The Casual Racism of a Southern Childhood

Growing up in the South means growing up with White Supremacy

Chris Thomas
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read
Main Street, Lexington (Virginia Military Institute in background)

I grew up in the South. Not just anywhere in the South, mind you; I grew up in Lexington, Virginia. More than most Southern towns, Lexington is a place defined by its Confederate heritage. You’ll hear the phrase “heritage not hate” there but there’s more to the “stars and bars” in Lexington than that tired cliche; the Confederacy and its veneration are at least half of the local economy. When people talk about tearing down the edifices of the Old South they may as well bulldoze Lexington and push the rubble into the river while they’re at it. There won’t be much else left.

In Lexington is buried General Robert E. Lee and about four-fifths of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (his arm is at Chancellorsville). Jackson taught at Lexington’s Virginia Military Institute before the war and his statue and military legacy dominate the college today. Alongside his likeness are four canons which saw action in the battle of Newmarket when the Institute’s students fought and died for the Lost Cause there.

Just across the street is Washington and Lee University, named, in part, for its late President, Robert E Lee. Lee lived out his post-war years in Lexington and is entombed on the campus that bears his name in a white marble sarcophagus which, until recently, was draped in the colors under which Lee fought for the right to own human beings.

Consider, by way of comparison, Thomas Jefferson’s gravesite

In such an environment even the liberal upbringing provided by two mid-western college professors is inadequate to shield a child from the pervasive cloud racism that hangs over the town like a fog. As a teenager I rode my bike past Stonewall Jackson’s house; my boy scout troop met at R.E. Lee Memorial Episcopal Church; and my friends lived on Jackson Avenue and Lee Street. A local country-bluegrass musical about the life of Stonewall Jackson (yes, really) was a fixture of summer entertainment and competition for parts was fierce every spring.

Stonewall Country cast photo

Though the musical has not seen a full run in decades, I still know all the words to every song. My mother-in-law wants the finale sung at her funeral.

Lexington’s racially segregated past is and was still evident in its neighborhoods and city planning. The old black sections of town feature narrow streets with no sidewalks on steep hillsides while broad avenues and large flat yards are in evidence in the old white neighborhoods. The city’s “black” cemetery is practically unknown, even to locals, while the “white” cemetery is named for Stonewall Jackson, resembles a formal garden in the city center, serves as a local landmark, and is never spoken of as “the white cemetery” but just “the cemetery.” Segregation in Lexington today is a matter of tradition and economic reality rather than one of legal edict, but the why of that segregation does not change the reality that it was and is.

Stonewall Jackson Arch — Virginia Military Institute

I point these things out not to excuse the behavior of myself or my hometown but to show how pervasive the presumption of white supremacy is in the rural south. The notion that the spatialization of race in Lexington is problematic never even occurred to me before I left the town. The idea that black Keydets at Virginia Military Institute or black students at Washington and Lee University might take a dim view to the memorialization — in the buildings, statues, and art that surround them — of the fight to keep them in chains was not one that crossed my mind, even well into my college years.

And I say this, not as a pickup truck driving good-ol-boy with a gun rack and a confederate flag seat cover, but as the nerdy child of two college professors who timidly parked his 12 year old volvo station wagon between the lifted, stars-and-bars-sporting trucks that crowded the high school parking lot. I was not a victim of white supremacy in my childhood, but I was as unable to see it as I was the air I breathed.

To that end, while I fully support the “take the monuments down” movement, I lack the optimism to hope that they will be brought down in an amicable and agreeable fashion. To convince white people from the south — especially the rural south — that these monuments, street names, schools, and the practices and policies they surround are emblematic of white supremacy is going to be rather like convincing someone in the Roman Empire that light takes time to move. Not just the argument, but the entire premise of the argument rests outside of the southern life experience and the context of the world as understood in the South.

That is why the question that seems to follow the call to tear down these monuments to white supremacism is always one of “what about Washington and Jefferson, they owned slaves” and why the resistance to taking these statues down is one phrased in terms of lost history. To someone who has grown up in the shadow of Lee and the Confederacy, the idea that statues memorializing these men were erected out of spite, hate, and political fear seems incomprehensible, not because it isn’t the case but because that is not how they’re remembered today.

That is not to say that the South has moved on from its Jim Crow past — far from it. But there exists a profound divide of racial privilege down below the Mason Dixon Line where a white person can grow up watching “Eyes On The Prize” in middle school civics class and yet presume that both the civil rights era and the civil war are equally ancient history.

This divide and invisible privilege is why, when most of those southern good-ol-boys say “heritage not hate,” they’re not being deliberately disingenuous. The subtle white-supremacy that has defined their lives has rendered Lee and Jackson, AP Hill and JEB Stuart as folk heroes who define, not a political entity or a racial class but a cultural identity.

Through Confederate eyes the “War Between The States” cemented the identity of the South as a place apart from the North. That difference of place became a difference of culture. Yes, a culture founded in the ever-present assumption of white-supremacism, but a different culture nonetheless, birthing Elvis and Skynard, grits and iced tea, NASCAR and the Dukes of Hazzard. And that culture and all of the identity politics that come along with it are what its adherents view as being under attack.

I grew up hearing stories of Lee and Jackson and while I know, intellectually, that these men were traitors to their nation, owners of human beings, and ruthless killers in the name of an unjust and immoral government, emotionally I can not help but see them as the complex and storied figures of my childhood: reverent, stubborn, principled, humble, aristocratic gentlemen who lent an air of drama and majesty to a sleepy southern town.

But I can not turn my back from what is happening. I love my home; I love that it’s steeped in history and intrigue. But if that rich history is to be appropriated by bigots and racists who would beat from it the complex moral truths of the deeply flawed men who walked the streets of my childhood home then I would rather see those men remembered in the pages of a book than in bronze.

Rip them all down.

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Chris Thomas

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Resistbot chief policy wonk, coder, writer, drinker of coffee and builder of things

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