In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space by Irvin Weathersby Jr. (review)

Eat, Swim, Pray

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>

Binding Trauma

Your (Internet) Connection Is Unstable

Throwing Our Weight Around: Fat Girls, Protest, and Civil Unrest

Reviewed by: No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox Meghan H. Martinez No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. By Karen L. Cox. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 206. $24.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6267-1.) In his seminal work Black Reconstruction ([New York, 1935], p. 714), W. E. B. Du Bois confronts the consequences of the erasure of slavery in American history, stating, "Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center." In No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, Karen L. Cox explores the enduring truth of Du Bois's statement and provides insight into exactly how and why this false version of American history persists. In this slim volume, Cox offers an important and accessible history of white supremacist monuments and myths. Conversations about public spaces are becoming more commonplace, and this book parses the nuance. Cox challenges readers to take Lost Cause supporters at their word. Although such supporters are both defensive of the institution of slavery and insistent that the "peculiar institution" does not define them, she paints a portrait of a region that is as unwilling to surrender the battle over memory as it was to admit defeat in the war over slavery. She explains how white women were complicit in perpetuating racial inequality, carrying the banner of the Lost Cause almost immediately following the end of the Civil War, not only to absolve the men they loved but also to make sure those men retained social and political power. Regarding how we should contend with Confederate statues in the current era, Cox moves the conversation forward by discussing the shortcomings of "counter monuments" as an attempt to "balance" a landscape dedicated to Dixie, and by examining how political disenfranchisement has limited what action can be taken in opposition to Confederate monuments (pp. 134, 141). Perhaps most important, Cox effectively contextualizes the battle over public spaces as a microcosm of a fight for political power. If monuments could perpetuate myths about the alleged civility of the Civil War, then southern white communities were never forced to admit their true cause was white supremacy, no matter what Alexander H. Stephens may have said. As Cox points out, "for black southerners, the living and breathing Confederacy, with all of its related symbols, made it feel as though Dixie never fell" (p. 82). Confederate monuments both mythologized a false history of the Civil War and cast so-called southern heritage as exclusively white. Cox expertly employs [End Page 431] Black newspapers and personal interviews to explore the southern heritage often left out of Confederate memory—Black southern heritage. Cox's work centers Black opposition to Confederate memorials, telling a story of continued resistance to white supremacy. Black resistance was ever-present and inherently political. Some individuals defaced monuments, while others organized civil rights protests in the shadows of Confederate monuments. Cox argues that Black opposition has had an important impact on the narrative surrounding Confederate memorials. She documents how the protests that toppled Confederate statues in 2020 built on a century of Black protest and activism. Cox argues that after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, southern states were empowered to pass legislation "protecting" Confederate monuments from removal, even in communities interested in reevaluating them. In gerrymandered districts, Confederate monuments were offered more protection than Black votes. These successful voter suppression efforts resulted in rendering Confederate monuments essentially untouchable. The author also takes care to document the amount of state money invested in Confederate monuments, highlighting the systemic nature of racial inequality. No Common Ground makes it clear why the contemporary battle over Confederate monuments and public spaces is so fraught. It is an important read for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of the conversation. Meghan H. Martinez Florida State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Research Article| December 01 2020 Statement on the Removal of Monuments to the Confederacy from Public Spaces SAH Heritage Conservation Committee SAH Heritage Conservation Committee SAH Heritage Conservation Committee BRYAN CLARK GREEN, Chair KENNETH BREISCH JEFFREY CODY ANTHONY COHN PHYLLIS ELLIN DAVID FIXLER VICTORIA YOUNG THEODORE H. PRUDON PAULINE SALIGA DEBORAH SLATON Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2020) 79 (4): 379–380. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2020.79.4.379 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation SAH Heritage Conservation Committee; Statement on the Removal of Monuments to the Confederacy from Public Spaces. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2020; 79 (4): 379–380. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2020.79.4.379 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search The Society of Architectural Historians supports and encourages the removal of Confederate monuments from public spaces. In its eighty-year history, SAH has never before advocated for the direct removal of any historical resource, let alone listed monuments. As architectural historians committed to preserving significant elements of the built environment and cultural landscape, we have vigorously championed the preservation of such elements, even those associated with difficult aspects of our nation’s history, such as Wounded Knee, Manzanar, and the Stonewall Inn. From those painful examples we can gain perspective about ourselves as Americans and learn from our past mistakes. In contrast, Confederate monuments do not serve as catalysts for a cleansing public conversation; rather, they express white supremacy and dominance, causing discomfort and distress to African American citizens who utilize the public spaces occupied by these monuments. Our inaction gives these monuments power. By leaving them in place, we allow the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

