in Southern heritage, American tradition, culture and glory. One reader insisted that Cummings had announced that white people are his target audience — doesn’t say that anywhere in the article, but never mind — and that, ergo, the museum is an anti- white exercise in shame and blame.

Others condemned the museum as likely to inspire unwholesome pity for black people. (Mind you, the museum won’t open until next Monday, Dec. 8, so all the comment was somewhat speculative.)

Others warned that the museum had better be “objective” — by which the commenters meant that it needs to make clear that Africans were complicit in the slave trade, not just those beastly white planters.

And from the other side of the racial divide, you get the argument that descendants of the slaves are owed affirmative action and beefed up entitlement programs — ranging from job training to public housing — as compensation for the horrors visited upon their ancestors.

A slavery museum set up by a white man rich enough to own a plantation is just another legacy of slavery itself, an example of continued profiteering off the suffering of black people, some argued. “First their ancestors established their wealth on the blood, sweat, and tears of our Ancestors and free labor;

28 now the descendants want to make $$$ on selling their version of this story to the tourist …,” one commenter wrote.

A more academic concern expressed by some of the people Read interviewed was that Cummings’s museum, however moving, might turn out to be more of a monument to his somewhat eccentric passion for the topic than a resource that’s historically valid and useful to scholars.

Whitney Plantation will not be the first museum to address slavery and its place in American history. The LSU Rural Life Museum in Baton Rouge contains slave-era artifacts, and other plantations along the river — Oak Alley, for example — have refurbished their slave cabins and begun to include somewhat muted reference to the brutal economics that made massa’s “big house” possible.

But as Read notes, Whitney will be the first in the area to make slavery the center of the exhibition.

It’s an ambition that African-Americans have long tried to fulfill, though our attempts to establish slavery museums and make slavery a topic of national discussion have sometimes been stillborn.

In 1915, Carter Godwin Woodson, the Harvard-educated PhD who is sometimes called the “father of black history,” founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History — based in Washington and later renamed the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. Its purpose is “to promote, research, preserve, interpret, and disseminate information about Black life, history and culture to the global community.”

In 2001, Douglas Wilder, who had been Virginia’s first African-American governor and later was mayor of Richmond, began a drive to start a United States National Slavery Museum. The museum sought bankruptcy protection in 2011 after it was denied a tax exemption on a site in Fredericksburg. Plans are afoot to one day open it in Richmond.

In 2002, Philadelphia opened the Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery. It houses an extensive collection of authentic slavery artifacts and documents, including plantation records and ledgers, slave purchase receipts, shackles, branding irons and other forms of punishing ironware from the U.S. and Trans-Atlantic slave trade. But you can visit by “appointment only” because of funding and budgeting issues.

Similarly, the River Road African American Museum was established in 1994 on the Tezcuco Plantation but was moved to a small house in Donaldsonville after a fire in 2002 and is struggling to stay open.

I found it impossible to imagine the ‘happy slave’ evoked by apologists for the plantation system.Right here in New Orleans, native son and local historian Lloyd Lazard has been lobbying city and state government to build a National Slave Ship Museum on an abandoned Lower Garden District wharf. “The reality of it is the fact that New Orleans was the cradle of the slave trade,” says Lazard. Funding has not come together. As Woodson wrote in 1933, in his book The Mis-Education of The Negro, “The chief reason why so many give such a little attention to the background of the Negro is the belief that this study is unimportant.” This is still true today.

I took a tour of the Laura Plantation some years ago and came away sad and disappointed, but I’m going to remain an optimist about Cummings’ plans.

Maybe Laura has upgraded its act, but at the time the tour was basically a celebration of the Big House and the splendid social life of the slave-owning family. There was glancing mention of the nameless field workers and enslaved craftsmen who built the place and kept it going, and slaves came up again briefly as we entered the kitchen/cooking area.

29 Dilapidated slave cabins were mostly boarded up and not part of the tour — as is still true of some River Road plantations that are open to the public — and that’s what disappointed me. I should mention that the tour guide never once referred to the planter whose home we were touring as a “slave owner” or “master.”

A couple of friends and I broke away from the tour and ventured off to the slave cabin area. And that’s where I became overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings of the atrocity committed there. We peeked into the slave shacks, walked into some of them and sat on a porch as countless slaves must have done.

As I took in the surroundings, I tried to fathom what it must have been like for them: their thoughts and feelings, their food, their laughter, their joys, their tears. I found it impossible to imagine the “happy slave” evoked by apologists for the plantation system.

I want to believe Cummings when he says, “It became important to me to have the history of slavery researched and recognized, to convey untold stories of their [the slaves’] humanity.” Through the use of historical empathy, he says he is attempting to provoke moral outrage in all of us.

Maybe it’s an attempt to encourage a more balanced and equitable view of plantation slavery, an understanding of the outlook, feelings and worldview of the slaves. “When you leave here, you’re not going to be the same person who came in,” Cummings told Read. “Education is the takeaway here, including the education of African-Americans, so they can realize how badly the deck was stacked against them.”

If that turns out to be true, I say bravo to John Cummings. When it comes to the topic of slavery, there is more than enough ignorance, mis-education and skewed history in both the black and white communities.

As for the skeptics and cynics, so maybe Cummings is a rich white liberal trying to further the liberal agenda through shame-and-blame tourism. Maybe he’s just a latterday massa profiting off the spirits of dead slaves.

Or maybe, as he seems to think, he embodies the spirit of the martyred abolitionist John Brown, who was killed at Harper’s Ferry trying to liberate slaves and start a revolt. In this case, revolt would be a liberation of minds.

In all honesty, I don’t care to know his personal motivations if the museum is historically accurate and powerfully true. “Everybody has to do something,” Cummings said. “I may be doing some things wrong,” he continued, “but I’m doing something.”

Very well, Mr. Cummings, we will see what you have done come Dec. 8. I look forward to the tour. Best wishes !

30 Doc 2 : Demetria Lucas D’Oyley, “Plantation Tours: Don’t Expect to Hear How Horrible Slavery Really Was”, The Root, 17 July 2015

I’m not sure how I picked up the hobby of touring plantations. I think it started with my interest in architecture—picked up from my husband, who works in real estate—and my best friend of 20-plus years, who is an interior designer. Over the years, I’ve adopted their combined interests.

I’ve been to four plantations and an antebellum home with slave quarters over the past few months. That certainly doesn’t make me an expert on slavery or plantations. But it has given me some perspective on the popular article “I Used to Lead Tours at a Plantation. You Won’t Believe the Questions I Got About Slavery,” written by Margaret Biser for Vox.

Biser, who described herself as someone who once “worked at a historic site in the South,” shared her observations of some white people who visited the grounds and the sometimes bizarre questions they asked. I’ve had my own experiences with strange questions on the tours, notably all from black people, and also the bizarre commentary from white—always white, always women—docents.

My first plantation tour took place in March, when I visited Magnolia Plantation & Gardens in Charleston, S.C. The tour of the big house was OK, though it was smaller than I expected. I appreciated the architecture and interior, though I was never able to separate the opulence from the people who toiled miserably in cotton or tobacco fields. Every time the tour guide made a sweeping gesture alluding to the grandness of a room, I wondered about the enslaved men and women who were forced to work for free to make such luxuries possible.

As the other visitors, all of them white except for a friend accompanying me, oohed and aahed, I wondered if they were picturing themselves heading back in time and imagining what life would have been like then. As a black girl with a great-grandfather born into slavery, I know how I would have lived: enslaved, considered property, doing backbreaking work for no pay, subjected to the demands of Massa and Missy, and living under the threat of violence at any time. Standing in one of the upper bedrooms, I thought, “This visit was a bad idea,” and whispered to my friend, “Never again.”

