Let's Find Common Ground - Caroline Randall Williams: "My Body is a Confederate Monument."

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

"The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from," wrote author, poet and academic Caroline Randall Williams in a widely-read opinion column for The New York Times. As a Black southern woman with white ancestors, her view of the debate over how America remembers its past is deeply personal. This episode is the latest in our podcast series on racism and its painful legacy. Recent protests across the country have sparked renewed controversy over confederate statues, and the naming of military bases and public buildings that celebrate men who fought in the Civil War against the government of the United States.  Should the monuments be repurposed or removed? We discuss ways to find common ground and better our understanding of the American history. Caroline Randall Williams is a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University. She is a resident and native of Tennessee. Some of her ancestors were enslaved. Others included a prominent poet and novelist, and a civil rights leader. She is the great-great grand-daughter of Edmund Pettus, who was a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and U.S. Senator from Alabama. 

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well then my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. Our guest, Caroline Randall Williams, wrote those words in a widely read opinion column for the New York Times. As a black Southern woman with white ancestors, her perspective on how America remembers its past is deeply personal. suspected on how America remembers its past is deeply personal. This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashley Melntite. This episode is the latest in our podcast series on racism and its painful legacy.

Recent protests across the country have led to a much more passionate debate over what to do about Confederate statues and monuments, as well as the namings of buildings and military bases. Should Confederate monuments be repurposed or removed? Caroline Randall Williams is a poet and writer in residence at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She was born and raised in Tennessee. Her black ancestors include enslaved people, and in the 20th century, a well-known poet, lawyer, and civil rights leader. Caroline has white ancestors too, and is the great, great granddaughter of Edmund Pettis, who was a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and a U.S. Senator from Alabama.

She joins us from Nashville. Caroline, you've said my body is a monument. What do you mean? When I said that my skin is a monument, that my body is a monument, I arrived at that line by first sort of asking, well, what is a monument? And I came to the conclusion that a monument is a tangible artifact that commemorates or acknowledges the past.

And there are mixed race people for whom their light skin isn't a hard story. But for me, the fact that I am a light-skinned black person in the American South is the result of only hard stories, right? All of my European ancestry happened pre-1910. And it happened in the South on plantations, either during reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow

or during slavery. And by virtue of those dynamics alone, it's necessarily the result of sexual assault by white men who took advantage of the black women and my family who were working on the property of those white men. You say that you don't just come from the south, that you come from Confederates. In fact, you write, I've got rebel gray blue blood coursing in my veins. Tell us more. When I wrote that I have rebel gray blue blood

coursing my veins, I was sort of thinking about some of the ways that lines get drawn in this part of the world. I mean, throughout any sort of European westernized society about who your ancestors are and how that doesn't doesn't give you power. If you're a Southern conservative organization and you want to exclude people who are not of you, who are not from you, you wouldn't be leaving out the great great granddaughter of a man that was such an important symbol of what they have subsequently built. So my body is a wrench in that works And so to me when I point out I have Rebel a gray blue butt. I'm saying I am from the fancy people that you want to celebrate and still That truth makes me want to speak out and up and against the people that we come from. I'm not just saying that y'all come from

I'm saying that we come from Yeah, you say our ancestors don't deserve your unconditional pride. That's right. I think that people want to be proud of who they come from. It's a natural instinct to protect your own, to celebrate your bloodline, to want to have a sense of belonging that comes from a collective memory, abiding in that instinct without examining

it is really dangerous. And I think that I have to examine that instinct because I can't sit and say, I celebrate the man who raped my great-great-grandmother the same as I celebrate my great-great-grandmother who survived that. Tell us more about Edmund Pettis and other ancestors. I know that Pettis served as a senior officer in the Confederate Army and was also he was a politician too, right? Yes, he was a politician. He was also the grand dragon at one point of the Ku Klux Klan. He was a senator from Alabama, UK, United States Senator.

I think he died as sitting senator. I'm not as interested in examining the vicissitudes of his life. And I just haven't been, because I'm more interested in chronicling the untolditudes of his life. And I just haven't been, because I'm more interested in chronicling the untold stories of my family. And I think that his attachment to him and his legacy is a convenience that I use

to amplify the other story. What do you know about those ancestors? What do you know about the women and men who were African-American and worked on plantations. My great-grandfather will Randall my mom's grandpa. He was raised in Dallas County in Selma knowing who his father was, you know, in Selma, Alabama. Where the Edmund Pettisbridge still remains state. And where Bloody Sunday took place, we'll knew who his father was. And it was interesting because he never learned to read,

but he always had a car. We went to a family reunion in Selma few years back and people were saying, you know, the Randals, they always had more money. They didn't have to do the sharecropping work the same way. And we all know why. You know, there was a different position within even the black community that was, and it was complicated, because you think this man gave his son stuff, but didn't let him go to school. He thought there was sort of this strange pride of place, but in your place, that as a result,

when my great-grandparents were part of the great migration, they took my grandfather and his siblings and they moved it to Troy and Will Randall, Edmund Pettis's son, my great-grandfather, Will, he never let his wife do any cooking in their house. He never let her do any of the housekeeping because that was how he was conceived is by black women working doing that domestic labor and he couldn't stand to watch his wife doing the work that begat him. And my great-grandmother, dear, Will Randall's wife, she was also mixed race. Her mother was a black woman who worked in the home of another Alabama family and her father was a white man as well.