Public historical spaces hold a powerful role in the teaching of a regional and national heritage curriculum. Those public sites, markers, museums, and monuments provide the narrative from which citizens conceptualize the past and they comprise a curriculum of American history. However, the calculated and intentional omission of the histories and identities of marginalized and oppressed people creates an unequal, ahistorical void that is filled by the hegemonic normality of the White supremacist narrative, creating a curriculum of White supremacy. Using research of historical understanding, racialized historical understanding, historical understanding in museums and public spaces, and the concept of erasure in history, this chapter investigates the important role public spaces play in presenting a holistic and complete historical narrative that goes beyond the additive models of multiculturalism and preserves the culture and heritage of all peoples.

Objective: This article examines ongoing arguments over the meanings of Confederate symbols—especially symbols displayed on flags and monuments—to assess two fallacies that frequently influence the debate. Method: The article explores the historical record concerning public displays of Confederate symbols. Results: The traditional debate is based on two fallacies. First, it presupposes that the meaning of a symbol can be limited to a single referent or set of referents and fixed in time. Second, it assumes that the meaning of Confederate symbols can be divorced from hateful messages of white supremacy and bigotry. Conclusion: A symbol cannot be limited to its original meaning because the context is constantly evolving. Even if it could be limited, the original meaning of Confederate symbols was always hateful. The debate sometimes has been cast as “heritage versus hate.” Because displays of Confederate symbols in public spaces have always been in a context of “hate”—to defend a slaveholding republic, to promote white supremacy, to defy court-ordered integration of public schools, or to promote the agenda of racist advocacy groups—the meaning of Confederate flags and monuments was never about heritage alone. Hate was always part of the message.

In Los Angeles during the early 1940s, the popular music and dance performances of a cross-cultural swing scene provoked reactionary regulation by white urban elites and law enforcement authorities. Reacting to multiracial musicians, dancers, and entrepreneurs, local politicians and municipal arts administrators created a Bureau of Music in order to encourage patriotic citizenship, prevent juvenile delinquency, and bring proper music to the people. This article argues that successive generations of Angelenos defied the city's rule of racial separation and white domination, creating a multicultural urban civility as they intermingled in dance halls, ballrooms, and auditoriums. Despite personal prejudice and internalized racism within and between different groups, dance music facilitated intercultural affinities that went beyond mere politeness or courtesy to include respect and tolerance. In diverse but distinct music scenes, Angelenos sustained egalitarian social relations in the face of blatant attacks on their civil liberties, particularly the right to freedom of assembly in public spaces. Ultimately, the educational infrastructure, cultural production, and grassroots initiatives of musicians, promoters, and fans brought music to more people, and brought more people from different neighborhoods together, than the official middle-class music programs of the city government did. Through cultural creativity and entrepreneurial activity, the irrepressible swing and RandB music scenes resisted social segregation and highbrow reification by fostering contact and comprehension, as well as musical and physical expression. Shaped by the influence of African Americans and Mexican Americans, the region's two largest racial minorities, the culture wars of the 1940s and 1950s illustrate how power struggles over public space, common values, and a democratic American culture played out in popular music and dance venues.