The slave quarters, distant from the big house, required a separate tour. Of our big-house group of 30 or so, just four of us boarded a trolley that took us down the road to the cabins. The tour guide, a peppy young woman in her early 20s, walked us out to the restored one-room shacks, which she described as "duplexes" because they had attic space that enslaved people slept in.

She told our group that enslaved men and women were treated and fed well on the plantation. In fact, they “were like family” to the owners. She went on to tell the story of a black family who stayed on the plantation beyond the Civil War and into the 1960s because they were loyal and they were so happy there. Then she showed us a cabin with psychedelic wallpaper. My friend and I had exchanged “This is bulls—t” glances throughout the tour, but our eyes locked the longest and rolled the hardest over these details.

Oddly, this perspective on slavery actually made me want to go back on my word and visit more plantations, if for no other reason than to hear who was telling revisionist history and who wasn’t. Was every plantation selling “The slaves were so happy!” stories, or was anyone revealing 12 Years a Slave realness?

Last week I was in New Orleans and stopped by the Hermann-Grima House in the French Quarter. It was the city house of a family that owned a large sugarcane plantation elsewhere in the state. Enslaved men and women were kept in an apartment-style building in the backyard.

31 The docent, a white woman, of course, was visibly nervous. I was the only black person on the tour. Was she nervous because of me? She alternately referred to the enslaved women and men who worked in the home as “dependencies” and “domestic workers.” When she actually called them “enslaved men and women,” she stumbled over the words as if she weren’t used to the phrase. I wondered if she used that politically correct phrase with all-white groups. No one asked anything like what Biser described in her article.

After the tour, I double-checked some numbers and dates with her because I knew I would write about my visit. She answered my questions, then added unexpectedly that the current owners of the home don’t really like the docents to talk about slavery, but she’s a historian and thinks it should be mentioned. I thanked her for clarifying.

On the final day of my trip, I headed an hour out to Old River Road, a 100-mile stretch of two-lane road with plenty of plantations, including the Evergreen Plantation, which was featured in Django Unchained. (A TV show was shooting on location, so it was closed to the public.) A friend from Louisiana recommended that I start with the recently restored Whitney Plantation, which was now a museum dedicated to the history of slavery.

Of our tour group of 20 or so, there were five black people: me, three women and a man, all of whom looked to be in their late 50s to early 60s. By their accents, I assumed they were from the South. Only their questions struck me as bizarre.

We were standing by a monument to enslaved people that included only their first names, ages, any skills and the region in Africa where they were stolen from. The guide had just explained that the only way researchers were able to retrieve this information was by looking at property records.

From one of the black women: “Did the slaves have birth certificates?”

Um, no. Enslaved men and women were not considered people. Maybe she wasn’t paying attention to the docent. I gave her a pass.

Our group moved on to the on-site slave jails. The parish jail was for people actually considered human. The “property” who needed to be locked up for whatever reason were punished or held in a square contraption. There were hooks showing where they could be shackled to the wall.

From one of the black women: “When the slaves were in slave jail, were they allowed out for exercise?”

Um … no.

I was happy that they were on the tour in order to learn. But I was surprised that black people, especially those from the South, knew so little about slavery and seemed to think the treatment of enslaved men and women reflected a modern, humane way of life. Ignorance about slavery is not the sole domain of white people.

Next up was the Laura Plantation, which was owned by a Creole family. The guide pulled no punches in describing the cruelty of slavery. She told us about an enslaved man who was captured after he’d run off and was punished by having the initials of the owner engraved into his forehead.

There was another story about a son of the family who had a child with an enslaved woman, whom he never freed.

32 The docent told a story about an enslaved woman and her family who stayed on the plantation after the owners fled during the Civil War. The docent was clear that they likely stayed there only because they had nowhere else to go. I appreciated her honesty.

Finally, I made my way to the Oak Alley Plantation. There’s no tour of the slave cabins, but they have been turned into a walkable exhibit that features the devices used to torture enslaved men and women, and small iron shackles that could be used on children.

All in all, my takeaway from my plantation tours is similar to the conclusion that Biser reached through her own experiences as a docent: A lot of people just don’t know that much about the horrors of slavery. There’s been a failure not just in what white Americans are taught about slavery but in what African Americans learn, too. That’s not by accident.

During some of my visits I found a willful intent to overlook the worst parts of slavery to make it more palatable, which doesn’t serve anyone. If you want to know the real deal, you’ve got to seek out the information, perhaps at a plantation that’s not afraid to confront horrifying truth.

Doc 3 : Bridget Minamore, “Slaver! Invader! The tour guide who tells the ugly truth about museum portraits”, The Guardian, 24 April 2018.

Was Lord Nelson a white supremacist? Was Queen Victoria a thief? Alice Procter take us on one of her Uncomfortable Art Tours, which aim to show how the empire still exerts a grip on British galleries

‘History is just storytelling’ … a poster promoting Alice Procter’s Uncomfortable Art tours, featuring Queen Elizabeth I. One of Procter’s posters, featuring Lord Nelson. Photograph: George Procter

Last June, Alice Procter started running free gallery tours. She had answered a call-out from Antiuniversity, a project that helps organise radical educational events, and wanted to try out an idea. Her plan was to take people through museums, looking at the ways colonialism continues to influence their displays and the aesthetics of art, and examine the role of empire in funding the spaces themselves. She didn’t think they’d be popular – but they sold out.

The MA student now does Uncomfortable Art tours at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the V&A, the National Maritime Museum and Tate Britain. “My parents took me to museums when I was a kid,” says the 23-year-old, “so I’ve always been very comfortable in art galleries. I have experience as a tour guide, I fit the profile of the typical young white girl who’s an art history student doing a guided tour. And I can use that.”

Why the empire? “I have always been interested in the art of the British empire. I’m Australian and I grew up understanding there is a multiplicity to historical narratives. So I was aware that history is always just storytelling. I feel fairly confident in spaces like this, and coming in and telling stories in them, because I know that’s just what the building is. A building.”

33 The group who have turned up for today’s sold-out tour at Tate Britain are mostly white, mostly female and mostly young, something Procter says is typical. She also gets “arts students, people who work in education, and museum people who want to know how to do this sort of thing in their own institutions. Which is nice.”

It quickly becomes clear why Procter’s tours have done so well. Rarely using notes, she clearly knows what she’s talking about, mixing the historical context with present-day reflections on everything from corporate sponsorship to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. She also interrogates how the Tate displays the work, as well as the labels with information she suggests is glossed over or even unmentioned.

The tour, starting at 11am and lasting only an hour, is a quickfire look at select paintings and sketches from the 17th and 18th centuries. We begin with Elizabeth I, when “ideas of Britishness began to be defined”, and continue until the abolition of the British slave trade in 1833. It’s fascinating. We see William Hogarth’s sketches for A Rake’s Progress that, Procter explains, are filled with elements an 18th-century audience would have recognised as caricaturing and demonising everything deemed foreign.

Later, she uses a William Beechey painting to point out the similarities between Sir Francis Ford’s anti- abolitionist arguments and the sentiment you sometimes hear today that British charity should begin at home with “the white working class” as opposed to abroad. She doesn’t shy away from politics, mentioning issues such as Brexit and handing attendees free badges saying: “Display it like you stole it.” Her website is equally blunt, containing portraits of fine-looking gents with words such as “murderer” or “illegal immigrant” scrawled over them in red.

This tour is relatively quiet. Procter says attendees “tend to be a lot more conversational” – but it’s clear the people agree with her. They are vocal, too, nodding and murmuring words such as “awful” whenever she mentions slavery. At times, it’s a little like an echo chamber.

