As A Black Southern Woman, My Very Existence Is A Relic of Slavery and Jim Crow: Caroline Randall Williams

Top image: Op-Ed by Caroline Randall Williams New York Times June 26, 2020. Bottom: In the days after Charlottesville, August 2017, Baltimore became an early city to remove four Confederate monuments. Image via Ryan Patterson on Flickr.

Poet Caroline Randall Williams so eloquently expresses a visceral response to the argument that the Confederacy is a proud heritage in American history and should be honored. The heroes of the Confederacy should have co-equal billing with northerners is the core argument of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Confederate generals were not traitors and secessionists, but rather principled patriots, often with higher, more noble values than northerners . . . or so the story goes.

Caroline Randall Williams has a different point of view, and reading the opening to her New York Times Op-Ed: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument., Williams’ words are so powerful and searing, that no more words from AOC should be said.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

New York Times Op-Ed by Caroline Randall Williams: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument. Read-On.

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