Lots of discussion of these images of South Carolina Senate President Glenn McConnell dressed as a Confederate Navy officer posing with black people dressed “in antebellum attire.” Apparently the black man and woman are “members of a Gullah-Geechee cultural group, which travels around bringing to life the Lowcountry African-American experience during the mid-1800s, including their dress, music and singing.” They were paid for their appearance.
It’s a weird picture. Since there are no actual historians here, and certainly none with an interest in the Civil War or the politics of memory, I’ll muse as follows:
(i) watching members of a Gullah preservation group would probably be pretty interesting;
(ii) it wouldn’t make the gathering less creepy if they were absent;
(iii) this makes me think that whatever badness there is here is present in a powerful white guy dressing up like a Confederate officer, rather than in the addition of Frank and Sharon Murray, the Gullah representatives;
(iv) but it’s more salient or more easily noticed when the addition of actual black people reminds us of what the Confederate Navy was for;
(v) not knowing much about Glenn McConnell except for his obsession with things Confederate, I can imagine– imagine! not endorse as true!– that he kind of lost track of all of these nuances a while back and just decided it would be neat to have some Gullah culture at the event.
As always, it’s important to remember that Ari is the real racist.
39 comments
September 16, 2010 at 10:33 am
Antonio Conselheiro
Isn’t that blue uniform a Union uniform?
September 16, 2010 at 10:33 am
ari
I can’t possibly be racist. I’m not from the South.
September 16, 2010 at 10:47 am
Whatcanbrowndo4u
But I thought that the current sentiment of anti-Obama, “states rights,” Tea Party Patriotism had nothing to do with racism. We are after all in a post racial society, aren’t we?
September 16, 2010 at 11:16 am
CaliFury
I’m looking for the same people in this picture, too:
http://www.old-picture.com/american-history-1900-1930s/Whipping-Delaware-post.htm
Oops–sorry! This wasn’t in the South so not relevant to the southern experience.
September 16, 2010 at 11:17 am
Urk
Neddy, I’m with you till we get to point (v). Your point (ii) reminds us that the gathering is creepy without the Gullah re-enactment troupe. There are lots of reasons why that’s true, and one of them is that such gatherings elide the real historical relationships between the Confederacy and racism and slavery. Then, in point (iv) you note that “it” (the badness that’s present in a powerful white guy dressed as a member of the Confederate Navy, see (iii))is “more salient or more easily noticed when the addition of actual black people reminds us of what the Confederate Navy was for.”
So the net effect of the photograph is to…remind us of what the Confederate Navy was for, which, without the presence of the Gullah re-enactment troupe, is otherwise elided in the public presentation of the event.
Now the fact that everybody is all smiles and hugs-thats pretty creepy.
Having walked myself through all this, I can see now that your sarcasm in (v) is critiquing Mconnell’s likely thoughts/fantasies of what the photo represents, and not what the photo does in the world, two things which are at odds with each other. But the way you get there didn’t make that immediately clear, at least to my first reading.
but also: Are Mcconnel’s thoughts and fantasies more salient in reading the photo than those of the Gullah re-enactors? Your formulation makes sure to excuse them from the troubling qualities of the image (they are professional folkloricists, they got paid, their contribution clarifies history rather than eliding it,) but reading McConnell’s contribution in the least charitable way seems to lead us to assume that they are dupes, unable to perceive the ends to which they are being used, or that they don’t care what kinds of bad history they are used to perpetuate as long as they are paid. I don’t think that’s your intention, but it’s a side effect of assuming that any claim McConnell makes about the innocence of his intentions is insincere.
At least i assume that your statement here “I can imagine– imagine! not endorse as true!– that he kind of lost track of all of these nuances a while back and just decided it would be neat to have some Gullah culture at the event” indicates via sarcasm that you don’t really think that he just lost track and decided it would be neat. Maybe I’m misreading that too. I actually think that is a pretty good reading of why the guy doesn’t understand the fuss over the photograph and doesn’t understand that their presence to some degree punctures the celebratory qualities in such an event. in my experience, alot of guys (and girls) like that are pretty deeply sunk into a kind of cognitive/mnemonic dissonance, so they really do think its all innocent.
