Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 62
The Lost Cause Narrative is Not on Life Support
Happy Tuesday!
A large part of my job at Liberation Ventures focuses on investigating the narratives that have historically blocked reparations for Black Americans from coming to fruition.
There has been a lot written about the meritocracy narrative, the racial progress narrative, and the personal responsibility narrative.
I’ve found less research that examines the prevalence of the Lost Cause narrative in modern society.
Today’s Hot Takes section focuses on a Washington Post op-ed written by Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY. I’ve become a little obsessed with not only tracking what monuments are coming down but how they are portrayed and what they represent. Today’s Hot Takes section dives a little into this and the history of the Lost Cause narrative.
Some reparations-related news you might want to check out today:
Evanston’s housing grants are getting out the door. The Evanston Roundtable spoke to one of the first recipients of the program.
As detailed in the Harvard Crimson Review, late last year, the Harvard Minsformation Review retracted an article about the reparations movement group, American Descendants of Slaves, and their role in the 2020 election.
Eight CDFI’s have pledged to focus their lending to K-12 public and charter schools that exhibit practice and results that enhance racial equity in their schools, as detailed in this Next City article.
I was first introduced to Dr. William Darity (featured in Vol 31) and Dr. Darrick Hamilton when working at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities back in 2018. CBPP’s Full Employment Project commissioned a paper that laid out a modern Federal Job Guarantee plan. Yesterday, I published a piece with Prism that frames the program in the context of Covid.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Washington Post: Confederate heritage groups are keeping the Lost Cause on life support
Next City: Is There a Formula to Creating an Anti-Racist School?
Business Wire: JPMorgan Chase Commits $30 Million to Help Close Wealth Gaps for Black and Latina Women
Washington Post: Behind the latest GOP restrictions on race teaching: A hidden, toxic goal
The Guardian: White nationalists are flocking to the US anti-abortion movement
Regional News
The Harvard Crimson: Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review Retracts Article, Admitting Editorial' Failure'
NPR: Black Mississippi senators walk out in protest over critical race theory ban
San Fransisco Chronicle: California paved the way for reparations conversation. Will America ever follow?
Evanston Roundtable: ‘I never thought that I would be picked’: Meet one of the first 16 recipients of Evanston reparations
NBC News: Florida school district cancels professor’s civil rights lecture over critical race theory concerns
Johnson City Press: Georgia Republicans move to block critical race theory instruction
Yale News: City unveils sweeping Cultural Equity Plan
Route-fifty: Mayors Move to Confront Racial Disparities in Their Cities
WESA: New program selects first grant recipients to address systemic racism in Pittsburgh's arts scene
WBCK: Michigan State Rep Introduces African American Reparations Bill in the House
International News
The Guardian: Reparations to the Caribbean could break the cycle of corruption – and China’s grip
The Guardian: School governors in England to be offered anti-racism training
Hot Takes
Washington Post: Confederate heritage groups are keeping the Lost Cause on life support
The Lost Cause is historical mythology and social movement created by ex-Confederates that seeks to reframe the Civil War and the original intent of the Confederacy in a positive light.
According to historians, the term originated from the 1866 book, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, which the New York Times proclaimed as a book still extraordinarily shaping the nation.
The author, Edward Alfred Pollard, argued that while the North defamed the institution of slavery, slavery brought about “prominent results beyond the domain of controversy. It bestowed on the world’s commerce in a half-century a single product whose annual value was two hundred millions of dollars. It founded a system of industry by which labour and capital were identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protected labour. It exhibited the picture of a land crowned with abundance, where starvation was unknown, where order was preserved by an unpaid police, and where many fertile regions accessible only to the labour of the African were brought into usefulness and blessed the world with their productions.”
He’s not wrong. America’s wealth at the time, and still today, is built on the institution of slavery. But, this statement, and the entire book, sought to frame this fact in a positive light rather than the nefariously negative one it deserves.
Since then, the Lost Cause narrative has been popularized by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who built monuments, delivered lectures, ran essay contests, and distorted history textbooks to propagate this mythology.
Today, the Washington Post opinion article briefly highlights the various efforts to take down Confederate monuments and the lawsuits that have almost always immediately followed that seek to preserve them.
Thompson doesn’t opine much into the very last few sentences of their piece where they state, “too many of our monuments were put up without any public input, by people wealthy enough to pay for them. We should not let a similarly small group of plaintiffs control the process of their transformation with deep enough pockets to pay for legal life support for the Lost Cause.”
I’d argue, though, that the Lost Cause mythology is not on life support — or anywhere close.
Last year, the Andrew Mellon Foundation launched a $250 million initiative to answer the question, “what story does the commemorative landscape of the United States tell?”
One of the first projects to come out of this effort was a National Monument Audit produced by the Monument Lab. One of the significant findings of the audit was that the story of the United States, as told by our current monument landscape, misrepresents our nation’s history.
It found that:
Only 3 percent of recorded Confederate monuments mention the word defeat
Less than 1 percent of recorded monuments represent enslaved people and abolition efforts
$40 million in taxpayer dollars have gone to preserve Confederate monuments
The monuments toppled in 2020-2021 only make up .6 percent of all monuments across the country
Of the over 5,000 monuments that mention the Civil War, only 1 percent mention slavery
If you’ve read this newsletter or follow me on Twitter, you’ve likely heard me express my annoyance at the idea that after George Floyd, there was a “racial reckoning.” It supports the narrative/myth of racial progress.
While I agree we need to address the Lost Cause narrative and those that support it more directly, the idea that the narrative is on life support aligns with the notion that there was a racial reckoning. The typical story that we tell, that Black Americans made substantial progress after the Civil Rights Act, is false. Not to take anything away from those before us who fought to pass the incredulous piece of legislation, but as the New York Times reported, “in terms of material well-being, Black Americans were moving toward parity with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era. What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped, and even reversed.”
The metaphors we use and how we tell stories about race (and America) are so important.
When something is on life support, they usually refer to a ventilator. This machine helps someone continue to breathe by keeping oxygen flowing through their body by pushing air into the lungs.
Racism, and the narratives that undergird it, like the Lost Cause narrative, are not taking their final breaths.
The final call to action in the National Monument Audit calls for us to “engage in a holistic reckoning with monumental erasures and lies and move toward a monument landscape that acknowledges a fuller history of this country.”
To do that, a federally-funded effort must be launched that seeks to radically reimagine the entire way we document history in public spaces. But, until we see Black joy, love, triumph, and pain represented fully, accurately, and respectfully in cities across the country, the work isn’t over.