Janine Jackson interviewed Keri Leigh Merritt about Southern history for the August 18, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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BillMoyers.com (8/8/17)
Janine Jackson: It has been noted that Donald Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville is not new or unique to him. One of the angles is that the removal of memorials to, say, Robert E. Lee, which some will maintain was the sole motivating factor of the people flying swastikas and yelling about the Jews, is an offense against history itself. You could hear that view from Fox’s Laura Ingraham, who decried “people who have no idea it seems about the history of this country just roundly denouncing anyone who had any connection to the South.” She went on to declare “this is about the control of the narrative and the destruction of historical recognition.” And she’s not wrong, except about who it is, in the main, doing the controlling and the destroying.
Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent historian and author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. Her recent article, “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump,” appears on BillMoyers.com. She joins us now by phone from Atlanta. Welcome to CounterSpin, Keri Leigh Merritt.
Keri Lee Merritt: Thank you for having me.
JJ: In a conversation about white supremacy, sometimes references to class are deflections from the irreducibility of anti-black racism. But sometimes ignoring class divisions among whites is itself a kind of deflection. What are you looking to convey in this latest article?
KLM: I think the most important thing is not letting poor working class whites off the hook in any way for their racism, but just trying to understand the ways in which elites not only benefit from racism, but use racism to their advantage. Long history of this throughout America, particularly in the labor sector. Bosses long keeping black and white workers apart, engendering racism, using blacks as strikebreakers, things like that. So it’s more not letting lower classes off the hook, but bringing middle and upper class whites onto the hook for racism as well, and their part in it.
JJ: Right. You say:
White supremacy is most commonly conceptualized as a way for lower class whites to feel socially superior to people from other ethnic backgrounds. More important, though, white supremacy is a tried and tested means for upper class whites to grow their wealth and power.
It’s not an idea that you hear coming and going, frankly, in mainstream media. You’ve talked about labor, but there are other mechanisms, if you will, for how that works.
Keri Leigh Merritt: “Slavery was not just something that they had no interest in and no financial benefit, but slavery was actually actively bad, socially and economically, for poor whites.”
KLM: Definitely. I primarily look at the 19th century South, slavery, Civil War era into Reconstruction, and so when I was doing work for Masterless Men, and looking at these poor whites, who I argue slavery was not just something that they had no interest in and no financial benefit, but slavery was actually actively bad, socially and economically, for poor whites. Because, basically, they didn’t have access to jobs, and so they were constantly unemployed, underemployed, and they really had no real will or reason to want to secede from the Union or fight for the Confederacy.
And so you see this movement in the 1850s, where the upper-class slaveholders who were trying to convince them why they need to fight for the South, why they need to defend slavery, and it’s just all of this horrible racist rhetoric. They come up with this impending racial war, and they warn all the poor whites that rich whites will be able to flee the region, they have the money to leave, but the poor whites will be left there at the ravages of all these ex-slaves who have taken over society.
So they’re really using media to kind of engender this rabid, violent form of racism, warning that these poor whites’ daughters are going to be raped by black men and—I mean, you see the beginnings of Jim Crow in all this really racist rhetoric.
And I think that even today, you can see in Trump’s own campaign, he wasn’t saying things necessarily completely overtly, but it was a dog whistle, you know; he was calling all the racists to arms. He was passively, and increasingly more complicitly, calling all these people out of their little hiding places, in their basements with their computers, and making them feel emboldened to come out into the streets and have protests and demonstrations, like they just did in Charlottesville.
JJ: When you hear someone like Laura Ingraham saying that people are denouncing anyone who had any connection to the South, based on what you’ve just said, I hear a misrepresentation of many Southerners in that.
KLM: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Within probably the last ten years, there have been a lot of great works, not just about slave resistance against the Confederacy, but also poor whites and other different ethnic groups; of course all the immigrants were coming into the Southern cities, port cities. But there’s a huge movement, not just of Unionists but of anti-Confederates, people who just didn’t care, who did not want to be involved, who wanted to be left alone. And so these poor whites who lacked, really did help bring the war to a close by fighting against the Confederacy in the South. The Confederacy was designed and brought about by a very small class of extremely wealthy slaveholders, who at all costs wanted to protect slavery, which was their primary form of wealth.
JJ: I often notice how media divide and erase with just the language. You’ll hear about, you know, “police killings that African-Americans deplore,” and I think, well, but wait, lots of other people deplore them too. It seems like a similar erasure going on here when you represent all the South as being pro-Confederacy. It’s not just getting history a little bit wrong, it’s almost turning it on its head, it seems to me, and to a particular effect, a particular end.
KLM: Oh, absolutely. And I think, just as in the way that blaming poor whites for racism is letting upper-class whites off the hook, blaming Southerners for racism is letting all other Americans off the hook. Some of the most racist places I’ve ever been are up North. But it’s definitely just a way to deflect what they’re really doing. And the Trump presidency is peopled with Koch brothers’ puppets, basically, and they all have a vision of what they want America to be. And not only does it take the racist ideas of people like Bannon and Miller, but it takes what the upper classes are designed to do on a financial level, on a tax level, to keep their power and wealth.
Twitter (8/16/17)
JJ: My other guest today, Adam Johnson, quipped on Twitter, you know, I know almost nothing about World War II because there was no statue of Hitler in my town.
KLM: Exactly.
JJ: And activist David Swanson, who lives in Charlottesville, pointed out that it’s not as though we commemorate all sorts of things. You know, there’s no memorial about Native American history or slavery or civil rights. So I just wonder—as a historian, if people are going to claim that taking down a statue means forgetting or erasing, what does never putting one up mean?
KLM: That’s a great question, and it’s one I think that we’re going to increasingly grapple with as we head through taking these statues down. I live in Decatur. We’re having that conversation right now. When we take down this statue, what are we going to put up? I think that’s going to be a great way forward, and a great way to try to heal the country, is to think about what kind of things haven’t been remembered in this country. Whether it’s a great biracial coalition of laborers in the Populist Era, or honoring the slaves themselves, who created so much of our infrastructure, so much of the wealth that this nation was based upon. There are lots and lots of things that we could commemorate. But, again, there tends to be only one thing, primarily in the South, but all throughout the rest of the US, that has gotten the most statues and the most remembrances, besides the Revolutionary War, and it’s definitely the Civil War. When those statues come down, I think we will have a great conversation of what to put in their places.
New York Times (7/14/17)
JJ: Let me ask you, finally: As I’ve said, I don’t hear the ideas that you’re putting forward having a big place in the most common kind of major media dialogue. And I’m guessing that that has something to do with why you take issue with the notion that historians should somehow be above the fray, that somehow it’s sullying to take part in media debates. You had a letter to the editor in the New York Times on just that point. What are your thoughts on that?
KLM: I think that the way our education system is so unequal right now, that the sad fact is a lot of Americans get their information about history through news sources and through cable TV, through things like that, little news cycle soundbites. So the fact is, if we are not on the front lines providing that information to them, somebody else will be. And that’s how Bill O’Reilly is now known as a historian. Somebody who knows absolutely nothing about history, and actually bastardizes every single fact he possibly can, is known as the US’s preeminent historian. Definitely sells more books than any other actual historian. And if we’re not the ones on the front lines, actually talking to the American public, it leaves a spot for a Bill O’Reilly to come in and teach history, not only incorrectly, but for propagandistic reasons.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with independent historian Keri Leigh Merritt. She’s author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. Her recent article, “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump,” appears on BillMoyers.com. Thank you so much, Keri Lee Merritt, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.
KLM: Thank you so much. Have a good one.
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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.