“You kind of know what you’re signing up for,” she says, “so I tend to get people who broadly agree with me.” Is this a good thing? She sighs. “I think it’s a thing. There are better places to have arguments over whether the British empire was good or bad than in an art gallery. The point of these tours is that they’re educational. So yes, people who come broadly agree with me, but they’re coming because they want to know more.”

Shamma, who is studying at the Royal College of Art and is originally from Dubai, says: “I did like the tour. I wanted to hear more, but there’s a lot of information and not much time.” Shamma admits to feeling “a little uncomfortable” as the tour went on. “I look at the techniques, and I’ve been so ignorant about how disgusting some of these works are. Suddenly I felt ashamed, like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to look at this any more.’ But I think it’s necessary.”

Procter has high hopes for the future. “At the moment, the tours are run from my kitchen. It’s just me, but they’re growing. I want to start working with other people, help people develop their own tours of different sites, get out of London, work with school groups. There’s so much I want to do, but I’m studying and suddenly this is a full-time job.

“My hope was that people could come and it would be a bit of a wake-up call. Then they would go and find more information.” However, those aims have changed. She hopes extra knowledge will encourage people to be more vocal, so that galleries will change everything from how they display work to what they put on the label. “That’s my bigger aim.”

34 Doc 4: Mia Mullane, “Why my Virginia town's 'slave block' should be removed from our sight”, The Guardian, 9 Sep 2017.

In Fredericksburg, Virginia, there sits a pre-civil war slave auction block. It’s upsetting to black and white residents – and it should be in a museum

As hurricanes ravage large parts of the US, another kind of tempest continues in my hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia, over whether to move a pre-civil war slave auction block from a prominent historic district corner to be housed at the local museum.

I signed the petition to remove the now infamous slave auction block and was surprised to see the local political controversy elevated to the world stage in last week’s article, penned by fellow Fredericksburg native David Caprara. To put it frankly, I believe Caprara buried the lede.

The crux of this issue is that tourists perform mock slave auctions atop this block, or otherwise disrespect it by sitting on it, standing on it, and taking smiling pictures of their family with it. It’s upsetting – to black and white residents alike. In the words of Chuck Frye Jr, Fredericksburg’s only black city councilman and a strong proponent of the auction block’s removal: “If it weren’t there, this wouldn’t be happening. It’s that simple.”

One solution might be to cordon off the block to visitors while providing more contextual signage – the current sign says nothing of the slave families who were brutally ripped apart there. However, it’s the block’s location – mock auctions or not – that many find distressing. Several friends have told me they’d like to feel free to take their families out for pizza, or just go for a walk to the corner coffee shop, without being confronted with a visual reminder of the atrocities committed against their ancestors. At a recent city council meeting, Faith Childress said she has friends who avoid William Street altogether.

Petition opponents argue that the block’s unassuming location is what gives it power as an historical artifact, and that it wouldn’t have the same emotional impact if viewed in a museum. I have heard some compare it to the Auschwitz concentration camp, claiming that the two locales serve much the same function – to ensure that we never forget the atrocities of the past and never allow them to be repeated. While these sentiments are well intended, one would hope that Fredericksburg’s residents don’t need a daily reminder not to enslave people.

Adrian Elliott, an African American resident and native of Fredericksburg, doesn’t think the comparison to Auschwitz quite holds up. Auschwitz is “a place you go to knowing that you’ll be hanging your head for the next three days” and that its location makes it a destination unto itself. One must actively choose to visit. In contrast, the auction block sits in the middle of town.

As the self-proclaimed “most historic city in America” — the area was the site of four major civil war battles as well as the boyhood home of George Washington – Fredericksburg and its residents are committed to preserving its unique history. But the history of the block does not end with slave auctions. In the decades since, it’s continually been used as a tool of oppression. Frye cites stories he’s heard from older black residents about how, as children, white tourists asked them to stand on top of the block for photo ops. In the Jim Crow south, when black people literally risked being lynched for something as

35 simple as not stepping aside to let a white person by on the sidewalk, who would dare deny this humiliating request?

An overlooked aspect of this issue is that moving the block to a museum might be the best way to preserve it, since it would reduce the risk of vandalism. In 2005, a former classmate of mine took a sledgehammer to the block in what was a noble –yet perhaps misguided – act of friendship. His best friend was black and had long found the block troubling.

Councilman Frye disagrees with Caprara’s assessment that “a common reaction is to throw this rock in the same mental heap” as Confederate memorials and flags. “[Removing the block] is an idea” Frye and others have been “talking about for years” – well before the recent uproar over Confederate monuments. Frye acknowledges the block’s historicity sets it apart from Confederate monuments, but that fact doesn’t change how it makes black residents feel.

Most perplexing is the reason for removing the block – that it stirs up uncomfortable feelings – paradoxically seems to be the basis of the argument for not removing it. But do the feelings of white people – their guilt and need for self-flagellation over the atrocities committed by their white forebears – trump the feelings of our city’s black residents?

Doc 1 : Why is UpRiver Plantation Museum so controversial?

Doc 2: What’s wrong with Plantation Tours in the US today?

Doc 3: What do make of this special tour in Britain?

Doc 4 : Do you think offensive representations need to be put away in museums? What does it say about the role of museums?

SYNTHESIS QUESTION: To what extent have museums evolved in their practices regarding the depicting of slavery? Which other improvements can there be?

36 4 - Slavery through Contemporary Art

37

Dominique Zinkpe, Voyage, 2015 Edwige Aplogan, Out of Africa, 2015 Rémy Samuz, Liberté, 2015 Roger Brown, Untitled, 2014 Maud Sulter, Bonnie Greer, 2002 Jason De Cayres Taylor, Underwater Sculptures, Grenada Kerry James Marshall, Great America, 1994, acrylic and collage on canvas. Keith Piper: Go West Young Man (slave ship), 1987, Glenn Ligon: Untitled, (I AM A MAN), 1988, oil and enamel on canvas

Check this exhibition catalogue, find a work of art, describe it and analyze its impact: http://www.faitacuba.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/CatalogueTM.pdf https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/regions/welcome-to-the-northeast-caribbean-region-2/about-region- 2/african-burial-ground/african-burial-ground-commissioned-artwork

Doc 1: 'Uncomfortable Truths', installation by various artists, February-June 2007, Victoria and Albert Museum

READ THESE 4 INTERVIEWS AND SUM UP THE ARTISTS’ OBJECTIVES

1. Anissa-Jane (b. 1980, UK) was one of 11 artists featured in the exhibition Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art which was held in 2007 to commemorate the bi-centenary of the parliamentary abolition of the British slave trade. Her work seeks to explore the intricacies of identity, ancestry and cultural adaptation and her own experiences as an African British West Indian woman are integral to her creative expression. Her signature medium is to manipulate brown paper - a representation of her own skin - into sculptural forms. In this interview she discusses her work and the Uncomfortable Truths exhibition.

What for you is the appeal - or necessity - of addressing slavery in your work?

My aim is to challenge pre-set perceptions and raise questions about identity and to celebrate the accomplishments of my forebears who have lived through and adapted to their changing social situations over the centuries. For me creating art is an indispensable necessity to life. There is a valuable link in the history of my culture that makes me who I am today. I am a contemporary artist and I have a grand role, I feel through my art I can stimulate interest in the multifaceted subject of slavery next to highlighting and documenting certain ideas on this subject.

38 The art I create originates from inner inspiration and from culture. The appeal to me is about remembering my ancestors and reflecting on who I am today. Slavery is a large subject matter and the reality is that it is part of my history. By addressing slavery I take up the challenge to encourage and spark enthusiasm to talk about such an intense subject. Personally, I do not believe slavery should be an uncomfortable subject to address, hence the reason why the appeal to me is to communicate my ideas and attract debate. I bring forth a negative subject matter in order to shape a positive change in attitude on the subject to pass on to generations.