The University of Texas's “Racial Geography Tour,” designed by Dr. Edmund Gordon

This article asks the question: Can sex discrimination law do positive work for the project of dismantling anti-Black racism and white supremacy? This article’s answer is “yes.” White supremacy and anti-Black racism continue their pervasive and destructive paths in contemporary American society. From the murder of George Floyd to the daily exclusions of Black bodies from white spaces, the nation’s failure to right the wrongs of chattel slavery and racism continues to be highlighted in stark relief. This article centers the racism made manifest through #LivingWhileBlack aggressions—the phenomenon of white people calling 911 to report Black people engaging in lawful, routine, everyday activities—and examines it through the lens of two sex discrimination law doctrines: sex stereotyping and protections against sex discrimination in public accommodation laws. It contends that analyzing #LivingWhileBlack aggressions through the lens of sex discrimination law may yield two positive results: First, looking at the problem with a new perspective may lead to different, additional, or more comprehensive strategies for disrupting and dismantling white supremacy. Second, utilizing a sex discrimination frame to consider #LivingWhileBlack aggressions holds the potential to make legible to white women the connection between their own oppression and the oppression of Black people, thus create the opportunity for coalition building. The article proposes what it calls a “touchstone theory” of inquiry for understanding #LivingWhileBlack aggressions. This theory envisions multiple “touchstones”—legal, political, and cultural, to name a few—that may inform our analysis of white supremacy. It asserts that lessons from sex discrimination law are one such analytical touchstone, while recognizing that a number of touchstones are necessary to fully unpack and address #LivingWhileBlack aggressions. In providing another touchstone for thinking about and resolving the #LivingWhileBlack problem, the article contributes to the scholarly dialogue addressing this pervasive and harmful phenomenon. The article first explores the sex stereotyping theory established in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins and uses it to develop a derivative theory of racial stereotyping, which it describes as a White Privilege Stereotype. Framing #LivingWhileBlack aggressions as white people retaliating against Black people for claiming white privilege parallels Price Waterhouse’s framing of the rejection of Ann Hopkins as a partner in an accounting firm as punishing a woman for claiming male privilege. The article then engages with the history of the campaign for inclusion of “sex” in public accommodations laws. The article describes how the lessons learned from the history of prohibiting discrimination against sex in public spaces can help us to understand #LivingWhileBlack aggressions—punishing Black people attempting to live their “race in public.” In proposing a sex discrimination touchstone as one among many salient touchstones for analyzing #LWB aggressions, the article builds on the idea of a symbiotic dynamic through which multiple systems of subordination work together. As applied to the sex discrimination touchtone theory, this dynamic means that white (straight) women who are exercising white privilege in #LivingWhileBlack aggressions are doing so at the expense of reinforcing male privilege (to their own detriment). Exposing this dynamic through a sex discrimination touchstone inquiry of #LivingWhileBlack aggressions may encourage white women to work in coalition with Black individuals and organizations to engage in anti-racist work.

Taking Down the Flag Is Just a StartToward the Memory-Work of Racial Reconciliation in White Supremacist America Joshua F.J. Inwood (bio) and Derek Alderman (bio) On 17 June 2015 Dylann Roof, a self-avowed white supremacist, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat down for a Bible study. After spending forty-five minutes attending the service, he pulled a Glock 41 .45 caliber handgun from his backpack and opened fire, killing nine people. Roof then fled and was ultimately arrested twenty-four hours later in North Carolina. Of the nine killed the oldest was 87 year old Susie Jackson, and the youngest was 26 year old Tywanza Sanders. After his arrest Roof claimed that he assassinated the members of Emanuel AME Church in the hopes of igniting a broader race war. Indeed, photographs later emerged and went viral of Roof engaged in racist exhibitions and hate speech in the past, in particular the flying of the controversial and insensitive Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, we saw renewed efforts to remove Confederate symbols from across the South’s public spaces, with South Carolina legislators finally voting to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds. In addition, the nation witnessed the grace of survivors in forgiving Roof. These were meaningful and symbolic steps that, thankfully, had the opposite effect than the one the white supremacist shooter had intended. While it is undeniably tragic that nine innocent people had to die before political leaders realized what many African Americans have known and lived with for generations, it is also indicative of a nation that whitewashes the connections between the material realities of white supremacy and its grounding in historical memory. The Confederate flag is a highly charged reminder of legacies of racism that have long been employed by racists to intimidate the black community and to oppose those struggling for racial equality. The banner of the secessionist, pro-slavery southern government had largely faded from memory and sight in the years after the Civil War, but it reappeared not coincidentally after World War II as a symbol of [End Page 9] conservative white resistance to what was then the nascent Civil Rights Movement. African Americans who famously protested segregated bussing in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 have vivid memories of being pelted with balloons filled with urine, which were thrown from cars and trucks decorated with Confederate flags. In 1959, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, school officials in Fairfax, Virginia named and opened a new high school after Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (Shapiro 2015). Many communities carried out similar not-so-subtle strategies of defending white supremacy under the guise of southern heritage and pride. The landscape has retained major traces of these racist symbols and, as a result of the Charleston Massacre, these symbols are being challenged well beyond the removal of the Confederate flag. As activists and others from across the United States recognize, challenging the legitimacy of publicly displaying Confederate flags and other symbols that legitimize the defense of slavery and white supremacy is certainly the right thing to do. Yet these calls should not be mistaken for a solution to structural inequality. In particular, while state legislators from across the South should be applauded for taking down Confederate symbols, that is not the same thing as addressing the deeply entrenched social and spatial conditions that allow white supremacy to permeate not just the Charleston AME church but wider swaths of American life. This contradictory reality—addressing the symbols of a racist heritage without challenging the foundational histories and geographies of racism—raises questions about the relationship between violence, race and memory (Tyner et al. 2014). These questions are seldom discussed in our post-Charleston Nine social world. Recently, Karen Till has argued that progressive change requires a direct engagement with the trauma of “memory work” in which “individuals and groups may confront and take responsibility for the failures of the democratic state and its violences” (Till 2012, pg. 7). In particular, she highlights the place-based practices of local citizens, activists, educators, artists, and even performers in carrying out the physical, political, and...

