Good Guys Versus Bad Guys and Being a Conscientious Objector in the Culture Wars

Photo by Ian D. Keating

The way we spend time as a family has significantly changed over the past two years. I give credit to two catalysts: a global pandemic affording us numerous free weekends, and protests and riots centering around racial equity, effective democracy, and how history is being taught in schools.

As an observer, I have questions: who’s history is being taught? Who has a right to question someone else’s history? And why is vandalism and violence a part of any of this? Against a backdrop of statue removal being justified with a well-intentioned refrain of “they belong in museums!”, I wondered who would visit these Museums of Approved Items. Certainly not the people so intent on removing them; after all, the attempts to cleanse the present by leaving nothing but Perfect Historical Figures eventually lead to statutes being removed from museums too.

As a participant, I’m about as willing to deface a statue as I am to succumb to the boogeyman that is CRT (which is zero). I’m happy to be a conscientious objector in this culture war.

But as a mother, I am determined to use these nagging questions as a guide in raising our sons to be educated and empathetic contributing citizens. For me, “they belong in museums” is not a lament against what society deems appropriate, but a call to action to expose my kids to as much history as possible before someone else decides what they cannot not see. My husband and I committed to contextualize the present with the touchable past and an objective of preventing a single paragraph in a history textbook from being all our kids ever learned about a subject.

We are fortunate to be living in an original American colony, where land was stolen from indigenous people by settlers and patriots with a beautiful, yet often exclusionary, vision for America. Our state has seen battles of both the Revolutionary and the Civil—“ain’t nothin’ civil about it”—War, and is also home to giants of the Civil Rights movement—which clearly is not over. We would use it to our kids’ advantage.

I believe that Black lives matter. I also believe that history has various perspectives. Facts are facts, but truth often involves the way people felt (and feel). It is never a lost cause to investigate the perspective of another. Although we’ve hopefully evolved to better achieve concepts like equity and justice, we also need to acknowledge that Presentism and prejudice are both roadblocks to learning and growth, and we’ve got a long way to go. We need to understand the way it was so that we can understand the way it is. History is messy and complicated, but history is comprised of people who are also messy and complicated, people who are more than their one worst thing, and less than their one best thing.

We’ve taken our kids to the MLK historical site and Sweet Auburn, the First White House of the Confederacy, the Atlanta Civil Rights Museum, The National Memorial to Peace and Justice, The Equal Justice Initiative, Stone Mountain, a Confederate Cemetery, and toured plantations to listen to members of the Slave Dwelling Project explain how life in the big house depended on life in the slave quarters. They’ve seen countless monuments of Founding Fathers, Presidents, and war-time leaders from Montgomery all the way to DC. As we road trip, we queue up podcasts narrating the lives of pirates, Revolutionaries, explorers and the enslaved.  I’ve taught them to read inscriptions on monuments and think about what else was happening at that time. Was it a memorial erected as Civil War veterans were dying? Or was it a statue cheaply thrown up during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s? Is it a statue of a generic CSA soldier, or a statue of a Southern military officer? Regardless of the answers, there are historical reasons for why the statue is there at all, so we learn about those reasons.

I grew up in a small town in Kansas; there were less than a handful of Black students in my high school of 700+. Our history lessons included John Brown, Free-Staters, and Bleeding Kansas. We learned about the Civil War, Lincoln freeing enslaved people, and that the North won. That chapter in our textbooks was easy: slavery was bad, good guys fought bad guys in a war about it, and the good guys won. Kansas was on the right side with the good guys. But I didn’t learn about slavery sitting next to Black classmates, and I assumed that because of where I was in both geography and time, slavery hadn’t touched the lives of anyone I knew.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I relocated to Atlanta and became a traveling salesperson. My territory included extreme South Georgia and the South Carolina Low Country. I remember the moment it occurred to me that the Black populations residing in the rural towns I frequented lived there because they were the direct descendants of slaves. I had stopped on a town square to let an older Black man driving an open cab tractor putter through, and I naively  thought “why are all these Black people here?” To this Dorothy from Oz, Black people lived in cities and all farmers were white. I sat in my car and cried. It was the first time I had internalized slaves were real, and the few Black classmates I’d had growing up were descendants of slaves too. Faulkner’s words smacked me upside the head: the past wasn’t even the past. It was passing me on a John Deere.

My children consider themselves Georgians. They attend a very diverse elementary school of 700+. When they learn about the Civil War they come at it from a different perspective than I did. They have Black friends, and their home state of Georgia lost the war. If wars are good guys vs. bad guys, how do my kids reconcile this part of America’s past with their present place in geography and time? Do their feelings depend skin color? If race is irrelevant, when should it be relevant? The adage about history being written by the winners makes me wonder what parts of the loser’s story they aren’t hearing about. My hope is that my boys are not ten years out of high school before they appreciate that the way it is still has a lot to do with the way it was.

There is a small town a couple of hours drive from me that I visit a few times a year. The town square is centered around a monument, an obelisk erected in 1900 that reads, “Erected by the women of [small southern town] to the memory of their Confederate dead.” A few blocks away there is another monument to Vietnam. I often think about that juxtaposition: the dead southern men who died in their own fields wearing grey, and the dead southern men who died in a jungle half a world away wearing the American flag. Is any one of them less dead for better reasons? Was any mother or wife less entitled to her grief?  I don’t think so. I wonder how long that obelisk may last, who wants it put in a museum, and how long before its joined by its brother from down the street. History being written by the winner, and all.

During a presentation at Chickamauga on the experience of a CSA soldier and the subsistence farming family he left behind, my oldest son turned to me, confusion spreading across his face, “But who were the good guys, Mama?” We all need that moment, but in my opinion as his mother, it was best he came to that question himself. No one told him how to feel or what to think. He was exposed to realities of history that touched where he was in the moment, and it wasn’t comfortable. After all, we were not in Kansas anymore.

Nuance. Complications. Humanity.

I hope the boys love learning about history as much as their dad and I do. I hope that they realize history is simply a story that can’t be altered by the present. I hope they appreciate that while wars are started and ended by politics, they are fought by people, people who are neither all good, nor all bad.  Lastly, I hope we are raising boys smart (and humble) enough to question everything. “But who were the Good Guys, Mama?”  God bless you, my sweet son, for asking this. It’s complicated.