Learning from Charlottesville Before and After “Unite the Right”
Misrepresentation, Misrecognition, and Statue Politics
The first four months of the presidency of Donald Trump were replete with “teachable moments.” These centered on tone-deaf comments from high-ranking members of the administration (such as Betsy DeVos, US secretary of state, and Ben Carson, US secretary of housing and urban development) reflecting America’s struggle to make sense of the legacy of slavery. In October 2017, the president’s chief of staff, John Kelly, claimed that “an inability to compromise” rather than slavery caused the Civil War. This statement, and the responses thereto, makes clear that popular discourse today is no less confused on slavery’s distinctive role in American history than before the conflagrations of white supremacy and ethnonationalism in Charlottesville in August 2017. In what follows, I return to the brief spike of interest in the historical singularity of chattel slavery and its aftermath in American politics during the winter of 2017 in order to shed light on the events of August 11 and 12 in Charlottesville. In so doing, I suggest that the incapacity to come to terms with the historical misrepresentation of those who were subjected to chattel slavery is constitutive of the continuing incapacity for many persons of good faith to understand what is at stake in the statue politics that boiled over this summer. This is a historical misrepresentation that will continue so long as we fail to come to terms with chattel slavery as an integral part of America’s (at best) disjointed path toward equality and freedom.
THE HISTORICAL MISREPRESENTATION OF SLAVES AS IMMIGRANTS
On February 27, 2017, DeVos issued a public statement that said Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) “are real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” and “are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.” The next day she tried to distance herself from the implication that her statement was intended, as some pithily put it, to whitewash the history of slavery and segregation in the face of which the HBCUs were created. The impression nevertheless remained.
A week later, on March 6, Carson waded into similarly troubled waters when he claimed: “That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.” Facing immediate outrage from many quarters—including a sharp statement from the Anne Frank Center—Carson (unlike DeVos) defended his controversial words, saying: “I think people need to actually look up the word immigrant. Whether you’re voluntary or involuntary, if you come from the outside to the inside, you’re an immigrant. Whether you’re legal or illegal, you come from the outside to inside, you’re an immigrant. Slaves came here as involuntary immigrants but they still had the strength to hold on.”
Carson is wrong—and I have looked the word up, as he might also want to—but before we get into that, I’d like to step back from the immediate, partisan context of these two gaffes. I’d like to suggest that they are symptomatic of something far more nefarious than misrepresenting the degradations and dehumanization to which people of color in the United States have been subjected (Which, don’t get me wrong, is bad enough.) What is truly telling about these two moments is how, individually and collectively, they build upon a notion—a wrong-headed and demonstrably false notion—that American society somehow entered a “post-racial” moment with the election of former President Barack Obama. That Obama himself, while always careful not to endorse this notion, contributed to its proliferation in his words and deeds, does not exonerate DeVos and Carson. But that fact does contextualize their errors, telling us something we still need to face about how hard it really is for Americans of all ideological temperaments and of all races to come to terms with the past.
The rhetoric used by Obama during his two-term presidency bears on what made it possible for Carson to say something as outrageous as he did. Indeed, as the far-right media platform Breitbart News first reported, and which was later picked up by various outlets both expressly partisan and non-partisan, Carson’s claim bears a close resemblance to something Obama said in December 2015 during a naturalization ceremony at the National Archives: “So life in America was not always easy. It wasn’t always easy for new immigrants. Certainly, it wasn’t easy for those of African heritage who had not come here voluntarily, and yet in their own way were immigrants themselves. There was discrimination and hardship and poverty. But, like you, they no doubt found inspiration in all those who had come before them. And they were able to muster faith that, here in America, they might build a better life and give their children something more.” Strongly similar, no doubt. What’s interesting about that?
I cannot know and will not know what was in the minds and hearts of enslaved persons on the ships that carried them against their will to a life of involuntary servitude thousands of miles away from the land of their ancestors. But, having read slave narratives—which themselves have their own ideological distortions—and being not entirely unfamiliar with the careful studies that have been done on chattel slavery in America and the Americas, I find this statement from Obama to ring false. But let’s put that to the side. Whether or not human beings, sent in chains across the ocean, held hope in their hearts or not, and whether or not “they found inspiration in all those who had come before” (here, if I am not mistaken, it seems Obama has shifted from speaking of persons who were captured or bought in Africa and shipped across the ocean to speaking of their descendants), the important claim in this quote from Obama is what came before, when he says: “. . . yet in their own way [they] were immigrants themselves.”
