W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s was an eye opening experience in reading. I was born and raised in the South. I was born in Mississippi, raised in Louisiana and have lived in Georgia for over twenty years. While reading Brundage’s The Southern Past, I made some startling revelations about my belief system, particularly my southern heritage. (For those of you in my class and who may read this blog, these opinions I state here are only my opinions, please do not take offense.)
Collective remembering forges identity, justifies privilege, and sustain cultural norms. For individuals and groups alike, memory provides a genealogy of social identity. (Brundage Pp 4) This is a powerful statement. I think about all of the history classes I have taken in my early education in Louisiana. The quote “history is written by the victors” really doesn’t apply to the south. The educators who created the curriculum white-washed history when writing and teaching the subject. I do not say this lightly, because I have always believed that being raised in the south was a privilege. It is/was a privilege if you were white. Although I have never considered myself as racist, I never went to great lengths to think about the race issues minorities face in the world and in the south in particular. With the all of the events that play out in the news each day against minorities my collective memory begs the question, “why do we believe what we believe?” I think it starts with my parents, and my parents parents, and before them. They believed that there should be a distinction between races. That’s because of the time in which they grew up and the rhetoric they were fed all of their lives too.
I now ask the question, “what can I do about this?” What can one voice do to make a change in the world, the beliefs held by others?” Hopefully, someday soon, people we truly be color-blind.
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Issues and Interpretations in Public History 
Thank you for your honesty in this post. I’ve lived in Georgia all my life, born and raised in Atlanta. A lot of Brundage’s book definitely rang home to me, too. I could relate personally to many of his points: why yes, my father and brother were both Civil War “experts,” yes a relative has conducted genealogical research on our family line, of COURSE I’m a direct descendant from American Revolution and Confederate soldiers (my brother has actually received scholarship money from the DAR and UDC for meager scholarships, I still have all of his research. He was desperate for money to buy his books for med school). Those aspects of the book were amusing.
What was not amusing was my realization of how little I really, like actually, knew about the impact of southern race relations on our present-day public history culture. I grew up in Atlanta, my parents are both avowed “liberals,” my sister is adopted from Korea, we lived in a part of town with a diverse population, etc.–all this is to say that racial discrimination was not really a feature of my upbringing because of my fairly insulated environment. Insulated from the reality of race relations in the rest of the South, since to be fair Atlanta is not a very accurate representation for “The South” (city boosters have worked very hard to ensure that). While I have spent a lot of time learning about and researching black vs. white public/intellectual/artistic/civil life from the postbellum to the present, and also how the built environment was impacted, Brundage put it into a context I hadn’t ever really considered it in. I hadn’t ever thought about how race relations played themselves out in the creation and dissemination of memory, how that memory is “experienced” through public history. To be honest, I haven’t really traveled very far outside of the South, except to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and San Francisco… of course those places would be very different from my motherland. It wasn’t until I went on vacation to New York City did I realize the extent of the fundamental differences between public history/culture in the South vs. the rest of the nation. In NYC, museums are so well-supported with philanthropic funds admission prices are merely “suggested,” but it’s pay as you can–wish we had that at home. In the South, historical buildings, roads, trails, sites, hell even rocks (the one in Decatur Courthouse Square, for example) have signs with information about their historical significance. Didn’t really see a lot of that in NYC. In NYC, neighborhoods and cultures are both bounded yet overlap, discernible yet still woven into the fabric of the rest of the city; in Atlanta, entire groups of people–e.g., the Latino and Asian populations of Buford Highway, the ongoing tensions fomenting in Peoplestown, a few examples among many, many more–are being pushed out by developers, annexations zone them out of desired school districts and corral them into distant but grossly overcrowded schools.
Basically, I realized that although Atlanta is the “exception” to the “rule” of the South, it’s still…well it needs work. I’m not saying NYC is some urban utopia, it has its own historical and current problems; but the differences were still irritating, depressing, and incredibly frustrating for a native-southerner with an interest in public history. Brundage’s book sort of gave me an intellectual genealogy of all the frustrations and issues that going to NYC made me more aware of in regards to my beloved hometown. Furthermore, it made me aware of my own white privilege–my whiteness, in addition to the liberal environment of my upbringing, had insulated me from the glaring issues our city and our region are still complicit in. Unfortunately I don’t know how to answer your questions–it seems that all the institutions and practices that were cultivated from the late-19th century and throughout most of the 20th century are too endemic to the region. Issues regarding public/state funding and involvement, conservative politics, racism, building and zoning practices, economic segregation, etc. seem so hopelessly and deeply rooted that all I can think about is firing everyone who is currently in charge and just starting over, if that were possible. Clear the weeds to make way for the field.
Even if people can one day become colorblind, will people ever stop being greedy, willing to step on/bulldoze whoever and whatever gets between them and profit? Will people ever stop finding ways to categorize other people as “different?” What if colorblindness just means people find another new way to map difference onto other groups of people? Does this mean the public AND policymakers need to be educated about the legacy of racism in the mapping of public and civic space through institutionalized memory? Are historians the therapists that can help society make meaning of its traumatic past, and how to proceed into the future in a way that respects that trauma by growing from it rather than repressing it? Or would people just get upset that we’re toying with their “heritage”?
Personally, I’m not sure that colorblind is the way to go. To say that one doesn’t see color would be to say that you don’t see any differences, and as has been shown both in our reading of history and our current situation, there are differences, especially in how people of color have been/are viewed and treated in this country. To not see color is to not fully embrace the struggles that African Americans have had in this nation–struggles that still continue today. To not see color is to not see rich and unique cultural heritages that have come from people of color.
A lot of people say that they either are colorblind or that they wish that we, as a society, would be. I feel it’s along the same lines as calling America a melting pot–the misconception that we’re all one big culture united under a banner. I prefer to live in a stew, where we acknowledge cultural, religious, and other differences. In a stew, the different flavors contribute to the overall experience.
I think that, rather than blinding ourselves to any differences, we should open our eyes more fully to understand the myriad experiences of everyone and to use that knowledge to help people out of the oppression that they face based on their skin color or what they wear as part of their culture. Perhaps in an ideal world, we could be colorblind but, again, not only would that give us (white folks) another reason to say all is right with society–and forget about what has been wrong–but it is also just not likely, given humanity’s track record of categorizing people and then acting negatively upon those categorizations. Perhaps that’s pessimistic of me, but it is the world that I have seen…
Great conversation! I am and have been on board with “Bayjove.”(?) I think we should examine and appreciate our differences – and not get bound up in trying to “morally legislate” them into nonexistence. – Thanks, Marnie for starting this .. i think we all have our South (insert whatever else) to reconcile