Charlottesville, Scotland, and the legacy of white supremacism: what are the lessons to learn?
The events in Charlottesville may seem distant from Scotland. However, the issues of white supremacism, and colonial and slave history that underlie the growth of the new US civil rights movement are very relevant.
As Confederate statues fall, the question in Scotland is how do we make sure that our history of plunder and racism is remembered and better understood?
Charlottesville, Va. August 2017
On Friday 11 August a group of men marched through the quiet university town of Charlottesville, in Virginia, under the banner of ‘Unite the Right’. Holding burning ‘tiki’ torches, they chanted slogans such as ‘blood and soil’, ‘we will not be replaced’, and ‘white lives matter’.
In a related event the following day, clashes developed between these men and the counter protestors demonstrating against this overtly provocative display of fascism and white supremacism. Within the context of these clashes, a man drove a car at high speed into a group of counter protestors in a crowded street. One person, Heather Heyer, died and a number were also very seriously injured.
As has been widely reported, in two particular responses to these events, the US President Trump made clear his team’s and his own views on the protests and killing. Two days after Heather Heyer’s death, he released a condemnation of violence by white supremacists such as neo-Nazis and the KKK. However, in a press conference the following day he said that while he condemned extremism, he felt that there was violence ‘on both sides’. He also asserted that among the right wing protestors (marching under Confederate and Nazi flags) there were some ‘fine people’.
In the last few years, at least since the time of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in summer 2014, the US has been going through a major re-examination of its legacy of slavery and racism. There has been nothing comparable in recent years, apart from the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Although the current protests initially arose in the time of Barack Obama — the US’s first President who identified as black — the debates and conflicts about race have intensified considerably since Trump’s inauguration.
Trump has himself a history of racial exclusion, racial profiling, and during his campaign and presidency he has made many incendiary xenophobic, racist, mysoginist, and ableist statements and comments, including a number which directly encouraged violence at political rallies. In addition Trump also has the open endorsement of a former head of the KKK, and until very recently had the senior editor of the right-wing and openly racist Breitbart news working in the White House as his chief strategist.
It is clear that the US is at present going through a new civil rights movement, with in particular the grass roots movement Black Lives Matter as one of its focal proponents. Needless to say, BLM are controversial — and are often labelled as ‘terrorists’ by right wing commentators. We must recall, though, that until the time of his assassination, Martin Luther King Jnr was frequently depicted as a ‘communist’ (and thus an enemy of America) and was under heavy surveillance by the FBI.
One part of the aftermath of the events in Charlottesville has been a renewed scrutiny of far-right and white-supremacist groups in the US, such as the KKK and publications such as the Daily Stormer. Many (white) Americans were genuinely shocked to learn the extent of mobilisation by such groups, which had been thought to be largely marginalised. There was no shortage of politicians, from across the political spectrum making comments — either on TV or through Twitter — in condemnation of such white supremacist extremism.
Beyond this, there has also been the re-emergence of a debate that was largely ignited in June 2015, following the terrorist attack by a white supremacist against a church (the AME Mother Emmanuel) in Charleston, South Carolina, in which nine people died. The attacker’s blatant identification with the battleflag of the Confederacy (the secessionist group of US states that fought and lost the Civil War to preserve slavery) led to a widespread debate about the use of the symbols of the Confederacy, including the flag. As a result, the flag was taken down in a number of official sites, and has become a more controversial symbol in (particularly white) public debates.
One other target within this debate was the proliferation of memorials and statues across the US (mostly but not exclusively in the South) for the generals and leaders of the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Conderacy’s fight against the US.
There have already been high profile removals of some of these monuments, such as the statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee in New Orleans in May 2017. Indeed, the city council of Charlottesville made the decision in February to remove a statue of General Lee from a park in the town, and indeed to rename the park from Lee to Emancipation Park (in memorial to the outcome of the Civil War, the emancipation of enslaved people across the US). The park and the statue of General Lee were the focus of the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in August 2017.
The immediate response to the violence of the rally has been the removal of a number of Confederacy-related statues across America in the past week. Indeed, the provenance of the majority of such statues emerges from the era of Jim Crow — the apartheid-like era of segregation and violence against African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of other statues were put up during the 1960s, as a reaction by white communities against the Civil Rights Movement.
