Glossary

Academic publications of the 1990s and early 2000s have shifted the discourse regarding critical race studies and performative aspects of race. Black scholars like Sandra L. Richards, Saidiya Hartman, and Derek Bell gave voice to the Black American experience and the permanence of racism, and White scholars like Peggy McIntosh, Richard Dyer, and Robin Diangelo articulated the advantages and taken-for-granted-ness of whiteness in America. Scholarship regarding American cultural identity has, thusly, honored two Americas: a Black America and a White America.

As I understand, American white supremacy operates using three specialized tools: 1. Fantastical memory; 2. Confederate Stewardship; and 3. The Confederate gaze. These three characteristics of white supremacy manifest in overt and covert instances of racial bias or trauma leaving behind white power as a performance artifact/remain of performative white supremacy. Derek Bell wrote that racism is a permanent condition in American society because of its ability to adapt, or, more precisely, because of the WHCCNNm group’s ability to adapt racism and to legislate racist policies. Bell writes, “Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance.”[1] The story of American white supremacy is best understood through its varying historical narratives as well as in maneuvers made to adapt racial superiority through memory devices such as films and television, museums and monuments, acts of commemoration, and online content that reflect the social mores of racial dynamics in America.

After reading the scholarship about collective memory and historicization (the production of history), I put forth a concept of fantastical memory inspired by ideas regarding complicated fictions and collective amnesia.[2]  Fantastical memory is a constructionist conception of historical events that perpetuates fantastic, or unbelievable, versions of history. I am not suggesting that fantastical memory sits in opposition to an authoritative historical truth. Fantastical memory is a collective delusion masquerading as a collective memory, it is an interpretation of history that contradicts the experiences of others, and, yet it does not assume that there is one, authoritative version of history. Scholars like Ron Eyerman, Claire Whitlinger, and Karen Cox cite the reconciliation between White Northerners and White Southerners just after the Civil War as the impetus for Lost Cause mythology. Both Black and White Americans were re-shaping or re-membering their cultural identities during the era of Reconstruction; the dominant narrative of slavery became rooted in Lost Cause mythology and fantastical memories of enslavement:

The meaning of slavery was a focal point of reference. A similar process was underway amongst whites, and black attempts to negotiate cultural trauma were intimately intertwined with this national project…. As the nation was re-membered through a new narration of the [Civil W]ar, blacks were at once made invisible and punished. Reconstruction, and blacks in general, were made the objects of hate, the Other, against which the two sides in the war could reunite and reconcile. The memory of slavery was recast as benign and civilizing, a white man’s project around which North and South could reconcile.[3]

The memory of slavery morphed into a perverse understanding of a Lost Cause—a lost way of life that rebranded Southern White Americans as elegant and gentile and reenforced ideas that Black Americans were humanly inferior to Whites. As previously explained, Lost Cause mythology assessed slavery as a charitable act well regarded by Blacks and Whites alike, in doing so, it recast White Southerners as noble caregivers to an inferior race whose Confederacy fought for states’ rights and courageously pursued its independence. 

The real-world implications of fantastical memory are ensnared in the production of history. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “History is what happens, but it’s also what is said to have happened.”[4] Trouillot thinks of history from two viewpoints: positivism and constructionism — he wants to look at history beyond these two viewpoints. He notes the positivist viewpoint is the dominant mode of historicizing in Western culture and privileges power (those who dominated) over other methods of historicization. We can think about positivist history as history without considering privilege or power since it doesn’t factor into the narrative. The constructionist view interprets history as fiction. Trouillot maintains, “Narratives are necessarily emplotted in a way that life is not. Thus they necessarily distort life whether or not the evidence upon which they are based could be proved correct. Within that viewpoint, history becomes one among many types of narratives with no particular distinction except for its pretense of truth. Whereas the positivist view hides the types of power behind a naive epistemology, the constructionist one denies the autonomous of the sociohistorical process.”[5] Trouillot, in showing us how history is made, reveals that “the epistemological break between history and fiction is always expressed concretely through the historically situated evaluation of specific narratives.”[6] Thus, the production of history is not only activated by intellectuals and artists, but also by amateur historians—and we are all amateur historians.[7]

My concept of fantastical memory is also influenced by scholars like Kirk Savage, Claire Whitlinger, and Saidiya Hartman who anticipate fantastical memory by using different terms such as complicated fictions, collective amnesia, and the fiction-of-factual-representation. Kirk Savage writes about collective memory as complicated fictions: “We think collective memory—and indeed the ‘people’ who supposedly share this memory— as complicated fictions, manufactured to serve ideological ends.”[8] Savage is writing about how monuments and commemorative public art “speak to or for the larger collective,” and argues that a dominant narrative emerges in the public sphere through the visual and material culture of public memory, and, most often, this memory becomes inculcated within a racially biased dominant national memory. [9] And since there are (at least) two Americas there cannot be a single narrative, thus a dominant narrative is also one that necessarily divides and supplants American cultural identities. 