Here we see the crucial overlap between Obama’s claim and Carson’s defense of his claim: slaves “in their own way” were immigrants. Here, Obama is wrong, and so is Carson. And it is a meaningful wrongness. Let me try to say why, as I see it. Persons who are trafficked against their will are not immigrants. Every immigrant is someone who was first an emigrant, and in order to be either, a person needs to be a migrant. But migrancy connotes moving and, crucially, the freedom of movement, and such freedom of movement is a key constituent of, and contributor to, personhood. Having personhood means being the sort of entity that can act with intention, for instance to move to (to migrate), to move away from one place (to emigrate), and toward another (to immigrate). Trafficked persons, like the enslaved Africans both Carson and Obama exhort us to imagine on those boats on the Atlantic, were deprived of that personhood and thus, that capacity to move. This might sound abstract, but they were literally deprived of their freedom to move. Not figuratively, but literally, physically deprived. This freedom of movement was denied and, unlike a prisoner or someone else who was considered to have had their person “confiscated,” an enslaved person was deprived of that personhood without hope of restoration. This is not a metaphor: this is cold historical reality.
Why does this matter so much? It matters because it displays our incapacity to see enslaved persons—especially those who were captured and shipped across the ocean, but also their descendants—as persons who were deprived of their personhood. We want so badly to redeem American history and our cultural and political heritage that we blind ourselves to what is irredeemable in that past. No, enslaved persons were not immigrants. Precisely because they were not immigrants I consider it immoral for us to fantasize about what “hopes and dreams” or what “inspirations” they might have had. Why? I know we are being asked to engage in this fantasy as an act of moral imagination that restores the basic humanity of those persons “in the bottom of slave ships” as Carson put it. I don’t doubt that he means the exercise to be empowering, and I don’t disagree that Obama’s speech had the same intended effect. I respect their efforts, but I also find them to be, in actual effect, immoral. The immorality rests in our willingness to believe that America is and was the “land of opportunity,” the place where, among other things, HBCUs could be “pioneers in school choice.”
We must shout “NO!” at this whole line of thought and educate ourselves about the harsh realities of American history. We need, in short, to be honest with ourselves and with our children. And we need our leaders to lead the way. We need them to call upon us, first and foremost, to face and to retell the hard history of how the practice of chattel slavery deprived enslaved persons of the very conditions that make having hopes and dreams possible. We need to recall that at the most basic level to be enslaved was to lack a future, as well as a present and a past. Yes, even the kind of temporality that makes personhood possible was deprived to enslaved persons. We need to teach and remember that the crimes of the past were so basic and so thoroughgoing that their legacy outlives (not outlived) them, even as we all, regardless of ideology, aspire to an America that is truly free of that legacy of unfreedom.
What exactly does this have to do with white supremacy and the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville? The link becomes clear if we turn to comments delivered by Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) in March 2017 intended—along with attempts by DeVos and Carson, and more recently Kelly—to whitewash the extent to which chattel slavery was implicated in the development of the American republic. King made a series of increasingly inflammatory comments about the need to protect “our civilization”—by which he meant either or both “Western” or “American” civilization—from the influence of “someone else’s babies,” apparently indicating immigrants, specifically from the Middle East. But then, as CNN reported,1 King clarified that what he meant was that the cultural contributions of white Americans are under threat. He also stated his prediction that the white population will remain the majority in the United States because “Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other.” King defended his view to Chris Cuomo in a CNN interview: “This is an effort on the left, I think, to break down the American civilization and the American culture and turn it into something entirely different. I’m a champion for Western civilization . . . There are civilizations that produce very little [freedom], if any. This Western civilization is a superior civilization, and we want to share it with everybody.”2
These statements are not mere misstatements but rather immoral acts. This is so, I would claim, because misrepresentation today—even when done in the service of upholding moral principles such as the dignity of the person and the equality of all people before the law—can never correct past misrecognition. More than that, when we attempt to cast back our “correct” recognition of person or persons who were misrecognized in the past, we actually commit a further immoral act by refusing to do justice to the past, as well as to that person or those persons who had injustice done to them in the past. Worse yet, we underwrite the assumptions that bring about further misrecognitions today. The misrecognition of enslaved persons during the period of the transatlantic slave trade has a direct link to the misrecognition of minorities today. More starkly, errors of judgment like those from Obama and Carson about the nature of slavery make it possible (though surely not obvious or necessary) for a view like King’s to be articulated as a serious defense of “American culture.” Most members of polite society and many politicians of both parties will decry King’s statements. That is good and right. But are they ready to see the ways in which the discourse about American exceptionalism and our inability to reckon fully with our past make his point of view plausible?