September 16, 2010 at 11:25 am
Urk
And just to be clear: I’m not defending McConnell and his fascination with all things Confederate and submersible here. I just think that the photo is a truly weird snapshot of what’s inherent in contemporary folkloric attempts to deal with the Southern past. It certainly isn’t an “innocent moment” like McConnell claims, but it also isn’t just a window into his racist fantasies either.
September 16, 2010 at 11:49 am
Andy Vance
I should probably rethink the Cambodian Killing Fields theme I’m considering for the
frat keggerer, contemporary folkloric celebration I’m planning.September 16, 2010 at 1:21 pm
NM
Interesting, Urk. Actually I meant (v) non-ironically, and I’m debating whether I should be embarrassed by this. Here’s what I was thinking, but keep in mind all I know about McConnell is what I read after a quick googling: the guy seems interested in Confederate history in a way that’s different from yahoos with confederate flags– he seems really fascinated by it. If so, it is plausible to me that he sincerely thought, wow, some people will talk about/demonstrate Gullah songs and folklore from the 19th century! Cool!
Now, if I had that thought, my immediate second thought would have been “but I’ll be around in a fucking naval uniform from the Confederacy! That’s seriously messed up!” But then, unlike me, McConnell is deeply embedded in the culture of CW fetish, so those thoughts have been banished or suppressed.
Not saying this is the way it went down, but I wouldn’t find it shocking to learn that this is all true.
September 16, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Urk
Ahh- that makes sense. Sorry I misread you. I don’t know much about McConnell either, but your take seems right. I think that group of CW fetishists breaks down in interesting ways. some of them are fully and intentionally dog whistling dixie, but some of them…well I can’t get the musical metaphor to work here, so I’ll just say that they are so deep into the rhetoric they use to reassure themselves that they aren’t racist, because they really don’t want to be, that they just can’t make those connections.
September 16, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Urk
So I guess I’m saying that we should thank McConnell for setting up a situation where a simple photo of an “innocent moment” blows the cover of the entire confederate fetish franchise industry. Or something.
September 16, 2010 at 2:39 pm
politicalfootball
ari’s and Califury’s remarks resonate in an unpleasant way with me. Whenever I see someone saying, “Well, there’s a long history of really brutal racism in the North, too” it’s generally to downplay the South’s unique racist history.
But I’m only describing my gut reaction to those comments, and not the actual content of the comments.
September 16, 2010 at 2:51 pm
Margarita
But I’m only describing my gut reaction …
My gut reaction was that Ari was responding ironically to the ironic reminder in the post that, “Ari is the real racist.” And that CaliFury felt compelled for some reason to downplay slavery. Gut reactions can be wrong though. Who knows?
September 16, 2010 at 2:51 pm
CaliFury
I hadn’t meant to have that resonance in my post, politicalfootball, but I see what you mean. I wasn’t able to find an historical photograph from the South.
My original thought was to Photoshop Mr. McConnell’s face onto the fellow with the whip, but decided that it would be 1) too much work, and 2) stupid.
September 16, 2010 at 2:56 pm
CaliFury
Margarita,
I have to say “ouch!” I’m sorry to give that impression. The picture was meant to represent the brutality missing in the Confederacy that Mr. McConnell is recreating.
September 16, 2010 at 3:08 pm
ari
My gut reaction was that Ari was responding ironically to the ironic reminder in the post that, “Ari is the real racist.”
This is correct.
September 16, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Margarita
CaliFury, my mistake then. Sorry. My main point was that Ari’s ironic intent seemed pretty transparent to me, irrespective of your later post, which seemed less so.
September 16, 2010 at 7:54 pm
NM
Remember: when we fight each other, Racist Ari wins.
