Come, return with me to the summer season of 2020.
Tens of millions of individuals from all backgrounds flooded America’s streets demanding justice for George Floyd and the long-dead victims of American racism. Throughout this era of racial reckoning, one thing extraordinary occurred: outdated statues fell. Accomplice generals had been pulled from their pedestals. Slaveholders had been toppled from marble thrones. Base names, college plaques, and public memorials had been reexamined and, finally, rejected. Even Aunt Jemima obtained fired.
It was extraordinary not simply because these relics had stood for therefore lengthy, however as a result of they had been by no means purported to fall. These monuments had been rigorously constructed to final, not simply in stone, however in story. They had been erected not within the speedy aftermath of battle or glory, however many years later throughout Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as half of a bigger marketing campaign to rewrite historical past and reassert white supremacy. For generations, they stood unchallenged, unexamined, normalized. They didn’t simply commemorate the previous; they distorted it, insisting that the Confederacy was honorable, that slavery was an unlucky “essential evil” or only a “darkish chapter” in American historical past, and that white dominance was everlasting.
So, when these statues fell, they didn’t simply crack concrete; they ruptured a nationwide mythology. They pressured this nation to ask: What sort of tales have we been telling ourselves? Whose model of historical past have we honored? And who has been erased, silenced, or trampled within the course of?
After which, the backlash got here swiftly.
Politicians, pundits, and self-anointed defenders of the “actual America” began foaming on the mouth and sprinting to cross laws. They accused activists of erasing historical past, although what had truly been toppled was propaganda. Faculty boards began banning books. Governors started defunding variety applications. The phrase “Crucial Race Principle” turned a scare tactic. All of it—the removals, the debates, the bans—revealed simply how fragile the American reminiscence actually is when pressured to confront the reality.
As a result of these weren’t simply arguments over monuments. They had been battles over which means. They uncovered the deepest fault strains on this nation’s relationship to its personal previous and made clear that historical past in America isn’t simply taught. It’s fought.
Now, flash ahead to this week in Louisiana.
Whereas the remainder of us are out right here making an attempt to outlive local weather collapse, pupil mortgage debt, and no matter new judicial hell the Supreme Court docket has cooked up, Governor Jeff Landry determined the actual emergency was… a navy base not being named after a Accomplice household.
With full-throated conceitedness, he introduced that the Louisiana Nationwide Guard Coaching Middle in Pineville will as soon as once more be known as “Camp Beauregard,” a reputation beforehand stripped for its ties to the Confederacy and white supremacy. Beauregard was one in every of a number of Accomplice figures, together with Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, whose monuments had been focused for elimination or recontextualization in New Orleans. However Landry, ever the political illusionist, insists this isn’t about honoring Basic P.G.T. Beauregard. No, no—it’s about honoring his father, Jacques Toutant Beauregard, a sugar planter and enslaver whose title by no means as soon as graced a navy base till now.
What makes this transfer so brazen is that Landry didn’t simply resurrect a Accomplice title; he discovered a brand new option to venerate the identical outdated system. He skipped the overall who fired the primary shot of the Civil Warfare and went straight for the person who owned individuals and handed that legacy down. Jacques Beauregard wasn’t a nationwide navy hero. He didn’t lead any main campaigns. His solely enduring historic significance is the truth that he enslaved Black individuals and raised a son who fought to maintain them that means.
That’s who Gov. Landry desires Louisiana to recollect with delight. That’s who he’s asking troopers, together with Black troopers, to salute. This isn’t about historical past or reverence. It’s about spite. It’s about energy. It’s about turning again the clock on racial reckoning and reminding Black individuals precisely the place we stand within the state’s racial hierarchy: underfoot, beneath the boot, behind the title etched into authorities signage.
Landry’s stunt isn’t remoted. It’s the most recent chapter within the white nationalist scrapbook of American reminiscence. Beneath Trump’s affect, politicians like Landry are waging a full-blown battle on the historic document. It’s not nearly books or bases. It’s about declaring that the Confederacy by no means actually misplaced. That even when the statues fall, the spirit behind them can nonetheless be revived by means of coverage, propaganda, and PR.
That is about Making America Nice Once more, and that requires restoring the myths that when held America collectively, even when they had been constructed on bondage, theft, and mass homicide. Landry’s transfer to rename the bottom isn’t some quirky homage to his state’s previous; it’s a part of the MAGA mandate to resuscitate the misplaced trigger beneath a brand new title. It’s about placing a recent coat of patriotism on the identical outdated plantation logic.
They’re not even hiding it. Landry paired his announcement with a headstone meme studying “WOKEISM.” He wrote in a Fb put up: At the moment, we are going to return the title of the Louisiana Nationwide Guard Coaching Middle in Pineville to Camp Beauregard. In Louisiana, we honor braveness, not cancel it. Let this be a lesson that we must always at all times give reverence to historical past and never be fast to so simply condemn or erase the lifeless, lest we and our instances be judged arbitrary by future generations.”
As if restoring the title of a plantation-owning household is a few courageous act of historic preservation as an alternative of a petty, ahistorical tantrum towards progress.
No person erased the lifeless. We simply stopped pretending they had been heroes. We stopped letting traitors to the USA, defenders of slavery, and males who fought to maintain Black individuals in chains stand unchallenged on our public pedestals and authorities indicators. That’s not cancel tradition, that’s known as accountability. That’s a long-overdue course correction in a rustic that’s spent centuries gaslighting its victims.