The prevalence of these statues, and the Jim Crow-era veneration of the Lost Cause of Confederacy, is clearly a part of the racialisation of US politics. These are monuments that memorialise the Confederate movement to protect white landowners’ enslavement of African Americans, which were put up long after the end of the Civil War, but during a time of brutal (and often violent) oppression of African Americans.
In short, they are popular expressions of a particular form of white supremacism.
And it must be noted, that many white people who do not support the KKK or other extreme white supremacist groups, do not find any issue with the many Confederate memorials across the US. That is, there are many decent American people who support the basic ideals of white supremacy without being part of the KKK or other extremist group.
To put this another way, the debates (indeed, the crisis) that the US is currently going through in the wake of Charlottesville is largely based on one main issue.
That is, how much do white Americans wish to acknowledge the widespread normalisation and mainstreaming of white supremacy within the country?
Spinning from this are numerous other questions, including how much can the US be other than such a country, and is it possible for the US to re-imagine itself as a nation that is not dominated by a form of white exclusionary politics and identity? And what does the US do with its history ? This includes not only the 250 years of enslavement of Africans, but also the seizing of the continent from the Indigenous nations, and also the decades of segregation and white terror against African Americans and Indigenous nations?
Such history is an integral part of contemporary America. So how can the US find better ways to live with that past for the benefit of all its people?
How is Scotland different?
But these are not the questions I am interested in exploring here. Or at least not in respect to the US.
My focus is instead on what we can learn in Scotland from these debates? Scotland and the US have shared and overlapping histories, particularly with regard to the issues of race and enslavement that are at the basis of these contemporary debates.
It was British (including Scottish) merchants in the eighteenth century that helped to develop the industrial plantation systems of colonial America, and who abducted the African men and women, transported them in inhuman conditions across the Atlantic, and then sold them into slavery to the plantation owners. And even after American independence, Scots and other British merchants continued with the trading and enslavement of African people for over half a century, until slavery was finally abolished in the British empire in 1833. And even when that happened, the formerly enslaved people were not compensated — it was the slaveholders who received large sums of remuneration from the British government, in compensation for their lost ‘property’.
In short, Scotland was heavily involved in the industries of enslavement that stretched between west Africa, northern America (including the Caribbean), and the trading houses of Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, and London. Wealth came into Scotland from these industries — such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton — and Scotland became wealthy because of slavery.
Without that (stolen) wealth, Scottish history would have been very different, and also our present would also be very different. Scotland today would be a much poorer country if it had not been involved in the slave trade and other aspects of colonial plunder.
However, one significant difference between Scotland’s participation in enslavement and that of the US was the factor of distance.The enslaved people who were forced to create wealth for Scotland were a long distance from the nation’s boundaries. Scots traded people as slaves from Africa to America, and violently enforced their production of commodities on industrialised plantations in Virginia and the Caribbean. Only a few of these enslaved Africans came to Scotland itself.
Indeed, it was only with the end of empire, in the mid-twentieth century (over a century after the British abolition of slavery), that this distance partially collapsed. With the 1948 Nationality Act, it became possible for people from the Caribbean nations (many descendants of enslaved Africans) to come to live and work in Scotland and other parts of the UK.
This contrasts with what happened in the US. Most of the northern states (such as in New England and New York) were at a distance from the main areas of slave-based industrial production (the tobacco and later cotton in the US South). Thus at the time of the end of legal slavery in the US, in the 1860s, the majority of African Americans were living in the South — from Maryland through to Texas and Oklahoma. In these southern states there was little distance between the white populations (who thought of themselves as ‘truly’ American) and the African American populations, who were either formerly enslaved, or descendants of those who had been. It was from this situation that the new structures of segregation and Jim Crow arose — creating legal and social distance between white and African Americans (with schools, transport, housing, etc.).
One result of this was the large-scale movement of African Americans away from the horrors of such segregation, northwards to areas where they hoped for better treatment, for a fairer and more equal society. This is often described as the Great Migration, of around six million African Americans in the 1920s and onwards from southern states to the north — to Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, St Louis, and other large cities. Very often the places where they settled were also racist and exclusionary, and hostile to the arrival of African Americans from the south. And different forms of segregation emerged — less overt than under Jim Crow, but equally effective. For example, housing developers such as Fred Trump and William Levitt made millions of dollars from building residential areas (such as new suburbs) that were for white populations only, excluding African Americans. The legacies of this are still very obvious today — such as in the city of Chicago, which remains largely segregated, with most African Americans residing in the south side.