September 16, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Lady Peralta
“S.C. Senate President Glenn McConnell is defending his appearance in several controversial pictures that were taken last week at a Charleston, S.C. event sponsored by the National Federation of Republican Women.”
http://www.fitsnews.com/2010/09/15/mcconnell-responds-to-slavery-pics/
In the story he said “… “What the ladies had put together was a smorgasbord of Southern culture,” McConnell said. “It was reflected in the dress, the historical accuracy of the performances and even down to the food. It was a wonderful, entertaining and educational night for those visitors.”
As some one who really loves historical costuming- the ladies with their wristwatches and incorrect sleeves just send shivers down my spine. Some of those were costumes, not period attire. YMMV
September 17, 2010 at 1:12 am
Dave
Oh lordy, Lady, if you think that incorrect period dressmaking is the thing that’s wrong there…
September 17, 2010 at 5:17 pm
matt w
I think that the presence of the Gullahs makes the picture especially problematic because it means that McConnell can’t have been missing the racial implications of his uniform, or can’t have been missing it without being a complete blockhead. Dressing up as a feudal lord for the Renaissance Faire might just be dorky, but when you add a couple of mud-splattered peasants to your entourage you lose your plausible deniability about the unfortunate implications.
(Yes, I know Renaissance =/= feudalism. It’s what they’re called.)
September 17, 2010 at 7:40 pm
NM
You think McConnell might have otherwise…forgotten about the slavery thing, matt w? Not sure I can distinguish between those levels of blockheadedness.
September 17, 2010 at 7:40 pm
ozarkurk
Actually matt, I kind of disagree. I think that the situation is what’s problematic and that the picture, with the Gullah’s in it, just makes what’s problematic about it clear and inescapable.
I also think that the picture makes it pretty clear that he is a complete blockhead and is still missing the implications that we find disturbing, tho that’s just conjecture.
and, you can slag off renfest folks as “dorky” if you want to. doubtless most of them aren’t as cool as the popular kids we hang out with, but the SCA people I used to know were pretty well informed about feudal brutality, which they approached with a pretty dark sense of humor.
September 17, 2010 at 7:52 pm
ozarkurk
Neddy, from what i can gather, Mcconnel’s take probably resembles something like: “ok, you were slaves, that was bad, but we lost a war and that was bad too. It’s all just heritage and everyone should just get over being mad about it and remember how delightfully happy everyone in the south was before the north invaded.”
I’m still curious about what the Gullah re-enactors make of this whole thing. Not because I think that them being ok with it makes the whole event ok (call this the “blacks for wallace formulation”), but I am curious.
September 18, 2010 at 5:33 am
dana
There’s a difference between renfaire-type activities and the Confederate-dress-up-type activities, I think. In both cases people are romanticizing the past (dorks or total-non-dorks, there’s an awfully high princess-to-peasant ratio), but in the case of feudalism it’s not America’s original sin or celebrating relatively recent treason. (Same thing with dressing up as a Drake-era pirate. Vicious bloodthirsty killers, suitable for costumes for toddlers.)
And in both cases people really get into historical details and resurrecting old crafts and things like that, so to the extent that I find McConnell sympathetic, it results from sympathy with a thought process that goes something like this:
1) Wow, it’s cool to preserve and celebrate nifty things from the past, especially if someone’s taken the time to get all the details in their costume/forge/rifle/cannon/ tea set exactly right.
2) Hey, here’s this neat group that performs authentic old-timey songs! Those are always cool. They should definitely be a part of our old-timey event.
That said, I find the impulse to dress up as a recent bad guy deeply weird. So I’m of the opinion that all the addition of the musical group does is highlight the ways in which it’s really weird.
September 18, 2010 at 11:38 am
Dave
When I was a born there was still a Union drummer boy alive who fought in the “War between the States” and also people who had been slaves. There are, certainly, people still alive who knew them. There are African American families who keep the memories of their ancestors alive, who remember as detailed family history the facts of slavery.
Slavery, and the war that ended it in the US, are still a powerful living presence for a significant number of Americans. This differs, I think, from memories of pirates killing people. McConnell ignoring this history speaks loudly about what he thinks is important, not to whether he is a blockhead.