And that line about how we shouldn’t be “so fast to sentence or erase the lifeless, lest we and our instances be judged arbitrary by future generations?? Please. Chile, I’m an entire historian and I’m completely right here to sentence colonizers, rapists, enslavers, lynchers, and each power-drunk architect of racial violence who thought Black life was disposable. That’s known as moral readability.
The Confederacy wasn’t misunderstood. It wasn’t unfairly maligned. It was a violent, racist rise up whose leaders selected battle to protect slavery.
I get so drained of people that argue, “However we will’t decide males of their time,” as if our enslaved ancestors weren’t judging them in actual time. You assume they had been sitting on cotton bales pondering, “, Grasp actually wants a DEI coaching and perhaps he’ll cease whipping us and provides us our freedom.” These weren’t confused or misguided males. They made deliberate, violent selections to dominate, exploit, and brutalize. They usually constructed programs that also hang-out us. Refusing to sentence that isn’t neutrality, it’s complicity.
Judgment is how we study. It’s how we draw ethical strains. If we will’t say that enslaving individuals was evil, no matter what century it occurred in, then we’ve got no enterprise calling ourselves civilized. You need reverence? Give it to those who resisted. Give it to those who survived. The remaining can keep condemned and thrown into the dustbin of historical past.
The irony, after all, is that if Jeff Landry had truly learn a historical past guide, and even skimmed previous the plantation chapter, he’d know that Basic P.G.T. Beauregard, the very Accomplice his workplace is avoiding by title, went on to help Black suffrage.
After the Civil Warfare, Basic P.G.T. Beauregard, sure, the identical man who ordered the primary pictures at Fort Sumter, truly did a political about-face. By the early 1870s, Beauregard turned a distinguished supporter of the Unification Motion in Louisiana. In 1873, he joined forces with a gaggle of white and Black residents to advertise racial reconciliation and political cooperation, publicly advocating for Black suffrage and biracial governance. He gave speeches urging white Southerners to simply accept the political actuality of Black citizenship and warned that continued resistance would doom the South to financial and ethical smash.
In reality, Beauregard’s postwar rhetoric was so conciliatory that it drew criticism from former Confederates and Misplaced Trigger diehards. He overtly denounced Jefferson Davis and distanced himself from efforts to resurrect the Confederacy’s ideology, calling as an alternative for peace, unity, and pragmatic cooperation between the races.
So yeah, it’s wild that Jeff Landry and his persons are bypassing that Beauregard, the one who tried, nonetheless imperfectly, to reconcile with actuality, and as an alternative resurrecting the plantation-owning father, Jacques Toutant Beauregard. However I get it. The son doesn’t play properly on Fox Information. That Beauregard doesn’t troll the libs. Landry wanted a reputation that wouldn’t complicate the white nationalist narrative. The overall who advocated Black suffrage doesn’t work for MAGA optics.
So, what does this inform us, actually?
It tells us that we’re in a brand new period of historic gaslighting. That the erasure we had been warned about isn’t coming from activists tearing down statues, it’s coming from the state, placing them again up beneath totally different names. It tells us that white supremacy now not must shout to be heard. It simply must legislate. It must rename, reframe, and await the information cycle to maneuver on.
The press, for probably the most half, is lacking the purpose. The protection frames this as one other skirmish within the tradition battle, a “controversial renaming” or a “reversal of a federal choice.” However too few are asking the deeper questions. Why make this transfer now? Why pour state sources into resurrecting the title of a person who profited from the pressured labor of Black our bodies when Louisiana stays one of many poorest, most underfunded states within the nation? The reply is straightforward: trolling liberals and appeasing racists is extra vital to Jeff Landry than fixing actual issues. Bigotry is his funds. Spite is his agenda.
This isn’t nearly one man’s nostalgia or a misplaced reverence for “heritage.” It’s a coordinated strike in a broader marketing campaign to whitewash American historical past. We live in a second the place Black historical past is beneath siege. Faculty curricula stripped of fact, DEI applications dismantled, and Crucial Race Principle demonized as if it had been some contagious affliction relatively than a framework to grasp systemic inequality. Naming a navy web site after a person whose fortune was constructed on human bondage isn’t a tribute to braveness. It’s a provocation, a center finger to these preventing for historic readability and racial justice.
This renaming is occurring within the shadow of a bigger, extra sinister challenge: the try to rewrite the American story from the highest down. Beneath Donald Trump’s revived affect, we’re watching the rise of a brand new Confederacy, not one constructed on cotton and cannons, however on false reminiscence and white grievance. From banned books to curriculum whiteouts, from the demonization of “wokeness” to the glorification of insurrectionists, we’re being led down a path the place historic violence is repackaged as patriotism, and people who title it are branded as enemies of the state.
It’s all a cowardly sleight of hand, a shell sport performed with historical past, and it tells us the whole lot about the place America is headed beneath Trumpism. If future generations decide us harshly, it’ll be as a result of we allowed males like Donald Trump and Jeff Landry to resurrect white supremacy and name it “heritage.”
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and creator of “Spare The Children: Why Whupping Youngsters Gained’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Youngsters In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
SEE ALSO:
Why White People Are Grieving Over Destroyed Relics to White Supremacy
‘What Up, My Nazi?’ Is Fox Information Mimicking Black Reclamation
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