And you know, we just, we've carried these stories of knowing how these light skin babies happen for generations without talking about it. Well, talking about it, is that a way of finding common ground with people of different races and different values, and also those who at least until now have been skeptical about the protests against these Confederate monuments. I love that question. I hope that it's the beginning of finding common ground. I've been really encouraged by the response to this article and the number of people that have actually written

to me saying that what I said changed their mind. In what ways did they change their minds? So when people wrote to me and said that my article changed their minds, So when people wrote to me and said that my article changed their minds, I think that they had thought that you could look at this as a one side or the other discussion. And what I try to do with my article and which seem to have landed is that I said, you know, there is very much and in the middle of discussion because it's not saying, I am asking you to give up your family story

in favor of my family story. I'm asking you not to look at a white-sether narrative in favor of looking at a black-sether narrative. I'm saying, I'm asking you to have a conversation with me about the ways that the white-sether narrative and narrative and the black southern narrative didn't just come together in terms of actions and history, but in terms of my body, my story, like I am a living intersection of black southern narrative and white southern narrative. I have to have common ground because I do come from both. I am not coming from that perspective saying

dismiss your ancestors, sir. I'm saying these are our ancestors, sir. What are we going to do about it because of the fact of my life? My life means that whoever it is that we're talking about, we have to examine all of who he was. You have to acknowledge that there are shades to this, there are layers to this. It begins to sort of create a bridge. The article demands that we have a conversation in the middle in that common ground because you can't just say there's one side and there's another side and that one is trying to dismiss the other. Caroline, before you wrote the piece, had you talked about this publicly before, or was this kind of the first time that you went out there with this, because I'm curious about whether you've had, I know this is a really difficult time to have an actual conversation in person with anyone, but have you talked to a white southerner about this who might have previously been on the other side? Have you had an actual conversation either before

or after you wrote the piece? Sure, I've had tons. I think I was raised in private school in Nashville. I went to boarding school in New Hampshire. I do my undergraduate degree at an institution that has a lot of rare air and spaces that likes to create. And so I've spent a lot of time with a lot of conservative white people that I love. And the second they start talking about legacy and inheritance

and the fear of getting erased, I get to bring out that, ooh, I'm related to fancy white people card. And then say, let's talk about why you're afraid of erasing this man or examining him. And I've certainly given talks in and around the ideas of the article, trying to get it really organized because what I knew that I did not want to do was right from only a place of rage. I wanted to write from a place of wanting us to all get to the same side of history. I want us all to feel like we can have our dignity and have some sense of shared understanding of American history that we can honor by continuing to push

America to be the dream that it says it is in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence rather than even maybe what the founding fathers themselves might have envisioned with their limited perspective. When we say let's get the Constitution to do what it says it wants to do instead of what Thomas Jefferson wrote it to do. Let's get the Declaration of Independence to be the claiming of American freedom that Thomas Jefferson said it was but didn't really mean it was. I think people want to get excited about that, and then still you get the resistance of, well, it is what he said it was,

but we know that that isn't totally true in some functional ways, but I think that when we all say we want it to do what it says it means, I think that we can all then begin to have a conversation about how that happens and what we have to look at to get it there. You're listening to Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley. And I'm Richard.

This podcast is part of the Common Ground Committee's drive to shed light, not heat, on public discourse. Subscribe to our newsletter at commongroundcommitty.org and find out about our videos and events. And let us know what you think of the podcast or if you have ideas for future shows, email us at podcast at commongroundcommity.org. Also in the newsletter, learn more about whether you share our philosophy over what it means to be a common grounder at a time of deep divide. Now back to our interview with Caroline Randall Williams. Going back to, you said I've got all these white conservative people in my life that I love. When you've had these kinds of conversations with them, what have they said and have they

ended up being able to see your perspective? You know, I think in the moment, it can often be met with silence. But silence is actually a step forward because it's not, or silence in that kind of exchange is a step forward because it's not a pushback. It's not a rejection of what I said. And that silence said to me, you heard me. This is asking you to do a lot of rethinking

and reframing of your position. I am not going to argue with you right now. I'm going to digest that. I think we have sitting with silence because we're confounded by how to contemplate. The past is valid. I think that being stunned into silence is a valid response to being presented with something you'd never contemplated before. It's a good start. Yeah, that's right.

I'm assuming that you welcomed the growing protests against monuments to Confederate soldiers. That's not a stretch to say that, right? That is not a stretch to say that right? That is not a stretch. So what do you think should happen to those monuments? This is my specific personal preference. I think that they belong in museums. You know, I think I have had very powerful experiences at, but you know, the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. You can see Nazi iconography, you can see Jim Crow propaganda, you can see Ku Klux Klan ensembles, you can see Nazi uniforms, but they're in context. They're put in the context of how they were used under what conditions.