September 18, 2010 at 11:47 am
Neddy Merrill
Just a hunch, but I bet it’s pretty goddamned weird to be a Gullah preservationist in South Carolina. (I.e., a fair bit of interest in your thing will be from people who love all things antebellum, and a good number of those people will be Confederate romanticizers.)
September 18, 2010 at 11:57 am
ozarkurk
Dave,while I think he’s a blockhead, I’m not trying to diminish the fact that what he’s doing is in effect lying about history. and not just any history- history that’s critical to get right going forward.
But part of my interest in this is figuring out what goes into the (re)production of confederate nostalgia, and to that end there is some utility in breaking down distinctions between blockheads and knowing propagandists.
As you note, the facts of slavery are kept alive by many African mericans as family history. Presumably, the Gullah reenactors posing for that photo with McConnell are trying to bring that family history into the realm of public history. Presumably, that’s a good thing. But the results fo that work now include this photo, which we all agree, is pretty creepy. to me, that seems like a knot that needs some untangling and not a simple thing at all.
Definitely different from the pirate/feudal thing, for sure.
September 18, 2010 at 12:00 pm
CharleyCarp
I will repeat, tiresome though it must be for all you folks, my standard comment on this topic.
What a shame it is that no one from the South participated in the landing at Normandy and Liberation of France. Otherwise, they could celebrate that part of their heritage.
September 18, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Michael H Schneider
Okay, I’ve been reaeding carefully, and I think I get the point. Is this what you’re saying:
I’m going to kick off my political campaign with a big Veteran’s Day party. To honor our troops and our heritage, I’m planning a costumed informal re-enactment of My Lai and Abu Ghraib.
You’re saying I shoud NOT hire genuine Vietnamese and Iraqis to portray women and children getting shot and incinerated with napalm, and people getting beaten to death, raped, electrocuted, and otherwise tortured?
You guys are a bunch of spoilsports. That takes away all the fun.
September 18, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Herbert Browne
I’m not allowing myself the ‘pleasure’ of viewing the picture, myself… I just want to know if there was any watermelon. ^..^
September 19, 2010 at 8:57 am
Dave
But part of my interest in this is figuring out what goes into the (re)production of confederate nostalgia, and to that end there is some utility in breaking down distinctions between blockheads and knowing propagandists.
I expect that what goes into Confederate nostalgia is a similar mix of motivations underlying Neo-Nazi movements, Holocaust denial, euphoric recall of Stalin’s Russia and other careless, self-serving movements. Some of the people who follow along with this type of horrible nostalgia are blockheads. Regardless, their participation says more about what they think is important than about their ability to think. Even really stupid people can understand that owning, killing, raping, forced breeding, etc. of people is bad and any group that supported this was bad.
September 19, 2010 at 11:48 am
ozarkurk
“Even really stupid people can understand that owning, killing, raping, forced breeding, etc. of people is bad and any group that supported this was bad.”
That’s true Dave. But I know people, people who aren’t that stupid, who ought to be able to get to these facts, and who don’t. Maybe you don’t find this particularly interesting or sad. I do. But maybe you aren’t related to people like that either.
Given your take on this, which I’m not disputing, I wonder what you make of the presence of the Gullah reenacment troupe in the photo with McConnell and in the context of the event it was taken.
September 20, 2010 at 9:14 am
Dave
I think that the Gullah re-enactors were probably paid to be there. That they work for a living and this is their day job or a side job that brings in cash that they use for food and gass. If I were in their shoes, I would be having a tense discussion with my booking agent.
If they weren’t paid, it means something different. If the Gullah re-enactors are friends of McConnell and his group, then the fact that none of them think anything of this kind of juxtaposition is interesting. If they’re not friends, but still aren’t concerned it is, perhaps, more interesting. It means to me that the issue of slavery is essentially dead to them, with no different a status than people pretending to be Pirates and Townsmen. Or, for that matter, Union and Confederate soldiers.