Claire Whitlinger likens Lost Cause mythology to a kind of collective forgetting or collective fantasizing about the terrors of slavery and the antebellum South. She writes, “Indeed, philosophers have long noted the social significance of collective amnesia as the starting point from which to build a new society. Undergirded by this logic, societies emerging from violent conflict have adopted public forgetting as state policy.[10] Whitlinger employs the fiftieth commemoration of the Mississippi Burning Murders as a case study revealing collective amnesia:

Acknowledging the commemorative activities of local African Americans thus casts new light on memory practices in Philadelphia and Neshoba County [Mississippi]. It reveals two parallel mnemonic trajectories: one embedded within Philadelphia’s dominant white public sphere, and the other enacted within Philadelphia’s black counterpublic—a space where local African Americans and their allies preserved competing versions of the past.[11]  

In America, fantastical memory and critical memory compete for validation and recognition—each are branded and marketed as essential to cultivating an authentic American identity. 

Expounding upon Hayden White’s idea of the “fiction of factual representation,” Saidiya Hartman writes, “I acknowledge history’s ‘fiction of factual representation,’ to use Hayden White’s term, I also recognize the political utility and ethical necessity of historical fiction.”[12] Hartman acknowledges a need for the fiction-of-factual present to dismiss or obfuscate how America parodies liberty. Hartman encourages us to think about American liberty as a distortion, a fiction, or a contradiction in terms. In other words, Hartman invites us to reevaluate how “American freedom, liberty, justice, democracy came into being through slavery, genocide, rape, dispossession, murder, and terror.”[13] Hartman is not necessarily inviting us to think about memory as fantasy, but she encourages the re-synthesizing of American narratives to include a completer and more holistic understanding of America’s founding principles. I argue that this re-examination must necessarily include Lost Cause mythologies as an exemplar of fantastical memory exposing, “the repression of slavery’s unspeakable features and the shockingly amnesic portrait of the peculiar institution [that] produced national innocence [for White Americans] yet enhanced the degradation of the past for [Black Americans] still hindered by its vestiges because they became the locus of blame and the site of aberrance.”[14] Fantastical memory, then, shapes and continues to shape American cultural identities along a color line that remembers the genealogies of chattel slavery very differently.

Christian Stewardship is a theological principle that asserts Christians are responsible for the world, humanity, and the blessings bestowed to them by God. Many other religions and spiritual practices espouse concepts of stewardship. Today, Christian Stewardship is strongly linked to ideas about environmentalism and citizenship. Yet, during the Confederacy and lasting until desegregation, Christian Stewardship was perverted by those who used the curse of Ham to define racial superiority. The curse of Ham has been interpreted throughout centuries to foment some of humanity’s most egregious offenses. As Wongi Park writes, “Most often referred to as the ‘curse of Ham,’ Gen 9:18-29 has been enlisted as a justification for numerous atrocities from the Crusades, transatlantic slave trade, Rwandan genocide, American slavery and segregation.”[15] As Park demonstrates, the curse of Ham has been used beyond the context of American slavery; however, for my study, I employ the term Confederate Stewardship to identify how the Confederate WHCCNNm group used this parable as a divining rod to sustain and perpetuate chattel slavery and a racial hierarchy in service to their power and to their self-actualization of perceived human superiority in America. 

The Curse of Ham is a parable in which one of Noah’s three sons, Ham, is cursed for seeing Noah naked and intoxicated and then telling his brothers, Shem and Japheth, about what he’s just witnessed. When Shem and Japheth use extreme caution to clothe Noah without gazing upon his naked and intoxicated body, Noah wakes up and intuitively knows what has just transpired. Noah conscripts Ham’s son, Canaan, into Shem and Japheth’s bondage. The descendants of Shem and Japheth are blessed in perpetuity and Canaan’s descendants are relegated to slavery and suffering. Christians are not the only religious order to infer a sense of superiority from Canaan’s plight. As Park maintains, “Arguably, no other sacred text in Christianity, Islam, or Judaism has been misused and abused in the interest of racism more than the curse of Ham in Gen 9:18-29.”[16] Historically, Confederate Stewardship has been used to frame the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as moral endeavors, as evidenced by Lost Cause mythologies.