The monuments, sure, if people want to see them, let's have a place where people can see them, but I don't think that it makes sense to leave them in a place where people can see them and not have to think about what the men who died fighting and then got to be memorialized and then what they were fighting for. I don't think we should forget that that happened, but I think that we should certainly reframe how we remember it.

Some people say, leave them where they are, but put up a plan to provide some context to the issue. What do you think of that idea? I'd come to the table to talk about that. I think that responsibly implementing a plan like that would be complicated. And I think that it leaves it open to any number of things. Cessacration protests that create more divides than they create, healing. Who decides what responsible context is when you leave it up. A healing gesture is an important one,

it's the other part. I think that taking something down because it is pain someone is valuable. If I have a belief that is important to me, to some degree, but somebody that I'm speaking to, here's that and says, that hurts me. It hurts me that you want this, that you like this. I stop immediately and I'd say, how does it hurt you? Why does it hurt you? I've got to examine why something that I need or want

is costing you something. And I think that the people who want the monuments to stay up because of some sense of nostalgia or pride, they have to examine why they think that they're a sense of nostalgia or pride outweighs generations of pain. You mentioned the Holocaust Museum, which prompts this question. Do you think that the United States could learn from Germany

over how it dealt with its Nazi past? Yes. It's a very delicate conversation to have. And I have a few friends of German descent, very delicate conversation to have. And I have a few friends of German descent, and not just German descent, who are from Germany. And one of the things that I have found so striking is how to a person, they are so prepared to discuss the legacy of their ancestors with swift and vigorous reproach. I spent a lot of time thinking, well, where are the southerners, like the thoughtful right-minded white Americans who are prepared to do that same thing that the Germans did? And then I thought, well, what I really want is a descendant of Confederate soldiers to say, I don't celebrate this. And I thought, well, I'm a descendant

of Confederate soldiers. So I guess I'll do it, right? But my desire to do that came from my sense of, that collective German instinct towards saying, we did this, we are sorry, we must repair and reframe and acknowledge our responsibility. You say the campaign to remove Confederate statues to take them away is not a matter of airbrushing history, but of adding a new perspective, how can we do that?

How can we add that new perspective rather than just simply removing something? Well, there is an argument to be made for leaving up the statue and putting up a statue of Frederick Douglass or I to be Wells or W.E.B. Du Bois or Harriet Jacobs or Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth right alongside, that's another way to do it. I mean, I think that the statues as they stand are a failure to acknowledge the system that those men were fighting for. They only speak to not even just one side of the war or not, but one side of the South in that time, because the war was fought to keep people enslaved. Even if it's a question of economics, the South entire economic backbone was based on slavery, right? So even when you say it was about this, still the root of it was about

slavery. So when you look at the monuments out of context, they're celebrating men who were fighting and dying to preserve this thing. So in order to reframe the past instead of airbrush it, we have to talk about this thing that they were fighting and dying for and why it's right that they lost. We have to put the people who are suffering on the other side of it because right now, there are only monuments to a white southern past. They're not monuments that acknowledge the truth of the black southern past that was co-existing at the same time in that same space. So yeah, there is this much wider discussion now about whether monuments to founding fathers like Washington and Jefferson should also go. They owned slaves, they slept with their slaves,

but a lot of people would say they also did a lot of good things and that they are in a different category from some of the Confederates. What do you think? I think that we are gonna have to have a long conversation about that as a country. My short answer is one, what makes the Confederate monuments distinct and an easy

first step is the simple necessity of acknowledging that the men who fought and died for that cause had declared war against the United States of America, and we are not as a country otherwise in the habit of erecting monuments to traitors. You know, the question of Jefferson, the question of Washington, they're good men, but, and I had the opportunity to say this, I think the other day at MSNBC, you know, a good man can be an elder in his church and a regular blood donor and a father of five and a responsible lawyer. And then he can have too many drinks at dinner and kill some people in a car accident. And it doesn't mean that he wasn't a contributing member of society, but he still has to sit in court and maybe go to jail for what he did. And I think we have to

think about how people pay for the thing they did that's egregious, even though they did good things too. And I don't know how the memories of Jefferson and Washington are going to need to pay for the memories of what they did that was egregious alongside their meaningful contributions. But I think the idea that we just give them a free pass because they did great things, sets of really poor precedent. And I don't know what the answer is to how we reckon with them, but I think they do need to be put into a lot more context and under a lot more scrutiny than we have put them under in the past. Saying I don't know and inviting a further conversation is a really honest and I think good way to end Caroline Randall Williams.

Thank you very much for being on our podcast. Thank you for having me. It's been wonderful to talk with you all. Yeah, thank you so much. You all. Y'all. Caroline Randall Williams, her op-ed article is called You Want a Confederate Monument. My Body is a Confederate monument.

This episode is part of our podcast series, Race Matters. Here more at commongroundcommitty.org slash podcasts. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe and download our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's find common ground is a production of Common Ground Committee. You know, we always say this, and we mean it. Thanks for listening.