Through showcasing some of my work in this exhibition I would like to stimulate interest in a previous hidden history and to encourage enthusiasm to connect with art to all social classes.

Can you talk visitors to our website through the creative process that led the work on display in the exhibition to take the shape it has done?

'Lucy' and 'The Spirit of Lucy Negro' was created to highlight and represent part of the unknown history of Black people in Britain since 3rd Century AD. The creative process developed from research and readings of Shakespeare's sonnets. The investigation of looking back in history interconnected with my own personal work and became part of a project I started in 2002.

'Smell the coffee…' is a wealthy out of bounds display of trauma, brutality, perversion encased in the fabric of the upholstered chairs, a rich display of potency and sophistication redefined. The materials to my work are all significant. It's taken shape from an installation that consisted of six chairs.

The creative process to my work with brown paper is important to the pieces I have made. By using brown paper in relation to my identity I have been able communicate some of my ideas on the complex matter of slavery. I use brown paper as a metaphor for my skin, silently showing different qualities of strength, delicacy, flexibility and fragility. While an element of my standpoint is of my identity, being born in Britain with Caribbean parentage, my artwork has wider relevance and can hold meaning for any person. I have been able to transform Brown paper from its original context by manipulating it in different ways. Although the paper has changed from its original context the origin of it remains the same. When creating the un wearable "Womanifestation" sculptural garment it became more than a mere voice bound by words and interpretation it became a physical manifestation of the earthly and spiritual journeys many have endeavoured throughout history. From taking the Brown paper through certain processes the garments gain a life of their own transcending boundaries and restrictions.

How do you feel that the environment of the museum impacts on the perception of your piece(s)?

I believe that the environment of the museum has impacted on my art as the museum has some of Britain's most significant cultural treasures on view. I am joyous to have had this opportunity to exhibit my work.

2. Lubaina Himid's installation “Naming The Money”

Naming the Money is a spectacular installation made up of 100 life-size painted cut-out figures. This is the story of the slave/servant but also of the emigre and the asylum seeker. Each cut-out has a real name, each one is able to say who they actually are but each one lives with their new name and their new unpaid occupation attempting somehow to reconcile the two. Every person in the installation is trying to tell you something, each has a voice that can be heard via the soundtrack playing in the gallery space or as text on an invoice collaged to his/her back. There are ten ceramicists, ten herbalists, ten toy makers, ten dog trainers, ten drummers, ten viol de gamba players, ten dancers, ten shoemakers, ten map makers and ten painters.

39 What for you is the appeal - or necessity - of addressing slavery in your work?

In my work I tend to address the hidden and neglected, cultural and economic contribution, made by real, but forgotten, people to the history and swagger of so-called great and established nations, rather than speak to the bitter cul-de-sac that is slavery itself.

How does the environment of the museum impact on the perception of your pieces?

The work 'Naming the Money' was an installation consisting of 100 cut-out, life-sized, painted, wooden slave servants first shown in 2004 in Newcastle. The work shown at the V&A was a tiny fraction of the original work and as such it was very different.

The piece was made to explore notions of what it is to belong and what it means to make the best of a life unpaid and abused that may have been thrust upon you. Each cut out had a name and this is very important, a real name and a real identity. It is more about naming than it is about money.

In the museum the cut-out people were modest and demure, silent and nameless, in much the same way that you would see them in the paintings of the time, in the houses of the time. In reality as an artwork this gathering of creative and powerful determined Africans dominated the space and were each able to tell their stories and to put the record straight.

Can you talk visitors to our website through the creative process that led the work on display in the exhibition to take the shape it has done?

Usually I investigate, re-invent and then experiment with ideas, images and texts, colours and patterns in order to make work that invites an audience into a conversation.

In making 'Naming the Money' I worked with a team of seven people who helped with the sound track, the logistics of fabrication and the catalogue. I undertook all of the painting of all of the cut outs and the writing of the texts simply because this is the part of the project I enjoyed and reveled in.

The 100 cut outs were made up of 10 ceramicists, herbalists, dog trainers, toy makers, drummers, dancing masters, viola da gamba players, shoe makers, map makers and painters. The entire work took around 18 months to make. For the V&A all I had to do was choose 16 figures from the 100 to fit the locations allotted to me by the curatorial team. The person chosen and their life story each had to work with the tapestry, bed, statue or fireplace in front of which they stood.

3. Interview with Tapfuma Gutsa, artist, Tribute to Sango, Tapfuma Gutsa, 2005, Zimbabwe/Austria

Tapfuma Gutsa (b. 1956, Zimbabwe) sculpts using dynamic combinations of organic materials - from the more traditional media of carved stone and wood to the unconventional shaping of paper, string, drawing pins and gourds. His methods have revolutionised Zimbabwean art practice. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Two of his works, 'Ancient Voyages' and 'Tribute to Sango' are on display as part of Uncomfortable Truths. In this interview he talks about his work and the Uncomfortable Truths exhibition.

What for you is the appeal - or necessity - of addressing slavery in your work?

I would address slavery because it has been part of human history forever, even to the present day. That of Africans is the most glaring example of slavery in history, but there are other more subtle forms that have existed, for example as described by [John] Berger in 'The Seventh Man'. I therefore think it is a

40 universal aberration of human freedom at the hands of humans and wish to see it stop. However it is an issue that will not go away just like that, as it is tied to economics (to the point of trafficking in humans).

Can you talk visitors to our website through the creative process that led the work on display in the exhibition to take the shape it has done?

I made Sango in Zimbabwe and was trying to work granite without the folly of trying to dominate the stern material, hence the delicate balance meant to lend the piece a feeling of lightness.

My 'Voyage' piece was made in Vienna. I wanted something portable considering the uncertainty of my situation in an awkward space where one is forced to affirm one's rights to be... I note the irony of the fact that I came voluntarily to Europe on a personal voyage.

How do you feel that the environment of the museum impacts on the perception of your piece(s)?

The museum is appropriate because it contains objects that come from all over the world, some obtained by unorthodox means. Cultures tend to discard obsolete material, and therefore museums are valuable databanks where one is likely to find authentic materials objectively displayed without shame of politics.

4. Christine Meisner (b. 1970, Germany)

She lives and works in Berlin between extensive international travels and artist residencies. The thrust of her artistic output, whether in film, drawing or text, is the experience of the African Diaspora and its representation in contemporary Europe. Uncomfortable Truths features Meisner's video tale 'Recovery of an Image' and two series of delicate and powerful pencil drawings, excavating the experiences of Afro-Brazilian communities descended from slaves. In this interview she discusses her work and the Uncomfortable Truths exhibition.

What for you is the appeal - or necessity - of addressing slavery in your work?

For several years I have been working on colonial and postcolonial changes in African countries, concentrating on specific examples of the search for identity, released by cultural occupation and annexation, incorporation and destruction. The focus of my work is on unfinished situations - the specific cultural processes in stories and protagonists, between leaving and arriving. Looking into the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is not only to see an example of a forced acculturation, but it means also to question those responsible. The role of the Europeans in this trilateral trade made me, as a European, especially aware of the need to review my heritage, the conditions of my affluence.

Can you talk web users through the creative process that led the work on display in the exhibition to take the shape it has done?

I am working with the media of video, drawing and text. Having the choice of several artistic means and making investigations out of different resources, it's like I'm examining reality through several telescopes. Any 'truth' is determined by historic structures and, today, through the distortions of mass media. My work reflects the artist practice of producing a form of knowledge, which stands apart from the classical forms of written history and documentation. Questioning the legitimacy of historical constructions goes ad absurdum through a deranged perspective on details. My own approach tries to dissolve the inaccessibility of closed events and declared histories.

How do you feel that the environment of the museum impacts on the perception of your piece(s)?

