Living Among Confederate Icons: Perpetuating White Supremacist Beliefs and Blindness to Black Suffering

Abstract

Almost 160 years after the American Civil War, where the Union defeated the Confederacy and ended slavery in the United States, approximately 1,910 tributes remain to Confederate military leaders located on public property in the 11 original Confederate states, particularly in cities with an exceptionally high density of Black residents. To Blacks, this iconography delivers a clear message of White supremacy. Six states have enacted laws to protect and preserve these memorials, making it almost impossible to use the court system to move them to private property. This paper explores connections between support for a myth called the Lost Cause, which is a revisionist history intended to spread misinformation about the true cause of the American Civil War, and attitudes toward placement of Confederate symbols on public land. We show that there is significant belief in the Lost-Cause myth among many White U.S. Southerners. Furthermore, we find those who believe most in the myth are the least likely to want to move the monuments or end taxpayer support for their maintenance.

Keywords

• social justice
• White supremecy
• Confederate monuments
• fundamental causes theory
• racism