“FOOTBALL MATTERS!”
Recently, in response to a “Black Lives Matter” rally by Black students on the campus of South Carolina’s Clemson University, a parade of White-driven vehicles from the neighboring town passed through the campus flying Confederate flags; and head football coach Dabo Swinney (who is paid $9.2 million a year) posed with a “FOOTBALL MATTERS” T-shirt, while vehemently rejecting the notion of “systemic racism.”
My novel, Colleen and the Statue, is a love story. However, it also deals with the question, “Is there such a thing as ‘systemic racism,’ or are there only individual racists?” This is a heavy issue—very controversial at this time in American society. The Confederate soldier in my novel—is he only responsible for his actions as an individual who was fighting to preserve his family’s cotton plantation, or is he answerable as a soldier in an army whose ‘Cause’ was to preserve the Southern Way of Life that was based on slavery? A heavy issue indeed. … Bear with me.
In a recent issue of America Magazine, Vincent Rougeau, a Black man and dean of Jesuit Boston College Law School and president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools, put it this way: “Catholic social teaching … [draws] attention to our tendency to individualize agency and avoid notions of collective responsibility.” Which is another way of saying that we tend to say that there are individual racists in our country, but our country as a cultural whole is not racist.
A book that I just finished reading takes this stand when dealing with the history of slavery in South Carolina. The book—I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives—was edited by Susanna Ashton, who is currently professor and chair in the Department of English at Clemson University, the second-largest public university in South Carolina. It was published in 2010, when Ashton was associate professor at the university. I read it because it is on a list of 100 recommended readings by the Department of Black Studies at a major university in New England. I think it was put on the list as an example of how white Southerners to this day defend their ancestors who were living in the eleven states that succeeded in 1861 in the vain attempt to establish the Confederate States of America. The gist of their argument is this: the majority of Southerners did not own slaves; and of the minority who owned slaves, there were a few bad actors who abused their slaves, but most treated them like family—too valuable as assets to mistreat.
Ashton, who has been on the faculty of Clemson for more than two decades, at the time was undoubtedly obliged to make this argument, or else resign and return to Brooklyn where she is originally from. Thomas Green Clemson, who founded the university, served four years as an officer in the Confederate army. His father-in-law was John C. Calhoun, slaveholder, South Carolina statesman, and seventh U.S. Vice President. The grounds of Clemson were at one time Calhoun’s slave-cultivated plantation. The most prominent building on the campus is Tillman Hall, named after Benjamin R. Tillman, who served as Governor of South Carolina in the early 1890s and as U.S. Senator from 1895 to 1918. He was the ultimate white supremist, infamous for publicly advocating lynching of Black people. Today, the demographics of South Carolina show 66% of the population to be white and 27% Black, while Clemson University demographics show 82.9% of undergraduate students to be white, but only 6.8% Black. However, Clemson’s nationally ranked football team is majority Black: “Football matters!” as Coach Dao proclaimed. Which is to say, “I cannot win a national championship for the white alumni without Black players.”
How did Professor Ashton make her un-Reconstructed Southern argument? Her book is an anthology of seven nineteenth-century narratives by ex-slaves who “belonged” to South Carolina. Meaning, they were born and raised in the state; and wherever they ultimately ended up after escaping slavery, they nonetheless “retained a sense of themselves as belonging in some way to the state of South Carolina.” Ashton stressed their “sense of identity,” “intense individuality,” and “legacy as individuals.” All seven individuals were intensely religious. Their primary identity “seems to come through Christ, rather than slavery.” Each one says, in effect, “I make no complaint against those who held me in slavery.” The majority of the seven ex-slaves describe their childhood under slavery “in terms nostalgic and even wistful.” The human warmth of their masters and mistresses could “transcend the system of slavery and build genuinely good relations between slaves and their masters.” The daily life of these slaves was “under generally benign owners.” Two proudly served in the Confederate army during the war! Professor Ashton pointed out that most of the hundreds of narratives by ex-slaves were “concerned with compiling a breadth of data for the abolitionist cause” and emphasized “the most sensational aspects of suffering” under slavery. However, according to Professor Ashton, the story of slavery in South Carolina and the South is more “nuanced,” and defies “any easy generalizations.” Which is another way of saying that we cannot generalize and conclude that Southerners—both slave owners and non-slave owners—should be held to “collective guilt,” nor should we say that all white Southerners were participating directly or indirectly in “systemic racism.” Judge them individually, she argued.
I doubt that such a book as Professor Ashton’s would be published today by a major university—not even by Clemson or the University of South Carolina. … Times have changed. … In fact, at Clemson’s most recent BLM rally, Coach Dabo took off his “Football Matters” T-shirt, exchanged it for a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt, and stood beside his Black players in solidarity with them.