Confederates Weren't Punished Enough And Now We're Here
The redistricting of Memphis is more of the same old evil
The trick to understanding the necrotic pageantry of modern American, Christian, Southern conservatism is realizing that the Civil War never actually ended in any meaningful moral sense. The shooting stopped. The graves filled. Statues went up. But the ideology and racist culture of the Confederacy was never dismantled with anything approaching the seriousness history demanded. Not in the way other countries like Germany, Japan and Italy dealt with their fascist uprisings.
And because the United States possesses the unique ability to transform catastrophic moral failure into sentimental folklore, the Confederacy was not remembered as a treasonous oligarchy built on industrialized torture, but as a sort of misunderstood regional identity involving barbecue and columns and men named Beauregard. The defeated planter class lost the war and then almost immediately coopted the narrative. Which turns out to matter more in the long run.
You can draw a straight line from Appomattox to modern Tennessee redistricting maps that, this week, surgically diluted Black voting power in Memphis. You can draw another line from Reconstruction’s collapse to a Supreme Court that now treats the Voting Rights Act like an unwanted family heirloom everyone’s too polite to throw away but no longer intends to use.
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!
-- Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone
And if this sounds overheated or hysterical or insufficiently reverent toward the sacred bipartisan mythology of “healing,” it is worth remembering that after the Civil War, former Confederates were permitted to return to positions of power with astonishing speed. Men who had literally taken up arms against the United States government in order to preserve slavery were reabsorbed into political life so gently that within a decade they were writing textbooks about themselves as tragic heroes.
Imagine another country attempting this. Imagine postwar Germany erecting statues to regional Nazi generals because they were “complicated figures.” Imagine Germany allowing former architects of fascism to retake local governments while insisting national unity required everyone to stop dwelling on unpleasantness. The comparison irritates Americans because Americans remain deeply invested in believing the Confederacy represented a noble disagreement over “states’ rights,” despite the fact that the Confederacy itself repeatedly clarified that the right in question was the right to own Black people as property and profit off their labor forever.
The postwar South should have undergone something closer to de-nazification. Confederate political leadership should have been permanently barred from office. The planter aristocracy’s land should have been redistributed at massive scale. Federal protection of Black political participation should have remained non-negotiable for generations. Confederate iconography should have been treated with the same civic revulsion reserved for communist symbols.
Instead America pursued reconciliation without justice, which always means reconciliation for the hateful and diminishing for everyone else.
The descendants of that unpunished ideology adapted. The explicit white supremacists became segregationists. The segregationists became “law and order” conservatives. “Law and order” became “small government.” Then “election integrity.” Then “anti-woke.” The packaging changes with every generation while the machinery underneath remains obsessed with the same thing it has always been obsessed with: limiting multiracial democracy before multiracial democracy limits them.
Modern Tennessee politics often resembles a laboratory experiment designed to determine how openly a democracy can be manipulated before the whole facade collapses. And that breaking point should be right now.
Can’t you see it?
I know you can feel it
It’s all in the air
I can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
Take Memphis. A majority-Black city, one of the Blackest in the nation, with enormous cultural and political significance, whose congressional representation was deliberately fractured during redistricting in order to dilute Black voting strength and secure Republican advantage. Memphis had historically been contained largely within a single congressional district.
In, what I am sure is a deliberate, devilish and twisted alteration, Pulaski, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, is now in the same congressional district as Memphis. This is a historical obscenity. A city synonymous with Black political power and cultural brilliance forcibly tethered to the cradle of America’s most symbolic white supremacist terror movement.
What has been done to Memphis is spiritually rancid and liturgical in its cruelty. It is not merely cynical. It is an act of symbolic domination masquerading as democratic governance. A cartographic sneer from the descendants of a defeated ideology that still cannot forgive Black people for surviving it and thriving.
