Recently, Jacksonville celebrated an incredible act of progress: the removal of still more Confederate monuments from public squares. Though the majority of our city seem to greet this as the step forward that it is, we’re also hearing the predictable white chorus of “But that’s our history!” Look, there’s a pretty clear racist dogwhistle hiding in that statement (“I’m sorry, it’s whose history exactly?”), but I feel like just calling it racism almost gives it too much credit. The “it’s our history” position not only requires a very willful ignorance of actual history; it requires doubling down on 1890s-era propaganda and folklore rather than checking out any remotely reputable museum, textbook, or documentary, and y’all, white Southerners have been pulling these shenanigans for a very long time. To best describe the vortex of ignorance, shame, tall tales, and (yes) racism around conservative white Southerners’ retelling of the Civil War, I feel like we need an appropriately dismissive term with all the passive aggression of a good “bless your heart.” That’s why I’ve chosen to call it…

White Southern Nonsense.

Before I get into the statue thing, I should explain how my background makes me uniquely driven to notice and call out White Southern Nonsense. I’m a proud Southerner myself, and while my Civil War heritage is a mixed bag, there’s a particular ancestor who inspires me. My great great great grandfather, Jasper Collins, was so angry at rich white Southerners for dragging poorer men into the Civil War (while refusing to fight themselves) that he deserted the Confederate Army and helped found a guerrilla band of Union sympathizers called “The Free State of Jones” who became a thorn in the side of the Confederacy. (There was a 2016 movie about it.) I have direct ancestors on both sides of the Civil War, but I’m drawn to Jasper’s willingness to call out the Confederacy’s injustice and lead others to rebel against it. By calling out White Southern Nonsense in my own era, I feel like I can honor his legacy. So now, about those statues…

White Southern Nonsense would have us believe that these are important historical markers erected soon after the Civil War to remind us of Southern heritage and that the Confederate soldiers being honored at these sites weren’t so much fighting for slavery as for… um… “states’ rights.”

Well, that’s clearly all horseshit. Here’s the truth:

Most of these statues were erected decades after the Civil War in response to later racial tensions.
With Robert E. Lee’s death in 1870, white Southerners started to memorialize Confederate veterans (chiefly through burial markers), but this effort ramped up in the 1890s with the birth of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Not wanting their fathers to be remembered as villains, this “historical society” —and I cannot put enough quotation marks around that phrase— waged one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of all time. Touting their “Lost Cause,” white Southerners (with the UDC as vanguard) romanticized Confederate soldiers as fighting a great losing battle but retaining their honor. They deemphasized slavery as the key cause of the Civil War and instead focused on the Southern desire for honor and independence. Confederate leaders were suddenly mythologized despite some of them (most notably Lee himself) not wanting to be. And thus, in the 1890s, we see the first big wave of monuments to Confederate soldiers. Want to guess when the next two big waves come?

The 1910s and 20s saw the revitalization of the KKK in the South and a horrific rise in lynchings, and along with these trends came a slew of new Confederate monuments (including the ones just removed in Jacksonville). This is also when Lee High School was founded in Jacksonville despite the fact that Robert E. Lee had no connection to the city whatsoever, and there were no Civil War battles fought here. The next big spike in monuments came in the 1950s and 60s, coinciding with the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the start of desegregation. This is also when the city of Jacksonville established Jefferson Davis Middle School even though Jefferson Davis had no connection to the city whatsoever, and there were no Civil War battles fought here. You see, whenever racial tensions escalated in the South (especially when black Americans gained new rights), white Southerners felt a sudden need to “remember our heritage” by erecting monuments which would glorify Confederate soldiers and their Lost Cause. These statues aren’t so much history as revisionist history; they’re more about asserting embellished archetypes of white dominance than about remembering historical figures. In short, they have always been White Southern Nonsense, and this leads me to my next point:

Taking these statues out of the public square will not lead to “forgetting our history.”
We don’t learn our history from statues; we learn it from museums, from books, and —when we’re truly lucky— from people who lived through it. As previously discussed, the Confederate statues were never about history in the first place, so their removal might actually help us more accurately understand and teach our history! By removing these statues, we’re removing decades-old pro-white propaganda, which will ultimately help us demythologize Confederate soldiers and their cause. So in conclusion:

No, removing Confederate statues will not make us “forget our history” because these statues were never historically accurate. They have always been pro-white propaganda erected at times where white Southerners wanted to assert their dominance over our black neighbors. The removal of these statues ultimately benefits everyone; it invites us to consider history more honestly and to use these spaces to venerate more worthy causes. Take ’em all down.

Well, that was fun.

There are a lot of examples of White Southern Nonsense out there: the idolization of Robert E. Lee and demonization of Ulysses Grant, the anachronistic “Confederate Flag,” the stubborn refusal to admit the Civil War was over slavery— the list goes on and on. It always amazes me how intensely some folks cling to White Southern Nonsense as a point of pride and honor. Therapist Jonathan Decker once pointed out that this kind of ferocious pride is often a mask for shame and self-loathing; could it be that all the flags and statues and revisionist history are really just a refusal to accept the shame of our culture’s racism and violence? Rather than acknowledge the ethical and humanitarian disaster that was the American Civil War, we promote a “Lost Cause” and put up monuments of “Southern Heritage.” I wonder how much our society would change for the better if we could instead acknowledge the truth:

It’s all just a bunch of White Southern Nonsense, and we’re better off without it.