  In the antebellum American South, interpretations of Ham gave way to certain racialized entitlements taken on behalf of the WHCCNNm group. Among these, a God-granted authority to not only assume the apex of a racial hierarchy but to also drive a noble and dutiful sense of husbandry for God’s lesser creatures—this extended to their wives, other humans, plants, animals, and everything else on earth. Park argues that the curse of Ham created “a biblical foil for circumscribing a social hierarchy of race,” in doing so, the rationale for Confederate Stewardship is “rooted in a deracialized whiteness that was biblically produced and blessed with divine authority.”[17]

Antebellum views about racial (and gendered) hierarchies would leak through after the Confederacy’s defeat creating palimpsests of antebellum ideologies in post-Civil War American culture. Vestiges of the Confederacy proliferated through Lost Cause mythologies and cultural attitudes about Blackness that encouraged a litany of disgusting acts, chiefly among them the lynching of Black Americans as popular entertainment. As Robert P. Jones writes, “Much of the recorded history of slavery, segregation, and racism gives scant treatment to the integral, active role that white, Christian leaders played in constructing, maintaining, and protecting white supremacy in their communities.”[18]Confederate Stewardship is a uniquely American branch of white supremacy that materializes as systemic racism—the afterlife of slavery. Jones contends, “white churches were the institutions of ultimate legitimization, where white supremacy was divinely justified via a carefully cultivated Christian theology.”[19] The legacy of white supremacy and the afterlife of slavery, endures as the WHCCNNm group continues to move socially upwards at the harm and disenfranchisement of those not in the group. Sophia Driscoll Gamber argues that white supremacy is in and of itself an American theology. She contends, “[A] white Jesus is working for the success of the American project [and this idea] allows white Americans to feel as though white supremacy stretches back thousands of years and stretches forward through sacred space to heaven, where it sits at the right hand of God. Holy whiteness is used to sanctify racial hierarchy, American exceptionalism, and Manifest Destiny, which sits at the root of U.S. imperialistic agendas. It builds a narrative that positions white people as God’s Israelites, chosen people in a chosen land destined to bring about a new world order predicated upon their greatness.”[20] Therefore, Christian principles, American liberty, and an understanding of the WHCCNNm group’s superiority are imbricated in and through antebellum residues that, as Gamber claims, significantly impact one’s construction of American cultural identity.[21] The embodiment of this social positioning and its effects on Southern cultural heritage are what I describe as the Confederate gaze.

The Confederate gaze is a performative discourse that not only characterizes Southern heritage but also constructs a frame, or point of view, with which to see the world. The Confederate gaze positions the WHCCNNm group as the subject viewing all others as objects and defining existential parameters for those not in the group. Richard Dyer argues that the concept of whiteness is based on a historically complicated relationship to Christian purity and heterosexuality.[22] I extend Dyer’s ideas to Southern culture and heritage. A Confederate gaze reproduces characteristics of Southern heritage that include (among others): a declaration of Christian values, a passion for the Second Amendment, resistance to outside cultural norms (which are perceived as attacks on Southern culture), a perceived ownership of female romantic and/or sex partners, and an expression of virile masculinity which typically resonates and reproduces in mediated representations of country music, large trucks, hunting, football, and beer campaigns. Therefore, the Confederate gaze includes an interpretation of masculinity that constructs characteristics of Southern cultural heritage based on religious and cultural attitudes about race, gender and sexuality.

The Confederate gaze stems from Confederate Stewardship and continues to privilege the WHCCNNm point of view as the de facto American view, the taken-for-granted-ness point of view, a necessarily masculine point of view. Dyer argues that the model for white masculinity “can be characterized as low, dark and irremediably corporeal, reproduc[ing] the structure of feeling of the Christ story…. The model for white women is the Virgin Mary, a pure vessel for reproduction who is unsullied by the dark drives that reproduction entails.”[23] Dyer contends that White men are encouraged to conflate their existence with the temptations of Christ while White womanhood is conflated with the sanctity and purity of the Virgin Mary. Men are taught that controlling their sexual desire is their single moral vice, while women are taught to protect their virginity and to cater to men (first to their fathers and brothers and then to their husbands). 