In some respects, the Great Migration in the US was similar to the post-Windrush arrival of people in the UK from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s. One significant difference, however, was that the UK economies were in desperate need of the labour that these new migrants supplied — to reconstruct the industries of England in particular, following the Second World War. Thus, most of the African Caribbean migrants who settled during this time went to areas with labour shortages, particularly in London, Birmingham, and the English Midlands. The need for bringing in labour from outside was not so pressing in Scotland, and thus the populations of African Caribbeans settling here were not on the scale of parts of England.
However, the migration and settlement of people from the Caribbean — and also from other areas of the former British empire, particularly South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) — has been significant over the past sixty years. In the 2011 census, 4% of the population of Scotland identified themselves as having a minority ethnic identity.
And most importantly, the emergence of these new Scots — and the new Scotland that has been created by these changes — is a direct result of the legacy of Scotland’s role within the empire.
The empire not only created significant wealth for Scotland. The empire also has changed the makeup of the people of Scotland. The descendants of the people of countries that were under colonial rule are now Scots, part of the modern nation of Scotland.
The importance of history
For some people, this is all that needs to be said. There is an attitude that assumes ‘the past is the past’, that history is interesting, but we need to focus on the present and the future, rather than the past. Britain had an empire, Scotland was part of that, and Scotland has been formed from that empire — from the wealth Scotland plundered and from the people of the empire who are now Scots.
However, there is a problem with such an approach. If you try to ignore or disregard history, it often happens that the legacies of history do not disappear — instead they ferment.
In the US, for example, African Americans are often told (by white Americans) to live in the present, and to ‘stop dwelling’ on the issues of slavery that ended 150 years ago. Even so, the same people who are recommending we forget history then become upset when statues of Confederate leaders are removed, or when it is suggested that George Washington was himself a slaveholder.
The same people who might wish us to not worry about Scotland’s involvement in empire, plunder, and slavery may also care greatly about the circumstances of the passing of the Act of Union, or the destruction of the Highland societies after the defeat at Culloden, or the depopulation of many areas known as the Highland Clearances.
This is not to say that any of these are unimportant. They are all important.
History is important.
And building on this, a critical, informed engagement with history is of very considerable importance to any society or nation. Without this, and without a sustained public recognition of the importance of history — through education, through literature and arts, and through public channels such as media and museums — a nation can suffer. If an informed evaluation and engagement with history (warts and all) does not happen, then there will be others who will use history for their own ends.
Such as the white revisionists for whom the Confederacy was a ‘noble, lost cause’ and for whom the leaders of the rebellion against the USA are now American heroes.
And there are also the white UK revisionists who now seek to revive an ‘Empire 2.0’ out of the Brexit movement.
What is also notable, is the amount of resistance to discussions about this past. Recently, the renowned historian of Rome, Mary Beard, was subject to considerable trolling on Twitter for her defence of the well-sourced historical position that there was racial and cultural diversity (including Africans) in Roman England.
The writer Afua Hirsch also received nasty abuse when she suggested this week that we should give some thought to Nelson’s Column in London. Admiral Nelson was a supporter of slavery and as Hirsch concludes, he ‘was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist’. Her argument was not necessarily about ‘toppling’ or removing the landmark Nelson statue, but rather that there needs to be a debate about how we remember both him and also the many Africans who have also contributed to Britain. As she says:
‘The black slaves whose brutalisation made Britain the global power it then was remain invisible, erased and unseen.’
There is a debate that is beginning to take place in Scotland about public commemoration of the nation’s links to slavery and empire.
There is, for example, the column and statue for Henry Dundas in St Andrews Square, Edinburgh. Dundas was a senior British parliamentarian who managed to prevent the passage of a ban on the slave trade in 1792. There are also the place names of streets in Glasgow, such as Buchanan and Glassford, in memory of individuals who made fortunes from slave-produced commodities in America.
White national identity in Scotland
On top of this, though, there is another element of the debates around Charlottesville that cross over with contemporary Scotland. This is around the issue of white supremacy, white identity, and national identity.
Of course, there are in Scotland (as in England and other parts of Europe) groups who are overt, extremist white supremacists. Like those on the march in Charlottesville, there are people who march in the streets under the banners such as ‘Britain First’ and the ‘English Defence League’, and whose literature and websites are blatantly racist.
One step down from these, there are politicians and parties that trade on racial stereotypes and fears of ‘migrants’. UKIP has a parliamentary representative in Scotland, for the EU parliament (for as long as Scotland remains within the EU), and some parts of the Conservative Party in Scotland are clearly right-wing and racist.