The death of memory will, in the end, occur. That this might have already occurred for Mr. McConnell, his friends and the Gullah re-enactors could mark the beginning of a transition where the emotions of the Civil War are dead.
The present question, then, is whether the participants in the party are innocents, whether they are in denial, whether their intention is to slap the faces of people who still hurt from memories passed from their ancestors or some other motivation.
All of us are descended from people who lived during times of slavery, brutality, evil and destruction–although most of us have no specific knowledge of the evil our ancestors did. We need to acknowledge this as part of our human heritage. But consider, if we had to carry the guilt of our ancestors accumulated back to beginning of time how would we survive? When is an event sufficiently remote that it can be forgotten as a source of present guilt? Cursing a family “unto the seventh generation” only goes back 140 years with a 20 year generation time. The evils from slavery and the consequences from the Civil War didn’t end in 1870, or even 1950. I think there is some time left on the clock before the issues are actually dead.
As I said, even a blockhead can tell that bad things are bad–so, what were these people thinking about? I can’t tell from a picture. They could be anywhere from _really evil_ to _natural innocents_ or more simply, wanting their paycheck (in one case) and wanting McConnell to support their special interests, so they put up with his foolishness. (Being a fool is different from being a blockhead. If you say McConnell is a fool instead of a blockhead I will concur enthusiastically.)
September 20, 2010 at 11:41 am
politicalfootball
The death of memory will, in the end, occur. That this might have already occurred for Mr. McConnell
My experience with the Confederate sentimentalists is the reverse: They aren’t playing dress-up; they are commemorating.
September 20, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Dave
They aren’t playing dress-up; they are commemorating.
Maybe, but this attributes too much coherence to his behavior for my cynical mind. I think it is more likely that McConnell is a fool playing dress-up, getting drunk, telling stupid stories and just overall acting out to piss-off people he doesn’t like.
“He’s 34 and drinking in a honky tonk. Just kickin’ hippies asses and raisin’ hell!”
September 20, 2010 at 12:37 pm
politicalfootball
Well, different people commemorate in different ways.
September 20, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Dave
I concede that point, completely.
The Brits commemorate the foiling of an attempted terrorist bombing of Parliament with a party involving simulated executions:
“In the United Kingdom, celebrations … involve fireworks displays and the building of bonfires on which “guys” are … burnt. The “guys” are …effigies of Guy Fawkes, the most famous of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators [or other]local or national hate figures.”
September 20, 2010 at 5:27 pm
ozarkurk
Yeah, I think fool is a fine word for McConnell. I liked “blockhead” because to me it suggests that something in his head, the thing that would let him see the horror that he’s romancing, is blocked, but that’s my idiolect, not yours.
I’m not so sure that pissing off people he doesn’t like is really what drives him, tho maybe that’s a benefit. He seems to me like someone who’d be chasing this particular dragon regardless.
the Gullah re-enactors are professionals, they got paid for their appearance. for me, that doesn’t really make everything nice and simple tho. I’d like to think that they’re trying to add in the parts that would be glossed over without them, but who knows.
September 25, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Sean Peters
My question (and I’m not at all trying to be a smartass): is there any right way to do this? Re-enacting, I mean. I’m with what I presume to be the majority of the crowd here – a lot of what goes on in the name of Civil War re-enacting is nostalgia for a truly repugnant regime. But it’s still true that there’s some education to be gained from re-enactments and the like. Is it even possible to do this in a sensitive way, or is the entire subject still too painful even after this long?
Of interest: I went to a WWII “festival” (for lack of a better word) a few years back. Among all the various exhibits of Allied equipment and personnel, there was also a German one, manned up by a guy in a no-kidding Nazi stormtrooper uniform. We talked to the guy a while – he was really knowledgeable about his gear. Inevitably, the question came up – how do you do it? How do you get up in the morning and put on a Nazi uniform without getting totally creeped out? Of course, the guy wasn’t any sort of Nazi sympathizer. His POV was that WWII was a story that ought to be told, and to tell it fully, somebody had to be filling the shoes of the bad guys. Even if it feels creepy to do it.
Thoughts?