Goodbye, Columbus

"History is large and contains multitudes. There is no reason to cling to torturers, warlords, conquerors, and exploiters—and especially no reason to celebrate Confederate traitors who plunged the nation into civil war, in the aftermath of which we are in many ways still living. Indeed, the posthumous reputation of the Confederacy proves the adage is wrong: It is not always the winners who write history. The “Lost Cause”—a fantasy of the antebellum South as all crinolines, magnolias, courtly soldiers, and happy slaves and of the war itself as a matter of “states’ rights,” never specifying which rights were at issue—has set the popular narrative ever since Reconstruction. It’s great that NASCAR is banning the Stars and Bars, but why did it take so long? And why did it take the horrible killing of George Floyd and the marching of hundreds of thousands of protesters daily for weeks to achieve what is, after all, a symbolic victory?

Symbols matter. Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Mrs. Butterworth, and the black chef on the Cream of Wheat box are the remnants of a once mighty flood of ads, logos, and household items depicting black people as happy cooks, servants, mammies, and comical children. It is not possible to escape this history by slenderizing Aunt Jemima and giving her a modern hairstyle or by making Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle more abstract."

read article by

Katha Pollitt

thenation.com