Lughnasa: Bad Harvest

Lughnasa: Bad Harvest July 25, 2016

Lee Circle in New Orleans during Black Lives Matter protest July 8 (Robert E. Lee statue not shown)
Lee Circle in New Orleans during Black Lives Matter protest July 8 (Robert E. Lee statue not shown)

At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere as we look toward Lughnasa, the traditional Celtic celebration of the harvest, and our country spirals harder into a particularly ugly election season, my mind turns toward what we as a nation are reaping from our history.

As a white person growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s, the Confederate statues and symbols all around me, in place since the Jim Crow Era, gave me uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. My parents taught me that the South was wrong to have fought for slavery, and that it was a good thing that the North won, saving the Union and freeing the enslaved people.

And yet, my elementary Louisiana history class taught me that Reconstruction was terrible; my high school’s fight song was “Dixie.” My parents taught me that integration was a good thing; in the days before the black students arrived, my high school teachers warned us we didn’t have to speak to or interact with the black students.

Battle of Liberty Place monument that honors killing of police officers defending Reconstruction
Battle of Liberty Place monument that honors killing of police officers defending Reconstruction

During the Civil Rights era, when we traveled, my mother would half-jokingly say we ought to obscure our license plate with mud so no one would know we came from Louisiana, and yet we were always proud of being New Orleanians and counted the generations our family had lived here. My parents taught me to admire Martin Luther King Jr.; at my high school, students celebrated when he was assassinated and no teacher rebuked them.

It was hard to reconcile what my parents were teaching me with what my teachers and peers were saying, and what was obvious all around me.

It’s easy for non-Southerners to say, “All of that is YOUR problem” but the deadly harvest of racism and white supremacy pervades our whole country. Because the state of Texas is the biggest purchaser of school textbooks, companies providing such books have literally altered American history to appeal to Southern sensibilities.

Statue of Confederate General who fired first shot at Fort Sumpter, showing Black Lives Matter graffitti.
Statue of Confederate General who fired first shot
at Fort Sumpter, showing Black Lives Matter graffitti.

All over our country, school children are taught that the Civil War was fought over taxes, over individual and states’ liberty, over Constitutional principles, and only incidentally, maybe a little bit about slavery. All over our country, school children are taught that those who fought for the Confederacy were “honorable.” All over our country, school children are taught that Reconstruction was bad thing, corrupt, an overreach by the federal government, and that it was a good thing when federal troops were withdrawn from the defeated states.

But none of those things are true. They are deliberate and intentional lies, promulgated for the purpose of reinforcing white supremacy. And we are all damaged psychically and spiritually from being fed these lies.

All thinking people know, at some level, that the South was on the wrong side of history, that slavery was a terrible evil, that the carnage of the Civil War was the fault of the South, that Reconstruction brought a small measure of justice and equality for African Americans, that to laud Confederates is to honor traitors —and yet this knowledge must be suppressed and denied. We must pretend that those who fought for the Confederacy were “heroes” and that all those Confederate monuments and flags uplift some neutral “history” and “tradition”and thus are not offensive.

We say in pagan circles that what you put out comes back to you in multiples. When our country puts forth lies for decades, teaches those lies to all our children, and ignores the damage those lies do — what then comes back to us, in what multiples?

In order to live and work around the monuments to the Confederacy, white people either have to pretend that they don’t mean what they mean, or be outright supporters of the Lost Cause and white supremacy. White people have to find a way to reconcile the “liberty and justice for all” with the subconscious knowledge that the monuments say instead “white = right.” Whether we want to or not, we white people imbibe imbibe from the monuments a message of internalized superiority.

For black people and people of color, the effects are different but just as insidious and spiritually damaging. As black people around the country have said over and over again “you just have to ignore it” since the monuments mean “the South must’ve won the Civil War” as Southern cities have no statues honoring Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglas or the first black elected officials from Reconstruction. The South was pro-slavery and they get heroic statues and the phrase “liberty and justice for all” becomes just another hoax perpetrated on black citizens. The monuments are another link in a chain of indignities and lies that produce internalized inferiority in people of color.

We are all of us harmed in our souls by this perverse harvest. The ongoing dissonance between the truth of history and the lie of the Lost Cause, between civic proclamations like “equal justice” and the lived reality of black people, between right ignored and wrong honored, causes rage and shame. There is a kind of spiritual death brought about by a sense of moral helplessness and demoralization. We cannot be our whole and wholesome spiritual selves while living within this contradiction. We cannot be in right relationship with the Divine and with other human beings while living in a moral world of “let’s pretend.”

As my grandmother used to say: Tell the truth and shame the devil. Our ancestors who fought for the Confederacy were wrong and fought for an evil cause. We can mourn their lives and grieve that their cause was so inhumane, their principles so deluded. We must own that religious people normalized the evils of slavery, and that religious people were on the forefront of getting the Confederate monuments installed after the Civil War. They were wrong; by so doing they participated in evil. They perverted the principles of the faith they were ordained to proclaim.

Those who follow and honor pagan paths are not absolved or exempt. We who often are drawn to paths first walked by People of Color owe a duty to reject the bad harvest handed down to us. We must step forward and be among those calling for truth to be taught in history classes and for monuments to evil to be torn down. We pagans have an obligation under our stated principles to right this great wrong and prepare a better harvest for those who will look to us as ancestors.

(Melanie Morel-Ensminger is a Unitarian Universalist minister and an eighth-generation New Orleanian. Photo of Lee Circle by the author; Liberty Place from Wikipedia; Beauregard from the Internet.)


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