A Heritage, of Hate by Chris Walker

NinaIllingworth June 2, 2021November 5, 2022 1776 Report, activism, Alex Ingram, Amy Donofrio, anti-blackness, Black Lives Matter, BLM, CA4, capitalism and racism, capitalism and white supremacy, Chris Walker, Confederacy, Confederate iconography, Confederate symbols, critical race theory, cultural hegemony, Deyona Burton, direct action, DSA, FA1, fascism, Florida, George Floyd, George Floyd Protests, IWW, Jacksonville, Jim Crow, Klu Klux Klan, MP6, Nathan B. Forrest, Racism, revolution, revolutionary praxis, Riverside High School, Robert E Lee, Robert E Lee High School, Ron DeSantis, social inequality, Social Justice, Socialism, solidarity, ST2, Teen Vogue, Temitope Oriola, trauma, Walker, Wayne Flynt, white nationalism, white supremacist terrorism, white supremacy, whiteness

Editor’s note: after a lot of busywork, our project to increase the always free to read content here on NIDC is steaming forward with another Friends of the Blog contribution. Please give another warm welcome to Jacksonville IWW organizer, and newly-minted NIDC alumni Chris Walker. Today, we’ll explore what a long fight to change the name of a Florida high school can tell us about white supremacy in America; including Walker’s thoughts on why the pro-Confederate narrative is finally shifting, and how we can win the battles still to come.

Pulling Teeth

Yesterday we witnessed a crucial shift in opinion on Confederate iconography as the school board in Jacksonville, Florida recently approved renaming six schools, most notably removing any honors for Robert E. Lee from the newly-renamed Riverside High School. It’s worth celebrating this latest victory in a long battle, but it doesn’t represent the end of any struggle for two reasons: first, there are well over a hundred Confederate-named schools in 19 states across America, and more importantly, while the names are changed in Jacksonville, the intimidation, violence, and poverty remains. Merely changing the name of an institution can easily give a false sense of progress.

Still, it was as recently as 2014 that a majority of the Jacksonville community voted not to remove Nathan B. Forrest’s name, with both the community and school alumni portions of the vote overwhelmingly against the change. Forrest was the first Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan and a mass murderer at Fort Pillow, but he was still considered worth honoring by the community. Thankfully, the superintendent recommended changing the name to Westside High School anyway, and the school board approved.

As in 2014 this latest process included non-binding pseudo-elections to survey the community’s thoughts on a school name. With six times as many voters as the Forrest vote and a wider demographic, this time a majority chose to remove Robert E. Lee’s name. In the same non-binding vote, 90% decided to remove names like Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, from schools. At the very least, this is a significant change in public opinion worth celebrating, and the continuation of a movement, spurred by the George Floyd protests, to tear down racist monuments.

It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

Getting rid of reminders of racism is a worthy goal, yet we remain remarkably short of actual material change. Since the murder of George Floyd by the police, the rate of police killings has remained constant, and police budgets have only risen, including Jacksonville’s. President Biden has led this effort to increase carceral-state budgets consistently since his campaign days; it shouldn’t surprise us that Biden does not care about how poverty is tied to crime, because he never has. That poverty is also unchanged; for example, 60% of students at the newly renamed Riverside High School are economically disadvantaged. Historian Wayne Flynt summed it up well: “When you get to the end of all the name changes, nothing has changed in terms of the quality of the education or the property tax base.”

So, if there are no material changes, why would there be significant opposition to removing Robert E. Lee’s name? He has nothing to do with Florida, calling into question the sincerity of the “heritage” argument. Instead, we have to understand how Confederate iconography came into being during the Reconstruction era, especially during the Jim Crow era, and finally during the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s, which is when most schools were named with Confederate ties. The correlation isn’t a mistake; there’s a reason the Klu Klux Klan also came into being during the Jim Crow era. These symbols are chosen to intimidate and inflict psychological violence.

The motivation to intimidate springs from a growing sense that white Americans will no longer outnumber all non-whites put together. You can find this same panic in other culture war topics like “critical race theory”. For example, Governor Ron DeSantis wants to make it illegal to teach that slavery is deeply tied to the history of the United States. His desire to bury large swaths of the past resembles what his idol did with the hastily-written 1776 Report; the same techniques are used in both cases to obfuscate American history. As one of the main critics of “critical race theory” described, the goal is to package as many feelings of fear and resentment into a “brand” that can be weaponized.

