I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to

the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if

they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a

monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country with cartoonish

private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United

States Army bases.

It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and

the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it.

But there are still those like former President Trump and the Senate

majority leader, Mitch McConnell who cannot understand the difference

between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of

airbrushing history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors,

all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim

Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of

assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social

power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four

black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people.

Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more

sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA

testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women

who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half

white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory.

No. Voluntary. Whiteness.

I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern

men my ancestors took what they wanted from women they did not

love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim

their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible

the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South

and its past.

The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come

from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause.

And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to

ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesnt understand. You cannot

say it wasnt my family members who fought and died. My blackness does

not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of

the debate. I dont just come from the South. I come from Confederates.

Ive got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins.

My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund

Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand

dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selmas Bloody Sunday

Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am

a great-great-granddaughter.

And here Im called to say that there is much about the South that is

precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however,

a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned

with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, Our

history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.

It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of

American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But heres the thing: Our ancestors dont deserve your unconditional pride.

Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery.

They earned that pride, by any decent persons reckoning. But I am not

proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence,

to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there

are those who dismiss the hardships of the past.

They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of

gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it

away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that

whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be,

It was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and

nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured

monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and

ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these

delusions: Now is the GIVE ME THE BELOW ANSWERS FROM ABOVE ARTICLE.

1. What personal experiences can you relate (connect) to some aspect of

this text?

2. Identify an aspect of this text that you would like to talk or write about.

What would be the Big Idea of your choice?