“You need to understand the historical context.” I would like to consider and scrutinize this sentiment as it relates to our current conversation on race, especially the debate concerning figures from our past. Should we hate George Washington because he was a slave-owner who helped construct a document that allowed for the legal sale of human persons?
There are two extreme positions on this statement. First, there is the outright rejection of this statement in any shape or form. In short, racism is racism, no matter the time period. People who adopt this view see the statement in question as an insidious means of justifying terrible people and terrible things, often in service of upholding a tradition that is rooted in oppression.
The other extreme is essentially the position the former is rejecting. Those who adopt this position might not consider themselves as justifying racism or prejudice, but they are less likely to be “offended” by prejudices from the past because, well, back then everyone was racist, so why would we expect anything else? A more nuanced iteration of this position would consider our contemporary beliefs on equality as simply beyond the moral horizon of those in the past.
I’d like to respond to both sides with the same argument, or really just a set of observations. The initial thrust of my demonstration will be against the limitations of the former argument ─ those who outright reject the statement in question ─ although it will eventually respond to what I take to be some of the limitations of the latter. In short, I find that the common but ahistorical rejection of context undermines the very process that accounts for and makes possible any progress in our perception of equality or civil rights.
To distance oneself completely from all those who said racist things or were deeply prejudiced is to completely overlook the historical distinctions of a time period, distinctions that highlight the actual progress of civil rights. For example, it is imperative to make a distinction between Mark Twain and defenders of Jim Crow south, even if we decide Twain himself was racist. Why? Because Twain was one of the most outspoken critics of Jim Crow south, using his fiction and nonfiction alike to searingly satirize the evils of racism. Is it possible to consider Twain himself racist, or at least problematically prejudiced? Yes. I’ve taught his Huckleberry Finn many times, and I always like us to consider the characterization of the slave Jim, who, while being deeply human and the moral center of the novel, is also stitched from many of the racist stereotypes of the time, some of these stereotypes (like Jim’s stupidity) being quite offensive. But to ignore the distinction between Twain’s racism and the violent and political racism of the Jim Crow south is dangerous and blinding. When we refuse to see Twain “in his times,” we miss out on the movement Twain helped instigate, or at least that he was a wonderful representative of: a movement that marked an enormously important step in the civil rights conversation in America.
I’ll take up a topic closer to my own heart: Flannery O’Connor, whose alleged racism has received a lot of attention recently. I won’t take up the heart of Paul Elie’s article which was very influential in this recent reconsideration of the southern writer ─ but I will simply say that he provides no context for quotations from O’Connor’s letters that he cherrypicks and simply mischaracterizes. Additionally, Elie makes some uncharacteristically inane literary interpretations that completely misread the basic thrust of some of O’Connor’s stories, e.g. “Revelation.” But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that O’Connor held racist and prejudiced views. Like with the ahistorical conflating of Twain with supporters of Jim Crow, conflating O’Connor with, say, Senator Bilbo, is willfully ignoring how the civil rights movement developed ─ and this eventually blinds us from seeing how the conversation is presently developing.
Let me take up her wonderful “All That Rises Must Converge.” In this story, O’Connor satirizes both Julian’s mother, a prejudiced old lady who, when a black man with a briefcase steps into the bus she and her son are riding, whispers to Julian: “Now you see why I won't ride on these buses by myself.” But the real bulk of the satire is focused on Julian, a progressive college-educated young man, who sees himself as so enlightened but who ultimately is unable to rise much beyond the deep-seated prejudice of the south: “He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which he could teach her [his mother] a lesson. He might make friends with some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring him home to spend the evening.” In his imagination, where he lives most of his life, he imagines further ways of “educating” his mother:
“He brought home a beautiful suspiciously Negroid woman. Prepare yourself, he said.
There is nothing you can do about it. This is the woman I've chosen. She’s intelligent,
dignified, even good, and she’s suffered and she hasn’t thought it fun. Now persecute us, go ahead and persecute us. Drive her out of here, but remember, you’re driving me too. His eyes were narrowed and through the indignation he had generated, he saw his mother.”
O’Connor, while taking humorous and obvious potshots at the overt racism of Julian’s mother, gives more attention to the progressive white liberal, whose beliefs in equality are simply virtue-signalling, self-congratulatory, and/or a justification for condescension ─ especially since these beliefs are unconnected to black people as people, and especially not to helping out the actual plight of the black person in America.
So while one might validly hold O’Connor as prejudiced or even racist, her perception and representation of the disingenuous liberal call for civil rights amongst white people is a clever and complex addition to the conversation about race in the middle of the twentieth century. (Personally, I see some self-deprecation in O’Connor’s depiction of Julian, and other characters like him throughout her fiction, as if she understood that her rejection of her own mother’s overt racism didn’t free her from the prejudices of the south or align her with those fighting for real racial equality. But that’s beside the point.) My real point here regards the conflation of O’Connor as racist (if we accept the fact) with the racism of Senator Bilbo, who said on the floor of Congress in an argument against an anti-lynching bill in 1938:
“If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon White Southern men will not tolerate.”
To ignore the obvious distinctions between O’Connor and Bilbo is to misunderstand how the conversations of race in the south developed. O’Connor expresses a nuanced opinion on race that helps us understand the development of white beliefs on race during the first half of the twentieth century.
I’ll quickly address the ahistoricism of the opposing extreme, those who accept wholesale the quotation in question. The argument that “everyone was racist back then, so why would we expect otherwise?” equally ignores the distinctions (and messiness) of our historical perspectives on race. For example, this type of defense of George Washington misses out on the fact that other founding fathers viewed slavery not just as a necessary evil, but as an evil to be eradicated. John Adams famously said that the American Revolution wouldn't be complete until the slaves were free. Many religious speakers of the times spoke at length and eloquently about the great injustice of slavery ─ and all this during a time that people mischaracterize as a point in history when racial equality wasn’t an idea yet.
Both extreme positions on the topic miss out on how ideas develop, even moral ideas that seem so clear cut. Ideas develop through education, family, reading and experience ─ but they develop oddly, often slowly, and circuitously. To call a developmental position on race prejudiced or racist ─ as in the case of Twain ─ isn’t incorrect, and I might even say it’s important to. But equally important is understanding its position in the larger development, otherwise we don’t understand how our own time period, like every other time period, is simply one part of the larger development as well. To ignore history is to ignore how humanity actually moves forward in these areas (the former position’s limitation) ─ and to simplify history is to veer dangerously close to ignoring moral culpability (the latter position’s limitation).