41 As I have never personally been in the museum before [this exhibition], I can only hope that the presentation and perception of my work has had a stirring and fruitful exchange with the history and the exhibits in the Museum.

1. How do the artists deal with the notions of knowledge, identity, subversion, celebration, inspiration? 2. Which materials did they use? 3. How is their work connected with the environment of the museum?

Doc 2: “Slavery: Into the art of darkness”, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent, Friday 9 February 2007

It was abolished 200 years ago, but can artists today convey the horror of that monstrous trade? Yasmin Alibhai Brown finds out at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I have imagined, but not yet seen, the exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum ostensibly marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art and Design opens later this month, and the works have yet to be placed. Conceptual art was thereby born of necessity here - look at blank spaces and make the art in your head, as it is described by the animated curator Zoe Whitley.

Eleven modern international artists will be showcased in assiduously chosen sites through the museum. It is another modish "intervention" where, instead of a dedicated gallery, thematic pieces infiltrate permanent collections to unsettle the calmness of the usual. I rarely find that this makes the kind of impact curators imagine it does.

However, in this case some (not all) of the intruding artists will, I believe, have a daring visual dialogue with the venerated old residents. Will these interrogations "form a bridge between the safe and anodyne and the unspeakable and indescribable", as claimed in the guide notes? That remains to be seen.

There is also the question of how modern art responds to such a grave subject. One featured artist, Anissa-Jane, expresses some anxiety: "I don't believe there is a problem making contemporary art out of such a tragedy, as it creates interest and debate. I feel there is a possible mistrust of the unfamiliar, and there may be more of a problem expressing it."

Geoff Quilley of the National Maritime Museum considers another inherent difficulty: "The subject of slavery is shocking. There is always the problem that as soon as you aesthetise, you may reduce the gravity of what took place and the brutality of it." The subject may be unrepresentable without violation of collective memory. It can't be done, some say; not in our times, when art is expected to be light and airy and clever and individual and funny and lateral and perishable.

I don't share that view of the modern sensibility; I think it can be aroused and seek sublimation in the old and increasingly in the new. Look upon Turner's The Slave Ship (1840) and you find yourself there, witnessing the retributive storm. Beauty and wrath combine noisily, and you take away the hum in your head.

There are other vital debates that this anniversary has thrown up, and they will impact on the V&A and other museums. What are we marking? And why? Do you seek novel narratives or dig up the originals, lost to many generations? And is memorial art in a comfortable cul-de-sac?

Some Britons question this amnesiac nation, which has not looked into its own heart of darkness. The historian James Walvin throws a gentle rebuke; it will be seen as an impertinent challenge. "The story of slavery has slipped from Britain's memory," he says. "We must be wary of the triumphalism building

42 up over the white abolitionists and hope for some contrition." Some hope, when Britons are preparing to bathe in warm virtue.

The journalist Gary Younge points out the fictions that have prevailed: "When it comes to constructing mythology, those things we feel the need to remember often take precedence over others we are desperate to forget... collective responsibility for our past successes soon subsides into individual flight from historical infamy." It is as if, after 200 years of freedom, South Africa were to choose to remember FW De Klerk's co-operation with Nelson Mandela without upsetting anyone by reminding them of the human suffering caused by apartheid. Or as if the liberation of Auschwitz (the good news) drives out the starved, dying, dead, blank-eyed camp inmates.

The academic Marcus Wood (white, middle-class, public-school educated) is stinging about presumptuous white fantasists who claim that "freedom" was given to black slaves. Freedom is not, he says, in the gift of any human, and the freed slave is not a jubilant child. However subversive art strives to be, the chosen anniversary is reactionary.

The issue of memorial art is controversial and has been since the Holocaust. More recently, Rwanda raised similar concerns. Writing about Peter Eisenman's Memorial to Murdered Jews in Berlin (grey concrete blocks to disorientate and dehumanise), the art critic Jonathan Jones observed: "I couldn't see the myriad details of cruelty and hate and barbarity to which this monument abstractly refers. I couldn't help feeling that something is going on at this and other modern memorials that serves the needs and desires of the present and has nothing, really, to do either with making restitution for the past or ensuring that nothing comparable ever takes place again." Talk to angry young black men and you will hear these reservations, albeit couched in dazzling street language.

There is also a vague shame that slavery made them, and makes them still, into victims - hopeless people who can never break free. Yinka Shonibare MBE, one of the stars of Uncomfortable Truths, tells me: "I watched Roots again recently, and was as moved as the first time. But I don't want to reproduce that victimhood, or simply reflect slavery as absolutely horrible. That doesn't serve anyone well." I can feel him shrinking away from the emotionality, the pity of it all.

Keith Piper, an artist who caught the spirit of black Britons with his defiant work in the 1980s, adds: "Artists have always dealt with history. Contemporary artists should be no different, although fashion can sometimes be seen to dictate what is sufficiently 'cool' in terms of subject matter. Therefore, in a lot of cases, the overtly political is often squeezed out. "But I don't think artists should in any way shy away from subject matter that could be seen as 'tragic'. What we do perhaps have to do is try to generate approaches to tragic or difficult subject matter that can perhaps propel the viewer beyond the horror/guilt moment."

These are vital debates and spirited disagreements - intellectually more vibrant than any I have heard previously. Whitley knows that the anniversary is arbitrary and problematic, but she believes (I do too) that the heat generated can turn on creative force and light.

1. What was the name of the exhibition ? Where, when and on which occasion was it presented ? 2. How is the exhibition going to be presented ? What are the curators’ objectives? 3. How problematical can the representation of slavery through contemporary art be ? 4. Why is it a problem to celebrate freedom and not slavery? Explain the following sentence “However subversive art strives to be, the chosen anniversary is reactionary”. 5. What is the author’s opinion about this exhibition?

43 Doc 3 : “Black Bodies, White Cubes: The Problem With Contemporary Art’s Appropriation of Race”, BY Taylor Renee Aldridge, Artnews.com, 07/11/16

Sanford Biggers, Laocoön, 2015. COURTESY SANFORDBIGGERS.COM

In December 2015, while at Art Basel Miami Beach, I was scrolling through my Instagram feed when I found a video of a large inflated object. The object was a body, lying face down, on its stomach. It was a black subject, male, and large. The sculpture, I learned, was called Laocoön, by artist Sanford Biggers, and was part of a solo exhibition at the David Castillo Gallery in a wealthy neighborhood of Miami Beach. The work depicts Fat Albert, from Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and so it was dressed in a red shirt and blue pants. I watched the video for a moment and saw that the body was inflating and deflating slowly, like a person who was having trouble breathing, or perhaps experiencing his last breaths. I thought of Michael Brown. I thought of black lives. I thought of death. Then I noticed that in the video, the body was surrounded by a festive group of gallery goers, sipping wine, taking pictures of the panting body. The scene was grotesque. I thought, Not again. Many contemporary artists respond to instances of police brutality, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia through their creative practices. In the wake of the recent attack on the LGBT community in Orlando, for instance, the art community rallied around the victims. Terence Koh recited the names of the Orlando victims in a meditative performance at Andrew Edlin gallery. Hank Willis Thomas posted a photo on his Instagram of an enormous flag he’d made featuring some 13,000 stars—one for every victim of gun violence in the U.S. in 2015. As new political movements like Black Lives Matter have gained influence in recent years, social practice has risen in stature and popularity in the art world. This has contributed to the hypervisibility of cultures that have, for a long time, operated along the margins. But there is a new wave of contemporary work influenced by racial injustices, one that has arisen in the last two years and is decidedly more sensational, predominantly focusing on pain and trauma inflicted upon the black body. Artists have made systemic racism look sexy; galleries have made it desirable for collectors. It has, in other words, gone mainstream. With this paradoxical commercial focus, political art that responds to issues surrounding race is in danger of becoming mere spectacle, a provocation marketed for consumption, rather than a catalyst for social change. Too often, I wonder if artists responding to Black Lives Matter are doing so because they truly are concerned about black lives, or if they simply recognize the financial and critical benefits that go along with creating work around these subjects. The year 2015 was a watershed in the new art responding to racism, arriving just after two separate grand juries failed to indict police officers who killed unarmed black men—Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York. Another shattering incident was the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, who mysteriously died while in custody, en route to a local police station. Artists responded to these events in different ways. At the Venice Biennale, Adam Pendleton covered the walls of the Belgian Pavilion with large panels that read BLACK LIVES

