The South of It All

In the past few weeks, something north of a dozen cities have either removed or approved the removal of Confederate monuments. That might sound like good progress at first blush, but according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), as of last year, there were still almost 800 Confederate statues nationwide. And that was just a fraction of the more than 1,700 total monuments, place names, or other symbols memorializing the Confederacy.

That SPLC number includes 103 public K-12 schools and colleges named for Confederate icons, but it doesn’t necessarily include the dozens of schools in 41 states that have Confederate mascots. I spent an obscene amount of time over the weekend trying to see what the internet had to say about some of these. And I turned up something pretty interesting—a dissertation from last year. In it, Patrick Caleb Smith, then a doctoral candidate for philosophy at Southern Miss, analyzed the distribution of secondary schools with “Rebels” as their mascot.

Now, there are different interpretations of the Rebel—some of which aren’t even anthropomorphic. Smith engages with that. But even so, he found that of 162 secondary schools with Rebel mascots, 68 were straight-up Confederate soldiers, making it the most common version of the Rebel in his data set. Most are located in states of the former Confederacy, but exactly one-quarter were in other states.

I can’t say I was totally surprised by the distribution of Rebel mascots. But the only reason I knew the Confederate Rebel mascot wasn’t limited to east of the Mississippi, or south of a certain parallel is because I grew up about 90 minutes south of a public school in Montana that had a Confederate soldier mascot. And perhaps underscoring how little consideration I gave that, I had forgotten all about that school until (of all things) watching Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women last month.

The Montana of It All

Before I proceed, I have to expose myself as a delinquent in a deeper sense for neglecting to see Certain Women until 2020, despite every element of this film being squarely in my wheelhouse. In addition to being a Reichardt fan, I’m mildly obsessed with the creative output of Montana-bred siblings Maile and Colin Meloy, and the film is based on the former’s short stories. What’s more, I’m not shy about my affection for Park County, Montana, where I grew up, and also where most of Certain Women was shot.

I’d hazard a guess that interior and exterior location choices in Certain Women were pretty deliberate precisely because they are striking. And as a child of Park County, many were also quite recognizable to me. But one I was dumbfounded to correctly identify was Shields Valley High School in Clyde Park. I was surprised because I recognized it based on the view of a parking lot from a school exit. If you’ve seen the movie, you may know this is in the storyline with Lily Gladstone and Kristen Stewart that’s composed of predominantly night scenes. In other words, these shots are super dark. Nonetheless, I guess just by virtue of being a Gardinerite, I passed through that entrance at Shields enough in my first 18 years for it to be forever unmistakable

Some time shortly after watching Certain Women, I was talking to my mom on the phone and made an offhand comment that I’d always thought it was weird that Shields had a Confederate mascot. My reasoning was that, besides being fucked up on general principle, Montana wasn’t even a state until 24 years after the Civil War. That was weeks before I turned up Smith’s dissertation and learned that Montana is just one of 17 non-former Confederate states where you can find Confederate mascots. But 2020 isn’t the first time I questioned the one I knew about.

High school me often thought she was being a smartass, but in hindsight, I was probably being what we now call a Karen. Once or twice in my Karen heyday, I asked for somebody to explain to me how a Confederate soldier made sense as a mascot in Montana. For reference I graduated high school in 2011, and at least back then, it seemed nobody in a settler state could be bothered to take the question seriously. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but I wonder to what extent people fall back on the ambiguity around some representations of a Rebel.

For Shields’ part, their Rebel mascot is anthropomorphic, but it’s not as though it’s presented with a Confederate flag. Here’s where I think Smith’s dissertation is useful in addressing that ambiguity. Based on his research, there are only so many variants among anthropomorphic versions of a Rebel. Other examples include a Patriot-style American Revolution soldier, a Scottish interpretation, or a cowboy-ish Yosemite Sam figure. But here’s what Smith had to say about the characterizations that fall outside of those:

Attempts to classify all the presentations of mascots are open to interpretation because what may appear somewhat Confederate to one may not appear Confederate to another. A few mascots were non-descript officers dressed in garb from the mid-19th Century. There was no insignia denoting the mascot as Confederate in nature, but the term Rebel shapes the soldier as Confederate. A Union soldier dressed in that type of uniform would likely never be labeled a “Rebel”, so the conclusion established is that a Rebel that is not classified as one of the other type representations that will be discussed has to be Confederate.

Okay, that still feels a little loose. But Smith follows that with the core characteristics of a Confederate representation of a Rebel:

This soldier type wields a sword, which was common of 19th Century American soldiers, he wears an oversized moustache, also common of other caricatures of the time, and a flipped bill hat akin to the hat worn by [former Ole Miss mascot] Colonel Reb.