Code Breaking

Several local teachers involved in the campaign to remove Confederate iconography agree with the intimidation motive. Alex Ingram, a civics teacher at Darnell-Cookman Middle/High in Jacksonville, is also part of the teachers’ union and the local DSA chapter, and has been politically active for both school renaming fights and material change. Alex was kind enough to contribute many details to this article, and did not hold back an opinion on the matter:

“Community members have a hard time with empathy. Imagine Andrew Cuomo opened up a new high school in Manhattan and named it Osama Bin Laden High. That would sting, of course. He’s not a good guy, he killed a lot of Americans, and he is a piece of shit. We don’t need to name a high school to remember what a piece of shit he was. Anyone making that argument is full of shit. There are amazing people you could memorialize that inspire greatness from that time period, but that’s not what we want to do. This is 100% intentional, to oppress minorities. They know what they are doing.”

Ingram’s hypothetical is clearly tailored to resonate with right-wingers, and saying those folks “have a hard time with empathy” is being very charitable. But make no mistake, I completely agree with Alex’s framing of the hypocrisy. It doesn’t matter that the old name lacked any kind of representation; newly renamed Riverside High School is composed of 86% minorities. The cruelty is the point. The aim is to remind you who is in charge.

Cracking Heads

Alex is hardly the only local teacher to stand up for students. Amy Donofrio, an English teacher at Riverside High School, also spoke out against her school’s very public debate on the old school name, and correctly equated the experience with child abuse. When students can hear comments like “Jesus himself never condemned slavery,” in places they cannot ignore, is there any doubt this affects their education and mental health? Donofrio also made national news for refusing to take down a Black Lives Matter flag and was subsequently reassigned to non-teaching duties. While Donofrio is suing the school district in Florida courts for retaliation and in federal courts under whistleblower statutes, students are petitioning for her to return to teaching.

The viewpoint of the students has tragically gotten lost in the culture war debate. Teen Vogue did a great job documenting their backlash at the old school name. I would like to focus on one quote from Deyona Burton, the senior class president of the newly renamed Riverside High School, and a member of the Student Advisory Council:

“It’s going to speak for the city as a whole and that damage is irreversible because, during these meetings, it allowed these people to offend current students and disrespect them in the same auditorium that holds assemblies, and in the same hallways that they walk through every day. It enabled bigotry to wreak emotional and mental havoc on our lives and then project chaos when all we’re striving for is peace and inclusion. [If the name doesn’t change,] it was all for nothing. That means that it does not matter how much we scream or how much we are crying out for help — that it doesn’t matter to you.”

It doesn’t matter to some people because it serves the purpose of intimidation and violence. Preserving a mythical understanding of American history, and all of the Confederate iconography that comes with it, is necessary to preserve white supremacy when democracy cannot preserve it. That American brand of fascist politics, as it turns out, is crucial to preserving the ruling class:

“Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology — authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.”

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Speaking frankly, the system of capitalism requires haves and have-nots to function, and maintaining this inequality requires socially acceptable reasons to justify why some people are have-nots. Selling that system relies on emotional appeals like nostalgia, and those appeals are often intentional nonsense. The culture war sideshow prevents unity among working class people that might threaten the system capitalizing on this cruelty.

Struggle and Solidarity

That threat to the broader system of power is becoming more real every day, and it’s coming from a place of racial struggle. Again, consider the Teen Vogue article above, full of first-hand accounts from current students and recent graduates. The collective accumulation of trauma over several generations represents a powder keg ready to explode, in very specific, insurgent terms. As Temitope Oriola notes, “To predict that an armed insurgency may happen in the U.S. is not the same as wishing for it to happen: It is not inevitable, and it can and should be avoided.” The ruling class has no interest in avoiding it, as shown by the lack of material change, or by simply pretending it doesn’t exist.

Then what can we do? Personally, I do not practice brinkmanship; I will always choose to build trust methodically, and as soon as possible. Yet, I am not an alumni of Robert E. Lee High School or a current student of Riverside High School, and I won’t dare tell the student body what they should collectively do. The student body has already taken direct action to express themselves, and perhaps their own realization of genuine power will lead to great triumphs. I can say that collective direct action always gets the goods. We protect us, through strength in numbers. No one else can protect us, but us.

As a white man, I can break free of the head cage of white supremacy by unlearning the reactionary thoughts and conditioning I grew up with, every day. I still catch myself in self-absorbed situations that ignore others. This is going to be a lifetime of unlearning. Within the last year or so, we have witnessed how racial struggle can be the forerunner to class struggle; I must have the humility to follow instead of lead in that racial struggle, if I want to see that unity in my lifetime, if I want to ultimately see that class struggle won. When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution.