"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." Caroline Randall Williams
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| Caroline Randall Williams, Wikipedia image |
Caroline Randall Williams, author, poet, Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University, native of Nashville,Tennessee, wrote a powerful story about her legacy and identity in an op ed for the New York Times.* I am moved by her description of herself: "I have rape-colored skin."
That metaphor, the image, has stuck with me for days. I've never heard it put this way. But it is so right on, so correct. It holds the whole story of an America built on the free labor of slaves on land occupied by native tribes and invaded by Europeans. It's the history of America begun in 1619 when the first slaves from Africa arrived in Virginia.*
I want to remember Williams' story. It embraces the real history of the United States. It's a crash course in the history of racism on which this country was founded.
Her story evokes one of my favorite historical figures, W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois was a brilliant sociologist, the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard, a founder of the NAACP and editor of its pioneering Crisis magazine from 1910 to 1934. Above all, he was a lifetime activist against white supremacy. His scholarly books on African- American history, the slave trade, and black contributions are legendary and should be required reading today. In his pioneering book The Souls of Black Folk (1897) and his famous Atlantic magazine article that year, DuBois introduced the concept of "double consciousness," the African American experience of "two-ness" in a white racist society. DuBois' writings have never gone out of fashion or relevance.*
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.
I have read this passage many times. I used it in my American history classes. It always brings a powerful reality to the fore. Today we call it "Black Lives Matter." .
Williams' NYT piece channels DuBois' soul. One hundred years later, she brings his honesty and truths, his pain and longing, to our contemporary times. I imagine DuBois hovering, glad to see some revival of the hope for acceptance that he had lost at the end of his long life. He became a citizen of Ghana, and died there, giving up on the U.S.
Yes, we've come a long way since DuBois, but as Williams tells it we have a long way to go. The struggle to achieve the ideals of "equality and justice for all" continues. Even more persistent is the virulent racism that defines America, and the attitudes and actions that derive from it. The fact of slavery and unmitigated racism, and their tragic consequences, are still with us.
NASHVILLE — "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 — [government leaders] — 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 doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t 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 don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve 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 Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
And here I’m 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 here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t 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 person’s 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 time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels. By Caroline Randal Williams
Some sources:
https://carolinerandallwilliams.com/ Born and raised in Nashville, TN, graduate of Harvard and Oxford, writer, teacher, scholar, activist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness -- The term and the idea were first published in by W. E. B. Du Bois's autoethnographic work, The Souls of Black Folk in 1897, in which he described the African American experience of double consciousness, including his own. Originally, double consciousness was specifically the psychological challenge African Americans experienced of "always looking at one's self through the eyes" of a racist white society, and "measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt". The term also referred to DuBois's experiences of reconciling his African heritage with an upbringing in a European-dominated society."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/ W.E.B. DuBois' famous essay on double consciousness." See also his "Souls of Black Folks."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html. This NYT project is a masterpiece of the need to reframe our history, to begin the story in 1619, not in 1776 or 1787, by which time Southern planters were entrenched and slavery affected every aspect of social relations and life from the top down. .
Note: Not sure how to get these links to open; you might have to copy the whole link into google.
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