If there’s any merit to this analysis of misrepresentation and misrecognition, then what is to be done so that our history (our “cultural heritage”) is not misrepresented by the likes of King for the sake of further current misrecognitions? First, we must stress that we judge rightly when we recognize today that of course enslaved Africans were persons, and as persons must surely have had hopes and dreams, inspirations and aspirations—that is, that they had dignity. But we must go on to say that this must be so because as persons, those Africans whose personhood was confiscated along with their freedom of movement, were and are equal to each and any of all us as persons. Let us pause here to note that this misrecognition of Africans as non-persons also has a history.3 Most of us likely don’t know that in the early colonial period, Africans were considered indentured servants just like indentured servants from Europe. They were persons, whose labor was the property of their master for a set period of time, after which they were free to sell their labor as they chose. Africans came to be misrecognized as non-persons, as “slaves,” only after a precedent was set (in 1654 or 1655) through a suit brought by an African who had become a free man, named Anthony Johnson. Johnson successfully claimed that his African servant, John Casor, and not Casor’s labor was his property. As Kat Eschner notes in a recent piece for the Smithsonian blog,4 this decision became settled law by 1671 in Virginia and spread from there to the colonies at large. As property, enslaved persons were no different from sugar, gold, spice, grain, cotton, or any other inanimate cargo.
With this history in mind, while it is fundamentally right-minded that we wish to attribute our judgment and our correct recognition of Africans as full persons back to the time of the transatlantic slave trade, it is fundamentally wrongheaded to state as actual fact, that those enslaved persons had that personhood. And we are doubly wrong when we suggest that in addition to such personhood they also experienced the recognition that makes it possible, first, to do incredibly basic things like move freely, and then to do something like wish, hope, or plan for the future. That wrongheadedness, when based on ignorance, is an error to be forgiven, or if not forgiven, pitied. But when, as with the statements of Obama and Carson, the error is based on a willful distortion of the past, then what is forgivable or pitiable becomes an immoral offense. For such willful distortion is a conscious misrepresentation of the past that cannot and will not correct the misrecognition of Africans as non-persons in the past.
Why consider the details of these depravities? One important reason is so that we do not project back onto those who suffered historical injustice our own fantasies of justice and redemption. Chattel slavery in the United States is an irredeemable fact of American history. We must confront such facts in their full horror if we are to do justice to ourselves as well as to their victims and those who descend from them, and those who “look like” they might have so descended. We must confront the true nature of the legacy of slavery so that we can confront the next King. But, as the events of summer 2017 made painfully clear, a continuing inability or unwillingness to squarely confront this history contributes directly to an inability to muster the political will to exclude white supremacy and ethnic nationalism from the American public sphere.
THE HISTORICAL MISREPRESENTATION OF THE CONFEDERACY
As winter 2017 gave way to spring, the center of public controversy over the legacy of slavery and the present life of America’s past in our public places shifted. The shift occurred from statements and actions by members of the Trump administration to local debates, specifically, to the debate concerning the removal of statues5 dedicated to “Confederate heroes.” These debates have centered on the removal of four statues in New Orleans commemorating Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and (most controversially6) the Battle of Liberty Place. This debate, I believe, must be read together with the reverberations of a similar decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, the small city where I happened to be living at the time, and which was about to become far more well-known. Charlottesville’s Confederate statue removal controversy probably would have gone little noticed if not for the fact that a group of white nationalists, led or at least publicly represented by the already infamous Richard Spencer, held a torchlit rally around the base of the statue7 reminiscent of KKK rallies of the past. There, Spencer and his supporters loudly proclaimed statements such as “What brings us together is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced,” “You shall not replace us,” and “Russia is our friend.”