White women are the necessary progenitors of a white race, and, therefore, are also positioned as the locus for White male anxieties. Dyer argues, “as the literal bearers of children, and because they are held primarily responsible for their initial raising, women are the indispensable means by which the group—the race—is in every sense reproduced. Women are also required to display the signs, especially the finery, of the social groups to which they are bonded in heterosexuality, be it class or race. White women thus carry—or, in many narratives, betray—the hopes, achievements and character of the race. They guarantee its reproduction, even while not succeeding to its highest heights.”[24] I extend Dyer’s conception of whiteness and heteronormativity to understand how the Confederate gaze produces traditional gendered roles as well as engenders masculine interpretations of ownership, objecthood, and a compulsion to protect the sanctity and purity of White women. Thus, perceptions of White womanhood become another facet of white supremacy and foment anxieties expressed through acts of white chivalry.

White anxiety and white chivalry are two sides of the same coin: one reifies itself in the other. As I have previously explained white anxiety stems from a fear that Black (and Jewish/immigrant) bodies will replace White bodies, Le Grand Remplacement. White chivalry, the protection and sanctity of white women and children, has morphed from its origins in the medieval era. Chivalry was a written code of ethics for French knighthood, and as chivalry became romanticized in the literature and culture of France, chivalry spread and adapted. Maurice Keen writes, “The military experience of the fourteenth century had cemented a mental equation of chivalry and gentilesse [or kindness], which now included the esquires, and had anchored it firmly in the mind-set both of the gentry themselves and of their superior patrons.”[25] Chivalry moved beyond the realms of knighthood and the upper echelons of French society and became acculturated not only in France but was quickly adopted by the English. White chivalry is a proliferation of this code of ethics. 

In addition to interpellating women as passive objects, the Confederate gaze projects Black people as inferior, less intelligent, and more prone to acts of violence and criminality. My conceptualization of the Confederate gaze is inspired by Harvey Young’s assertion that Blackness is a projection cast onto bodies. Young views Blackness as a phenomenon projected onto flesh: “When a driver speeds past a pedestrian and yells, “N—–,” she launches her epithet at an idea of the body, an instantiation of her understanding of blackness.”[26] Similarly, the Confederate gaze projects race onto a body; the person projecting their idea of Blackness is making-it-so onto another’s body. If Blackness is a projection, then the Confederate gaze is its projector.

Black American experiences are not identical; they are uniquely individualized except for the mantle/projection of Blackness that touches each Black American’s life. Black American existence has been forced to delicately walk “the color line,” negotiating the “double consciousness” that W.E.B. DuBois put forth in 1905 and has been long established within the academy as the fundamental experience of Black Americans.[27] Harvey Young asserts that Black Americans experience similar conditions and consequences due to the shared phenomenon of double consciousness despite the reality that all Americans are individuals and no Black person has the same experience. 

The Confederate gaze defines what Blackness looks like for both Black and White bodies in a white supremacist America. Young writes, “The black body…is a body that has been forced into the public spotlight and given a compulsory visibility. It has been made to be given to be seen. Its condition, as DuBois famously observed, is a ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.’ This awareness of one’s status as the seen/scene structures behavior.”[28]The Confederate gaze persists in “the eyes of others,” this is the effect of generations of White bodies projecting racialized stereotypes onto non-White bodies. The “compulsory visibility” may be thought of as a performance that remains from generations of White Americans imbuing non-White bodies with subhuman qualities. I describe this gaze as Confederate because of the historical formation of White American identity, as being created alongside Black American identity, in response to Jim Crow era imagery, narratives, and social understandings of white superiority and Black inferiority. This identity formation was developed during the era of Reconstruction and perpetuated again during the Civil Rights era and the move to desegregate American institutions.

            Young further clarifies how a Confederate gaze creates a double vision for Black Americans. He tells the story of Rev. Jesse Jackson walking down the street and hearing footsteps behind him. Jackson thinks he’s about to be mugged and he envisions a Black man doing the mugging. When he realizes the would-be mugger is a White man Jackson is filled with chagrin and grief. Young writes, “His pain emerges from his (mis)reading of the absent black body from the same outside perspective that conceivably could be used to (mis)read his own body… Jackson’s self-revelation suggests that the black body is both an externally applied projection blanketed across black bodies and an internalization of the projected image by black folk. Black folk also suspect the black body.”[29] Young surmises, “this double vision is accompanied by an internalized double voice.”[30] This example shows how the Confederate gaze is not merely a performance remain resonating in White bodies, Black bodies, too, can project a Confederate gaze.