44 MATTER. Robert Longo made a hyperrealist charcoal drawing of the heavily armed Ferguson, Missouri police, which was later purchased by the Broad museum in Los Angeles. There were, however, two artists—both white—inspired by Brown who stand out in particular for their unsettling crudeness. In March 2015, Kenneth Goldsmith gave a public performance in which he read aloud Brown’s autopsy report, with slight edits to the text, during a conference at Brown University. A few months later, Ti-Rock Moore, a New Orleans-based artist, exhibited a realistic life-size sculpture of Brown’s body, lying face down, recreating the moment after he was killed, taking his last few breaths before dying. Both of these pieces sparked wide-ranging criticism, but resulted in few repercussions for the artists. And even after Brown’s father shared his disgust about Moore’s lifelike sculpture of his son, the work remained on view in a Chicago art gallery. The artist then unapologetically admitted that she creates her so-called socially relevant work for profit in an interview with Pelican Bomb. “My art is expensive to make. I am very far in the hole, and it has gotten to the point that I must start making money to be able to make more art,” Moore said. This is lewd voyeurism masquerading as empathy. Moore’s case is even worse for being sanctioned by a commercial gallery. (Her sculpture of Brown was not for sale, as Moore told the Chicago Tribune, but other works—including one that depicts the Confederate flag—did sell.) The platform that makes space for a sculpture of a black corpse by a white woman only further perpetuates the exploitation of black traumatic experiences. This co-optation is a general concern for artists interested in the new wave of social activism and racial justice. In a 2015 interview with Milk, the performance artist Clifford Owens said: I know that it [Black Lives Matter Movement] is important but my concern is that the movement is an image. It’s about a representation of blackness and I don’t know if that’s enough. I don’t know if black American artists are doing enough because what I see some Black American artists do is use the image of #BlackLivesMatter to promote their own interests. Some have even made commodity out of the movement. Owens’s argument is not a new one. The extent to which the representation of blackness by artists and institutions is either enlightening or degrading has been debated for as long as artists and institutions have been representing blackness. In 1971, 15 artists withdrew from the Whitney Museum’s “Contemporary Black Artists in America” as a result of the show being exclusively organized by white curators. In 1999, Kara Walker’s A Means to An End, a five-panel etching depicting a grim antebellum scene with a pregnant slave and her abusive master, was censored from a show at the Detroit Institute of Arts after intense condemnation from representatives of the museum’s Friends of African and African American Art. The group, according to the Detroit Free Press, “complained that the piece had offensive racial overtones.” The representation of the black image in response to issues championed by Black Lives Matter is something else entirely, though. In these works, blackness becomes a metaphor for the movement itself, a kind of branding that can be bought, sold, marketed, and consumed. This played out in comments Biggers made about Laocoön recently at a conference on art and race in Detroit. … In the conference, Biggers went on to share that “my work does live inside of white cubes, museums, galleries and so on, but I do have opportunities to take it out, because I think context adds to the theme of the piece.” Biggers is not naïve about the importance of context, especially when presenting blackness, but this awareness makes Laocoön all the more perplexing. In recreating the image of Brown, frozen in lifelessness, Biggers only valorizes the power of authority he aims to critique, and places it in a space that is necessarily voyeuristic—the white cube, where objects are gawked at. I was in attendance at the conference, and as Biggers talked about the work, I surveyed the audience. Many of the reactions to the piece were simply silent, coupled with scattered gasps of exasperation and sadness. The audience members, I imagine, were recalling instances of police brutality—unwanted, yet deeply entrenched memories. This is what I was thinking of, anyway. But Biggers generally glossed over Brown—whose body, lying in the street, has become one of the default images of Black Lives Mater. … As I was writing this piece, I learned there had been more murders of unarmed black men by the police, one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and yet another in St. Paul, Minnesota. These killings have become

45 common and visible in recent years, but they remain, especially for a black person in this country, life- shattering, disabling, and immensely traumatic. I was reminded of an exchange I had with the artist and activist Dread Scott, in October 2015, when we appeared on a panel together. Scott has incited critical dialogue around American injustices ever since burning an American flag on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1989, an action that influenced policy, and led to the landmark Supreme Court decision in support of free speech, United States v. Eichman et al. Scott has also responded to the murder of Michael Brown, through his 2014 performance On the Possibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide. Prior to the panel, Scott passed out flyers for a protest he was co-organizing with the Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. It was clear that his activism was a full-time commitment. I mentioned that his work in interrogating U.S governmental systems must be exhausting. He responded matter-of-factly, “Either you’re helping the movement or you’re not. There’s no in-between.”

1. What do you think of this Laocoön piece by artist Sanford Biggers? 2. Do you agree with the decision to censor Kara Walker’s A Means to An End in 1999? 3. How different is Laocoön to a piece depicting slavery? Should these types of art be censured?

46 5 - Slavery on screen

Doc 1: Tom Brook, “Slavery on film: What is Hollywood’s problem?” 21 October 2014, bbc.com

Slavery is a dark chapter in US history. And surprisingly few Americans seem to know the full horror of what the country’s slave population had to endure. Over the years Hollywood has been reluctant when it comes to filling in the details. But is this down to audience disinterest – or is there a deeper issue? “There still are a lot of Americans in the marketplace who don’t really want to see the reality of slavery − and Hollywood being a business may be wary about showing too much of that,” says Screen International film critic David D’Arcy.

But now a forthcoming picture, the highly-praised 12 Years a Slave from British filmmaker Steve McQueen, is about to bring Americans what many view as the most realistic and bold portrayal of slavery ever seen on the big screen. It opens next week in US cinemas and it’s a film that could both educate and inspire − as well as alienate.

The film is based on the published memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man from Saratoga Springs in New York who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841. Northup was stripped of his identity, given a new name and sent to toil on Louisiana’s plantations. The film shows his mistreatment − and that of his fellow slaves - in all its full horror. Steve McQueen maintains he had a straightforward goal: “I just wanted to make a film about slavery because it was something which hadn’t been actually looked at before in depth − and it was just a gaping hole in film history and I thought I want to investigate. I want to look.”

That assertion has provoked the ire of the long-established New York film critic Armond White. “Anyone who believes that 12 Years a Slave is breaking new ground or has something new to say,” he says, “they’re probably unfamiliar with the fairly long history of movies that have dealt with slavery.”. In fact debates over slavery in cinema among directors, critics, scholars and the general public can get quite heated − and there is plenty of disagreement. “Slavery is a very controversial topic to discuss within American cinema,” says Professor Dexter Gabriel, who teaches a class on slavery in cinema at George Mason University. What many would accept is that the hodgepodge of Hollywood films that have tackled slavery have often featured negative representations of black people.

Professor Gabriel cites pictures like the 1939 classic Gone With The Wind: “Most movies that we’ve seen on slavery in American cinema have been the old plantation epics,” he says. “Hollywood depicted slavery where the slaves were depicted as happy, as jovial and in really demeaning stereotypes such as the Mammy or the Uncle Tom.” But some will argue that these plantation epics weren’t always presenting slaves in a negative light. The Mammy, a caricature of an African-American matron that many find offensive, was famously portrayed by Hattie McDaniel in Gone With The Wind. But the character is viewed as well- drawn by critic Armond White. “Mammy is a full-blooded character, not a stereotype at all − and she stands equal to the white characters,” he says.