In a piece of soaring rhetoric8 surely inspired both in tone and in content by the rhetoric of Obama (whom he quotes at a central moment in the speech), Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, gave a serious and passionate defense of the decision to remove Confederate statues from public space that seemed to directly address the need to confront the newly emboldened white nationalism. In one of the more celebrated moments of the speech, Landrieu expressly links the continued presence of the statues to the politics of hope by sharing how a friend asked him to imagine himself as an African American mother or father whose fifth-grade daughter asks “who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city?” Landrieu then asks himself and his listeners: “Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?” The argument is clear: it is impossible for us to argue that Lee is someone who “inspires” or ought to inspire all of us, and since he cannot be someone who makes all of us “feel hopeful,” each of us knows that his presence must not stand over us any longer. In Landrieu’s words: “When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do.” That is, we must take the statue down. We must do so because its continuing presence in the public sphere underwrites that space as one in which some Americans cannot feel hopeful about their opportunities or even welcomed to be there.
I cannot deny that a public space that tells some of my fellow citizens that they are not welcome is not a public space in which I can feel at home. But there are norms other than the “call to feel inspired and hopeful” that operate here. And Landrieu himself acknowledges the norm, which I believe trumps the politics of home, in another, less celebrated, part of his speech, when he says: “But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery of rape, of torture.” Indeed, we do need to confront those truths; this is my central point, specifically with reference to the legacy of chattel slavery in the United States. And yes, merely leaving the monuments in place, as though we can memorialize as a source of pride and identity those who stood up for slavery and against the Union, would be an utter failure to confront that history. But, it seems to me, merely removing the statues from the public space will not remove the memorial that many citizens hold in their hearts for the figures and the actions those statues symbolize.
Yes, Landrieu says that the plan is to find an appropriate place, like a museum, in which to display these monuments with context. But while Landrieu argues for the monuments to be re-situated as museum pieces,9 for the moment at least they have simply been put in storage, where they won’t contribute to our much-needed confrontation with a difficult past. Landrieu’s speech, taken together with the marked absence of the statues seems to me to belie his stated and laudable intention to help his fellow citizens confront “the other side” of New Orleans’s history. By yoking his defense of removal to the politics of hope, Landrieu reiterates the perspective that Obama adopted in speaking to newly naturalized citizens and including slaves among those who immigrated to America. Given that many, including Frank Bruni10 writing in The New York Times, cast Landrieu’s speech as “just what we need to hear” in light of the resurgence of white nationalism, I am given pause. What I see in this kind of response, however laudable the intentions of the initiators of these movements, is another version of the mistake Obama made both in December 2015 on immigration.
I would humbly submit, echoing the proposal of Mayor Mike Signer of Charlottesville with respect to that city’s controversial memorials to Lee and Jackson,11 that simply removing these memorials will not do much to help us recognize today the nature of past misrecognition. Signer, whose personal views about these monuments and their legacy in their respective cities probably do not differ from Landrieu’s, argued and voted against removing the Lee and Jackson monuments in Charlottesville. In an unsuccessful attempt to convince the city council not to approve the removal of the Lee statue, he suggested that it would be better to “transform in place.” This proposal, an adaptation of a suggestion in the December 2016 report12 of the “City of Charlottesville Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces,” envisioned leaving the two statues where they are, but also building around them so as to create an open-air museum. Such a newly repopulated public space would add to the statue of Lee in Lee Park a new “memorial to civil rights victories” and, to the statue of Jackson in Jackson Park, a new “memorial to the slave auction block.” With this larger cluster of memorials and explanatory plaques in the two public parks, he argued and which I also believe, we might really begin to seriously confront the issues that divide the citizens of Charlottesville and New Orleans.
This, as Signer argued, would do much more to show the full dimensions of slavery and Jim Crow in Charlottesville than merely disappearing Lee and Jackson from public view. In Signer’s words: “We must see and defy these monuments to overcome what they mean. That is a more uncomfortable reality, to be sure. But I believe that this dialectical exhibit, and underlying process, of visible thesis, antithesis, and synthesis will create more vibrancy and dynamism for the progressive project in Charlottesville than the alternative.”