Reviewed by: The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy ed. by Dwight T. Pitcaithley Amy L. Fluker The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy. Edited by Dwight T. Pitcaithley. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. 400 pp. Paper $24.95, isbn 978-0-7006-2626-7.) The old adage "history is written by the winners" holds little merit in the context of the American Civil War. So successful were former Confederates in recasting their defeat as an honorable endeavor to defend vaguely defined "state's rights," rather than the institution of slavery, that many Americans are angered and confused when critics of the Confederacy point out its association with white supremacy. This has been most evident in a series of recent controversies over whether to remove or to preserve monuments to the Confederacy in public spaces. When historians enter these controversies, they must counter what the public at large believes about the Confederacy and the Civil War with what the evidence shows. For this reason, Dwight T. Pitcaithley's The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy is an invaluable reference and teaching tool. Pitcaithley's anthology begins with an extensive introduction, which details the evolving national debate over slavery and the Constitution from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to the Election of 1860. This overview contextualizes the documents that follow, illustrating how persistent antagonism over slavery drove a wedge between the North and South and exposed their fundamentally different interpretations of the Constitution. Picking up from where the introduction leaves off, the documents include state declarations of secession, congressional reports, constitutional amendment proposals, and [End Page 95] various speeches dating from December 1860 to March 1861. Taken together, Pitcaithley argues, these documents demonstrate that the sectionalism that spawned the Civil War was rooted in a constitutional crisis revolving around three critical issues: the expansion of slavery into the western territories, the return of fugitive slaves, and the transportation of enslaved people through free territories and states (6). Although the content of the documents overwhelmingly supports Pitcaithley's thesis, his selections are not one-sided. The documents provide a range of contemporary perspectives on the secession crisis, reflecting regional and partisan diversity. Among the most compelling of these are the secession declarations of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. Not only does each state defend secession as a means of securing the property rights of slaveholders, but as Pitcaithley points out, they also clearly illustrate "the general complaint was not that the government had overreached, but that it had done too little to protect southern interests" (94). The inclusion of sixty-seven proposed constitutional amendments reveals the awareness of both Northern and Southern congressmen that slavery was the source of national discord. Their efforts to find a constitutional remedy to preserve the Union all hinged on numerous, but ultimately failed, attempts at compromising on slavery to the exclusion of virtually all else. For example, Pitcaithley observes, "of the more than three hundred articles (or subparts) represented in the sixty-seven amendments, only two suggested regulations on the collection of tariffs" (161). Although the greatest strength of The U.S. Constitution and Secession rests on Pitcaithley's introduction and on the documents themselves, there are also useful appendices. These are, in part, composed of a time line of the secession crisis and a breakdown of the votes recorded at each secession convention. Finally, The U.S. Constitution and Secession includes a brief list of discussion questions that help facilitate a more focused reading of the documents and also enhance its potential for classroom use. On the whole, The U.S. Constitution and Secession presents a comprehensive refutation of the "state's rights" justification for the secession of the Confederate states. This interpretation has dominated the popular discourse surrounding the origins of the Civil War for more than a century—etched into countless Confederate monuments, inscribed into textbooks, and profoundly influencing popular culture. Unlike monuments, however, which are highly subjective and open to misinterpretation, the documents Pitcaithley gathered into this anthology are intractable. This evidence indisputably [End Page 96] shows it was...