When it comes to portrayals of slavery many would agree that it wasn’t a story told on the big screen that had the most impact but Roots, a TV miniseries, broadcast in 1977.The series chronicled what happened to a young African sold into slavery and brought to the US −and half a century later its finale still holds the record as one of the highest-rated TV programmes in history. Professor Gabriel points out that Roots presented slavery to the American public from a specific perspective − one which perhaps made it easier for viewers to relate to the plight of slaves. He says it was “a very middle-class version of slavery, where the slave experience is almost turned into an immigrant story so that it fits in with the United States.” Armond White, in what many might see as an exaggeration, sees the impact of Roots as being dramatic. “I think it’s fair to say that before 1977 most Americans had no idea that slavery had ever existed,” he says. “They didn’t know what it was like at all, and Roots revealed all of that. It changed Americans' perceptions of their own history.”

47 Slavery has also been tackled by Steven Spielberg, one of Hollywood’s greatest storytellers, both in his 1997 picture Amistad and in Lincoln, which was released last year. Amistad portrays a 19th Century mutiny by slaves who took control of the ship La Amistad off the coast of Cuba − as well as the legal battle that took place after their capture. “I think Amistad is one of the great movies in Spielberg’s filmography,” says Armond White, “because it looks at slavery as an aspect of law in America and it examines the legal aspects that pertained to slavery. It’s about how men create laws and how men respond to laws.” But Spielberg’s Lincoln didn’t hold up so well in several assessments. “We were treated to a film that was ostensibly talking slavery but was really about great white men who helped end slavery,” says Professor Gabriel.

Quentin Tarantino’s recent Django Unchained, a revenge fantasy in which a freed slave joins forces with a German bounty hunter to retaliate against an evil plantation owner, won two Oscars, critical raves and made a ton of money at the box office. But it has also been interpreted in less than flattering terms for its portrayal of slavery. Professor Gabriel is one of its critics. “In Django what we got was a very fantastical version of slavery based much more on modern notions of black masculinity and swagger than anything to do with the slave experience.”

“For me the problem with Django Unchained is that Tarantino seemed to make a joke of a very tragic history,” says Armond White. “He seemed not to take it seriously. He likes to play with movie tropes and Django Unchained is really his version of a 70s Blaxploitation film.”

With 12 Years a Slave about to arrive in US cinemas some are asking if it will redress the balance and finally bring audiences a more accurate representation of slavery.

Variety’s chief film critic Scott Foundas admires the picture and thinks it will at least give audiences a hefty dose of reality. “I think 12 Years a Slave is unique in terms of motion pictures in trying to have this very plausible realism,” he says. “In terms of this kind of brutal realism it’s pretty much unparalleled in the history of American movies.” And Screen International film critic David D’Arcy definitely welcomes a more visceral screen portrayal. “I think we want to see the blood and the grand emotion,” he says. “I don’t think the depiction of it is about the legalities or the shady evolution or anything like that.” But not everyone welcomes such a graphic approach. When asked about the picture’s brutality, Armond White, who is African-American, says he “felt sickened by it.” He adds, “I think 12 Years a Slave is not very enlightening to me for someone who has heard about the history of slavery through personal anecdotes of family and community.”

Despite his protestations, the vast majority of US critics applaud this movie − and Oscars watchers believe it will earn a trove of nominations. But 12 Years a Slave’s more immediate concern is its fate at the box office. With so many Americans historically tentative when it comes to confronting the horrific details of slavery, will sufficient numbers want to see such a brutal portrayal when the film opens in the US next Friday?

Fox Searchlight Pictures, who’re backing the picture in America, are no doubt anxiously waiting to find out the answer.

48 Doc 2: Zeba Blay, “Hollywood’s Complex History Of Portraying Slavery On Screen : ‘The Birth of a Nation’ reminds us how depictions of slavery reflect how we think about race”, The Huffington Post, 16 January 2017.

When the first trailer for Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” dropped in June, it felt like a lightning rod moment for the depiction of slavery on the big screen. Here was a film written, directed, produced by and starring a black filmmaker. Here was a film not only about the horrors and injustices of slavery, but also the fight against it, represented by Nat Turner’s infamous slave revolt in 1831. Turner’s story had never been told on screen, and certainly never like this ― from the perspective of Turner, fully sympathetic to his motives and his violent actions.

Then, the controversy began. After a stellar reception at Sundance (where the film was bought by Fox Searchlight for a record-breaking $17 million), reports emerged that Parker was accused of raping and harassing a young woman in 1999, during his time at Penn State. He was acquitted, but the details of the case (which also involved Parker’s co-writer Jean Celestin, who was convicted but later appealed) have cast a dark shadow over “Birth,” a film that includes two instances of rape.

Throughout the scrutiny, Parker has remained adamant that his personal past should not discourage movie-goers from seeing the film. “The Birth of a Nation,” he’s said, is too important a story for the black community and too great an opportunity for the country to have a real conversation about race.

Parker has stated that his film will move people to see slavery “with a different lens,” when compared to past depictions on screen. But how has cinema shaped our perceptions of slavery, especially those of us who were given a sanitized version of the history of slavery in our history classes?

Perhaps the most important movie of the 20th century is D.W. Griffith’s 1915 feature film “Birth of a Nation,” based on the 1905 novel “The Clansman.” In many ways, Parker’s film, from its title to its rebellious subject, is an answer to Griffith’s film. As activist and filmmaker Andre Robert Lee explains in the video above, Griffith’s film “presented slavery as something America lost,” rather than the sin that it really was. The movie, while revolutionary in terms of filmmaking, set a racist tone for how Hollywood would approach the reality of slavery for years to come. It presented a revisionist history of slavery in the United States, lamenting the end of slavery in the Old South and celebrating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

Alongside later popular films like “Gone With the Wind” (1939) and “Tamango” (1959), it played up the convenient delusion that most slaves were happy and accepting of their lot and life, and that free black people and black men especially were conniving, sexually aggressive, lazy, and violent. This was the era in Hollywood where a black person on screen would most likely be playing a jovial slave or maid, an era where the atrocities of slavery were kept out of sight and out of mind, where slavery operated in the periphery of faultless white heroes.

In the late ‘60s and ‘70s came a shift in the way slavery was depicted in film. It was the Blaxpoitation era, and movies like “Slaves!” (1969) “The Legend of N****r Charlie” (1972), “Mandingo” (1974), and “Drum” (1976) were all about stories of revenge against evil white slave masters that starred rugged male black leads.

These films were revolutionary in their day, but they still inadvertently perpetuated stereotypes of black men as hyper sexualized and violent, and presented sketches of life as a slave rather than fully realized portraits.

The 1977 premiere of “Roots” on ABC marked an attempt to more deeply explore the history and the atrocities of the slave trade. The 8-part mini-series was a television event, and a seminal moment in how

49 Americans talked about slavery and race. For the first time, the image of a black man being whipped within an inch of his life filled the television screens of 130 million an Americans.

“Roots” ushered in an era of Black Pride, films and television mini-series which focused in on the personal histories of individual slaves and their offspring, and attempted to reveal the overwhelming and far-reaching impact of the racist institution. These included “A Woman Called Moses” (1978), “Roots: The Next Generations” (1979) and “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey” (1984).

Since then, realism has become a theme and a goal of many slavery pieces. Part of that realism, it seems, has been focusing in on the visceral violence of slavery. “Amistad” (1997), “Beloved” (1998), “Amazing Grace” (2006), Venus Noire (2010) and “Django Unchained” (2012) have all experimented with images that take us to the extremes of slavery ― lynching, beating, starvation, rape, and the physical toll of actual slave labor.

