Alongside this summer's debate over the meanings of the Confederate flag, sparked by the Charleston shootings, another story about the history of American racism flared up. Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, revealed further discomfiting truths, this time about the background to one of the nation's most beloved fictional standard-bearers for racial equality.
In Watchman, Atticus Finch is discovered, twenty years after the action of Mockingbird, fighting against desegregation during the civil rights era. The shock readers have felt is akin to finding an early draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in which Orwell defends surveillance in the name of national security--but stumbling upon a segregationist Atticus Finch should not surprise readers who know their history. In the end, he proves just as problematic a symbol as the Confederate flag, and for exactly the same reasons: both flew in the face of civil rights to defend white prerogative in the South. And both were gradually romanticised through the process of revision, wrap ping America in comforting white lies.
Like our euphemistic habit of calling Jim Crow laws "segregation" rather than apartheid, all of this partakes in a time-honoured communal practice of deracination through whitewashing, through popular fictions of innocence such as Mockingbird and popular histories such as folk tales about the innocence of the Confederate flag. America keeps willing its own innocence back into being, even as racist ghosts continue to haunt our nation's dreams of the pastoral South, a society whose fantasy of gentility was purchased at the cost of brutal chattel slavery and its malignant repercussions.
An essential aspect of the history of American racism is also the history of its deliberate mystification. Many Americans continue to accept an idealised view of the antebellum and Jim Crow South, which emerged as part of a national romance known as the Lost Cause, a legend that turned terrorism into a lullaby. In the aftermath of the South's crushing defeat in the civil war, southerners began trying to reclaim what they had lost--namely, an old social order of unquestioned racial and economic hierarchies. They told stories idealising the nobility of their cause against the so-called War of Northern Aggression, in which northerners had invaded the peaceful South out of a combination of greed, arrogance, ignorance and spite. Gentle southerners heroically rallied to protect their way of life, with loyal slaves cheering them all the way. This Edenic dream of a lost agrarian paradise, in which virtuous aristocrats and hard-working farmers coexisted peacefully with devoted slaves, pre-dated the war: merging with Jeffersonian ideals of the yeoman farmer, it formed the earliest propagandistic defences of slavery. One of the most powerful broadsides against this spurious fantasy was launched in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a north-eastern preacher's daughter who had lived in border states and seen what really happened to fugitive slaves. The South responded to Uncle Tom's Cabin with a furious denunciation of Stowe's knowledge and motives, insisting on the benevolence of their "peculiar institution"--an especially...