The Virginia of It All

Suffice to say my years in Virginia immediately after high school were a hell of an awakening. I suspect and hope that many memorials to the Confederacy have been scrubbed since the first-half of the 2010s. But I can’t think of any town in Virginia I’ve been to that doesn’t have some road, park, or building named after a Confederate figure, nor can I think of a college campus without a similarly named residence hall or academic building.

Virginia, as y’all know, is not only a former Confederate state. It’s the home state of some of the highest-profile slave owners in the history of white settlement in North America. Now, I align with the Michelle Alexander/Bryan Stevenson view of mass incarceration as a modern, state-sanctioned continuation of slavery. And just to be super explicit while we’re here, police brutality and the ubiquity of policing is a function of this modern iteration of slavery.

I say all that to acknowledge that the Thirteenth Amendment—supposed to have “abolished” slavery—is a complicated touchstone. But, in the interest of putting Virginia into perspective, it’s useful to note that, of the twelve former U.S. presidents who owned slaves before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, five were out-and-out Virginians and one was born in the state. And that’s to say nothing of the state’s Confederate figureheads, which largely account for why, according to the previously mentioned SPLC data, Virginia was home to 110 Confederate monuments as of 2019 (second only Georgia’s 114), and has more Confederate symbols overall than any other state.

I have my own theories and gripes about Virginia history. It’s partly because it’s been very slow to publicly reckon with its legacy relative to slavery a la the most basic gesture of removing Confederate monuments (although that has been changing recently). But it’s also because of its lesser-known legacy as a vanguard of legislating and biologizing the notion of racial hierarchy far beyond the scope of Jim Crow laws. I’ll try not to go too deep into it, as I’m still learning about this disturbing backroad of history myself, but I will highlight a few points here:

1. Virginia was the first state to legally sterilize a person (Carrie Buck) under the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell.
2. Buck v. Bell upheld the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924, which became a model law for involuntary sterilization in other states and the wider U.S. eugenics movement. That in turn became a model for Nazi Germany’s “race hygenie” program. (You read that right: They modeled theirs after ours. And the deleterious repercussions of that are well known.)
3. Tens of thousands of people were sterilized under compulsory sterilization laws in the U.S. before they were rolled back in the 60s and 70s. Most of the victims were poor and uneducated and few were ever apologized to or compensated.

It’s all very upsetting shit. And if you want to learn more about it, I recommend checking out UVA’s online exhibit on Eugenics in America as a place to start. And while I know eugenics history feels like a detour from the issue of Confederate monuments, digging into all the complicated layers of how racial hierarchy has been created and reinforced in the U.S. is closely connected to why I feel so urgent about this moment we’re in. That’s to say, we have to believe that we can’t afford to fuck up this time. There’s more collective will than ever in our corner right now, and it’d be a shame if we took it for granted. Until there’s racial and economic justice, until there’s true redress for the BIPOC victims of centuries of systemic racism and economic exploitation in this country, this system we’ve put into motion will only continue to clone and feed. Because it’s synthetic—that is, made by people, not a naturally occurring phenomena—this thing is like nuclear fallout or toxic mine tailings. It won’t clean itself up or decompose over time, and that’s why it has to be actively dismantled on the policy and systems level.

U.S. capitalism is racial capitalism, and racial capitalism, by design, serves only an infinitesimally small percentage of society. If the resistance to the notion of defunding police is any indication, a lot of white folks are in denial on this point. I don’t think they’re all going to come around. But I feel like the power of remembering the totality of America’s “race hygiene” policies shows that the monster we’ve made has always: a.) hinged on racial oppression, and b.) allowed the bourgeoisie to create new races that serve their economic interest.

I have to admit, the eugenics cul de sac of our racial history is pretty personal for me. In a different decade and place, I would’ve almost certainly been slotted—like Carrie Buck—as “feebleminded.” Also like Buck, I grew up poor and was raised by a single parent. To boot, my absent parent was an addict, which back in the day, was considered a “hereditary defect” by eugenical criteria. And—icing on the cake—I’m neurodivergent, with three diagnosed disorders classified in the DSM-5. But here’s the thing: Those factors aren’t all that unique. I feel like all my favorite people fit at least three of those four criteria. I think that begins to convey a sense of who can be classified as expendable and “unfit for society” when it’s profitable or convenient for those in power. In terms of capitalism, most of us are potentially expendable.

I’ll concede that I wouldn’t be too torn up if I, in 2020, were sterilized. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that that procedure is invasive and fucking dangerous, and I do not think that the government—which we can’t even count on to fill potholes, much less stay open in perpetuity—has the right to subject a human being to that.