More recently, we’ve seen a kind of resurgence or renaissance of slave stories in Hollywood. Many considered 2013 the “year of the slave movie” ― a total of seven films about slavery from major and indie studios alike were released ― two of them starring Chiwitel Ejiofor. The most talked about and most prolific of the batch was “12 Years A Slave,” which starred Chiwitel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, a freeman from New York State who was kidnapped and forced into slavery in South Carolina.

“12 Years A Slave” turned the degradation and brutality of slavery that we’d seen before into art. The film was lauded as much for its direction and cinematography as it was for forcing viewers to watch scenes of black bodies being branded, flayed, hung, and broken in unspeakable ways.

When Parker speaks of the “lens” through which slavery is currently seen, perhaps he speaks of the way in which most current films and TV shows about slavery focus particularly on black pain, on violence against black bodies. And in the instances when these characters are able to transcend their circumstances, that redemption often comes in the form of a white savior.

In January, Jezebel writer Kara Brown wrote an essay passionately titled “I’m So Damn Tired of Slave Movies,” in response to the attention that “Birth of a Nation” initially received after it premiered at Sundance. For Brown, Hollywood’s preoccupation with producing and rewarding movies like “12 Years a Slave” and “Birth of a Nation” is proof that it “has a problem with only paying attention to non-white people when they’re playing a stereotype.”

In the past 20 years, there have probably been more major films about black people dealing with slavery and the struggle for civil rights in the past in than there have been about black people living in the present. (Not to mention the future ― the scifi genre has always been notoriously white). But while some people are weary of seeing black people in these stories, other people, like The Root writer Demetria Lucas D’oyley, argue that we need more films about slavery, not less.

“I mean, it was a roughly 397-year stretch of American history,” D’oyley wrote in January. “We’re just now getting a mainstream film about Nat Turner. Do we want to throw in the towel before we get a theatrical release about Harriet Tubman or the Haitian revolution?”

On Friday, “The Birth of A Nation” will premiere in theaters across the United States. Early reviews have suggested that it’s no masterpiece, using many of the familiar tropes and images that have been established and built upon in slave movies before it. But according to Parker and his supporters, what makes the film so important is its educational quality ― it’s introducing many people to the “real” story of Nat Turner.

And yet, looking back over 100 years of films about slavery and the effects of slavery, the question is if that’s enough. Should films about slavery be art, or educational, or both? Should they always be brutal?

50 Or should they be more palpable, less controversial? And does the grave subject matter of slavery make it worth supporting a film like “Birth of a Nation” and, therefore, its problematic director?

There must be a reason why we return, over and over again, to the institution of slavery when telling black stories on screen. Perhaps the constant return is a symptom of us never truly reckoning as a nation with the reality of American slavery as well as its complex, far-reaching ramifications. Perhaps, with each new movie, we’re attempting to arrive closer and closer to the truth of slavery and, by doing so, the truth of who and what America really is.

Check the video online: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hollywoods-complex-history-of- portraying-slavery-on-screen_us_57f3b955e4b0703f7590f73a

DOC 3: “‘Gone With the Wind’ is the one Confederate monument worth saving”, by Alyssa Rosenberg, The Washington Post, 29 August 2017.

As statues of Confederate soldiers and officers come down around the country, whether at the hands of outraged citizens in North Carolina or in a quiet overnight operation in Baltimore, another monument to the era is tilting on its pedestal. A theater in Memphis has made national headlines after pulling Victor Fleming’s classic Civil War movie “Gone With the Wind” from its summer screening series and revitalizing decades-old charges about the movie’s depiction of African Americans.

It’s an easy call to say our cities shouldn’t be full of laudatory monuments to people who betrayed the United States in defense of a virulently racist system. But how we deal with a complex, sweeping work such as “Gone With the Wind” raises more difficult questions about how to engage with valuable ideas in troubling art, and how to preserve historical artifacts that themselves seek to whitewash history.

The idea that “Gone With the Wind” is offensive to African Americans is not a recent development. Even by the standards of the era in which it was made — the novel was published in 1936 — observers saw novelist Margaret Mitchell’s depictions of her black characters as heavily stereotypical and potentially demeaning. As Jill Watts chronicled in her excellent biography of Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in the movie, black newspapers criticized David O. Selznick’s decision to option Mitchell’s novel. NAACP executive secretary Walter White, who had also protested D.W. Griffith’s cinematic makeover of the Ku Klux Klan, “The Birth of a Nation,” pushed Selznick to hire black consultants for the film, and to read W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction,” which debunks more sentimental ideas about the end of the Civil War.

Racist language remained in the movie, which opened in 1939. Many of the black characters in the film are defined in broad, sometimes demeaning strokes, from the loyalty and dependence of former valet Pork (Oscar Polk) to the hysteria and dishonesty of a young slave named Prissy (Butterfly McQueen). And though McDaniel won an Academy Award for her work in “Gone With the Wind” — the first African American to take home an Oscar — even her performance couldn’t wholly transcend the trope of a loyal slave who rejects freedom and prefers to serve her former owners.

Because of those factors and its narrow view of the Civil War and Reconstruction, “Gone With the Wind” may not be the right fit for a film series intended to “entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves.” It certainly shouldn’t stand in as the consensus view of the era. If the Orpheum Theatre, or any other community-minded institution, wanted to use the film to spark a discussion about race and historical memory, it would have to add a lot of additional context and alternate perspectives. That’s a lot to tack on to a film that already runs three hours and 58 minutes long.

51 But just because it’s not educational television doesn’t mean that “Gone With the Wind” should be shunned entirely, just as the Confederate statues that are coming down around the country should be preserved and curated, not destroyed. Both types of period pieces are valuable historical artifacts, not of the events and people they portray, but of previous generations of Americans’ efforts to figure out how they feel about the Civil War.

You don’t look at a statue of Robert E. Lee to treat it like documentary evidence of his supposed nobility or military prowess. You look at it to think about why starting in the 1890s so many Americans were invested in the mental contortions required to see Lee as decent and ultimately a patriot, despite the fact that he went to war against the United States to protect slavery. In the same way, you don’t watch “Gone With the Wind” for a serious analysis of how the American South transitioned to a free-labor economy. You watch it to understand why so many Americans in the 1930s responded to a character such as Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), who was alternately drawn to and repulsed by the slave-owning society in which she grew up.

The truth is, there’s more to “Gone With the Wind” than its stereotypes. I sympathize with any viewer who simply can’t make it past the depictions of black characters, or a subplot about the Klan. I understand how tired those tropes and stories are. For those who can make it past those depictions, though, “Gone With the Wind” casts a more gimlet eye on the Confederacy than it often gets credit for.

What makes Scarlett an iconic heroine is not that she unquestioningly embraces the perspectives of her slave-holding class during the war or the Lost Cause mythology that congeals after it, but that she sees the hypocrisy and self-deception that animate her peers. What makes Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) an appealing romantic hero is that for much of the film, he encourages Scarlett’s rebellion from these ideals when everyone else encourages her to conform to them. The climax of the movie comes when Scarlett recognizes that she never really loved Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), the dreamy but fundamentally weak product of the Southern slavocracy.

This is the essential difference between Confederate monuments and “Gone With the Wind.” Monuments to Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson and other Confederate generals are an effort to turn convenient illusion into concrete reality. “Gone With the Wind” acknowledges what some people might find beautiful about that dream, while arguing that real courage is not in succumbing to slumber, but in waking up from a fantasy.

1. How can one compare Gone With the Wind to a neo-confederate monument? 2. Do you think it should be treated the same way? Why/Why not? 3. How similar/different monuments and movies are in the way they represent slavery and model our collective memory of slavery?

52