MISREPRESENTATION, MISRECOGNITION, AND WHAT TO DO WITH THE UNFORTUNATE MEMORIALS
The Hegelian motif in Signer’s statement is perhaps surprising but no accident. This is because the monuments, both in their original Jim Crow-era construction and installation, and in the debates about their removal now, have always been about the politics of recognition. Much, if not all, of our contestation in the public space is an expression of the struggle that the desire (or need) for recognition inspires, as Hegel recognized and formulated in his classic discussion of the Lord and Bondsman. I do not feel especially welcomed or honored when I walk past the monumental statue of Lee when on my way to the downtown mall or the public library in Charlottesville, and I know that many—for good reasons—feel much less welcomed and honored than I. But the point of politics is to demand that my resistance to the way those monuments interpolate and misrecognize me and my fellow citizens be recognized by my fellow citizens, including those who identify with the larger-than-life model of a Confederate general guarding over their public spaces.
I reached the judgment recorded in the previous paragraph three months before the events of August 2017. Now that they are an indelible part of recent American history, it is nearly impossible for someone who lived through 2016 and 2017 in Charlottesville, and whose views in and of American politics are like mine, to speak with anything other than utter contempt for the memorials to Confederate “heroes” and the evil they have invited into America’s public places. It is just as hard to conclude anything other than that these memorials ought to be removed and destroyed at the nearest legal opportunity. But that instinct—ultimately itself an attempt to misrepresent the way the institution of slavery inextricably lives on in American politics—must be resisted. It is not easy to find the right institutional and physical settings, but there must be a way for the Jim Crow-era monuments to remain in public view, precisely as a way for us to confront the historical misrepresentations behind the “slaves were immigrants, too” rhetoric discussed above. A rhetoric that many voices, from the left as well as from the right, perpetuate.
Put another way, these monuments ought never to have been constructed, but that does not make removing them right. The detritus of history surrounds us in Charlottesville and New Orleans as elsewhere. This includes Berlin where Hegel once taught his philosophy of history, where the control center of the Nazi genocide was located, and where I write this coda to my reflections on the refusal to confront the realities of race in the United States in 2017. If the monuments concretize this for us, then let us insist on the symbolic installment of contrasting elements of our difficult past, and let us struggle together with those monuments. Let us repurpose existing monuments as we build new memorial cultures that physically embody and demonstrate the claim that the existing monuments misrepresent our shared past, as we try to discover who we have been as a people, who we are today, and who we might be tomorrow.
Michael Weinman is professor of philosophy at Bard College Berlin. He primarily works on ancient Greek thought, political philosophy, and their intersection. His most recent book The Parthenon and Liberal Education, co-authored with Geoff Lehman, was published in the SUNY Series in Ancient Greek philosophy in March 2018.
1 Chris Massie, “Steve King: Blacks and Hispanics ‘will be fighting each other’ before overtaking whites in population,” CNN, March 14, 2017.
2 Theodore Schleifer, “King doubles down on controversial ‘babies’ tweet,” CNN, March 14, 2017.
3 Ariana Kyl, “The first slave,” Today I Found Out, August 23, 2013.
4 Kat Eschner, “The horrible fate of John Casor, the first black man to be declared slave for life in America,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 8, 2017.
5 German Lopez, “New Orleans mayor: We can’t ignore the death, enslavement, and terror the Confederacy stood for,” Vox, May 23, 2017.
6 Jamiel Lynch and Darran Simon, “P.G.T. Beauregard Confederate statue comes down in New Orleans,” CNN, May 17, 2017.
7 Laura Vozzella, “White nationalist Richard Spencer leads torch-bearing protesters defending Lee statue,” The Washington Post, May 14, 2017.
8 Jack Holmes, “Read New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s remarkable speech about removing Confederate monuments,” Esquire, May 23, 2017.
9 Nicole Chavez and Emanuella Grinberg, “New Orleans begins controversial removal of Confederate monuments,” CNN, April 26, 2017.
10 Frank Bruni, “Mitch Landrieu reminds us that eloquence still exists,” The New York Times, May 23, 2017.
11 Mike Signer, “Mike’s statement on Charlottesville’s Confederate statues,” Mike Signer, February 6, 2017.
12 City of Charlottesville, Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces, December 19, 2017.