Now, I do tend toward paranoia. So, in a way, I get it if it’s so hard to believe that the whims of capitalism will continue to find modern ways to maintain and expand the race hierarchy it’s built on. But lo, it’s already happened. You’ve probably seen more charts of municipal budgets floating around than usual making you wonder why the hell most cities put more money in law and order than social services. We’re already involving law enforcement in too many places where only social workers, doctors, and educators should be involved. Pumping all our resources into law enforcement is progressively criminalizing everything except being rich in this country. That’s capitalism doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

The South of It All

I feel like we’re living in the social justice equivalent of a Superfund site. And the toxic fallout is going to continue to mutate and spread until we address how this organism came to be on the DNA level. What brought that into focus for me recently was something I read from somebody I admire a lot. They’re online, but out of respect for their privacy, I won’t say much else beyond paraphrasing what they said, which is basically this: In this country, you can get away from regions—the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest, etc. But you can’t escape the South. The South, they said, is in our DNA and it’s everywhere.

At long last, that feels like the answer to the Karen-tinged question from my teens. Why does a Confederate mascot make sense some 450 miles west and 360 miles north of the sites of the two closest American Civil War engagements? Because the South is everywhere. And I think that point is actually a good place to revisit what I said about not associating Montana much with U.S. history. It’s true that there wasn’t much ado made of Montana in my U.S. history textbooks growing up. That’s not to say I wasn’t taught some form of state history. And I’ve since beefed up my Montana knowledge in my adult life (because it’s an interesting state, dammit!). But, when I was school-age, Montana was framed as, at most, loosely connected to the rest of the country. To me, that’s a problem because it downplays a lot of shit that went down in and around Montana that very much tracks with this proposition that the South is everywhere.

Let’s start with those Civil War engagements that occurred hundreds of miles away from Clyde Park, Montana. For starters, neither involved the Confederacy. We associate the Union army with the fight to abolish slavery, but what were they doing near modern day Killdeer, North Dakota and Thatcher, Idaho? In literal terms, we know they were killing Sioux and Shoshone people. And for what? Likely, the same things that the first folks to arrive in Jamestown with enslaved Africans in 1619 were after: property and profit. Doesn’t that also seem to prove the ubiquity of the South as an idea? The alleged “good guys” are down to outlaw the right to own people, but won’t let go of their right to kill people if there’s an economic incentive. Honestly, we’re still pretty effective at doing both to this day, largely through our criminal justice system.

Even under this premise that the South is everywhere, I still struggle to wrap my mind around the Shields Valley mascot, partly because of another bit of history I turned up in my weekend internet blackhole. That is, Shields Valley is the result of a consolidation of two smaller schools in Clyde Park and Wilsall at the time of the 1990-91 academic year, and the two were already using the Rebel mascot when they formed a cooperative for athletics in 1989. All that is pretty well documented. But what I didn’t know were the previous schools’ mascots. Evidently, they were Blackbirds and Longhorns. How they arrived at a Confederate soldier from that combo is puzzling to say the least.

Let’s break that down a little differently. Somebody had a choice. They could do nothing, they could do something, or they could do the right thing. Okay, this isn’t a Spike Lee joint, but here’s a fun fact: Do the Right Thing came out the same year that the Confederate interpretation of the Rebel was adopted as the Shields Valley mascot. Timing aside, I think the big point to underscore here is the choice. Probably more than one person was involved in the mascot selection, and somebody had to okay it. And that happened somewhere in Montana more than a century after the American Civil War.

Although I’m perhaps unusually good at identifying Shield Valley High School’s entrance in a night scene of a Kelly Reichardt movie, I don’t love the optics of a white twenty-something from Gardiner with an East Coast education woke-policing a small high school in Montana. So, while I’m committed to following the issue, I don’t think it’s my place to raise it with the powers that be. I don’t think my voice is one that should be leading a conversation about redress for a hurtful symbol. And on general principle, I know outside pressure only goes so far, and can even be alienating. I think the will to change something like this has to come from either the community, or somebody with positional authority, or both.

So, I won’t be resurrecting my inner Karen and trolling a school system with pedantic emails or phone calls anytime soon. However, I’m committed to supporting anybody in a position to elevate and examine this issue of Confederate symbols. I’m also committed to continuing to learn. And for better or worse, I think I’m newly committed to putting more stock in questions young smartass Jackie asked. I might’ve been trolling back then, but I see now that not all of the questions I asked were unreasonable or unserious.

If you’re inclined to do the right thing, but lack the authority to remove Confederate symbols, please head over to Change.org to view, sign, and share 100+ petitions for the removal of Confederate monuments.