But there is a much larger issue here, which is about how ‘white’ a nation Scotland is, and how much Scotland wants to remain so. When Scots were bringing in wealth from the empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the majority of those living in Scotland were ‘white’. Indeed, the idea of being white emerged from the experience of finding a common bond in the union between Scotland and England.
Even so, Scotland ceased being an insular white nation when it went global through the empire. The ties of empire went both ways, and modern Scotland was formed through those global connections. And as part of that, the population of Scotland changed. This happened largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but became particularly noticeable with the twentieth century inward migrations of people to create the multiracial and multicultural population that Scotland now is.
If we are to condemn white supremacy and racism in the US, then we must also do so here at home.
We need to not only ask how we commemorate white supremacists, slavers, and plunderers of the past. We also need to ask how much structural racism and exclusion is hard-wired into contemporary Scottish society.
Racism is not about individuals, it is about structures. Racism is about power and it is about how groups are placed within a hierarchy of power and control based on an idea of race that derives from empire. This is more obvious to see at a distance, as we look across the Atlantic at what is happening in the US.
But these structures are also present in Scotland, in their own particular ways — as a legacy of Scotland’s past.
In short, race is colonialism speaking. Where we find ideas of race and the practice of racism, that is the result of the centuries of brutal imperialism which is Scotland’s legacy. This is why our history needs to be acknowledged.
This is not to say that we should aim for ‘colourblind’-ness or for a ‘post racial’ society. One of the main problems of racism is that it so easily hidden, in the structures of society, in the exclusions and disadvantages of certain people in education, housing, employment, and welfare.
What I am saying is that one of the primary lessons for Scotland from Charlottesville is for us to acknowledge that — like in the US — racism exists here, and that it needs to be addressed.
This racism goes through all the structures of society in which we live. It is grounded in the idea of the domination of one particular race — white nationalism or supremacism. And this racism is not only manifest in extremist individuals and groups, it is also found in policies for healthcare, education, and housing. It is found in ongoing, endless debates and discussions about ‘migration’. It was terrifyingly visible in London in June, as the tragedy of Grenfell was a tragedy of the invisible white supremacism that we call racism.
In Scottish politics, the idea of civic nationalism (as promoted in particular by the SNP) has been developed as a means by which some of the challenges of this racism can be acknowledged. That is, the SNP’s policy of civil (Scottish) nationalism is the idea that a modern European society can be formed into a nation on the basis of inclusion. That is, is the idea that to be ‘Scottish’ is not about whiteness. Such civic nationalism thus potentially challenges the historical legacy of white supremacism that exists around us in nearly everything we see.
Such civic nationalism is in many respect similar to earlier debates across Britain and elsewhere on multicultural citizenship — which still underlie much thinking in the UK as a whole, but which have been rapidly displaced in recent years by the rise of a more exclusive, Brexit-based assumption of English, white ethnic nationalism.
But as we can recognise that not all English people reject multicultural citizenship, there is also a strand of white exclusive nationalism in Scotland (which can be found among that who claim either Scottish-ness or British-ness as their primary national identity).
Or to put this most succinctly, civic nationalism is a good policy, but there is still a lot of work to be done to implement it.
And part of that is to recognise our history, and to challenge the mainstream white supremacism that is a legacy of that history and which becomes manifest in structural racism and disadvantage.
On this, I am on the side of Robert Somynne rather than Sadiq Khan on the evaluation of Scottish nationalism and racism. The movement for Scottish independence (and in particular the SNP) are trying to take this idea forward rather than backward. Indeed, the debates in Scotland have become more clearly progressive in this respect then the debates that have taken over in England, particularity around English national identity and Brexit.
But it is very clear that the connections between the legacies of empire, contemporary structural racism, and national identity are a difficult topic for Scotland to even start to explore, and there is a long way to go. So much we share with the US, albeit in quite different circumstances.
And a significant part of this process is to be well informed, and thoughtful about our history.
Malory Nye is an academic and writer who teaches at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He can be found on Twitter (@malorynye) and on his website, malorynye.com.
He produces two podcasts: Religion Bites and History’s Ink.
Malory Nye is also the author of the books Religion the Basics (2008) and There Shall be an Independent Scotland (2015).
Also by Malory Nye:
Main photo: Members of white nationalists are met by a group of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, Aug. 12, 2017. (Reuters)
