—By BitterSweet Editors
“What if, when people picture folks with Confederate heritage, they imagine people — Black, White, and multiracial — who hold a special commitment to destroying White supremacy?”
Kelly Carter Merrill, whom some of you may know through her work with David Campt and the Dialogue Company, descends from Confederate enslavers and soldiers. Like many of us, Kelly descends from one of the first families of Virginia. She writes compellingly about her feelings about this inheritance on her blog, Gray Areas. Her blog post A Third Way advises a way for enslaver descendants to navigate past family pride, which is often followed by shame as we learn the true history of our families, into action. (Additional ideas, support, and resources to navigate this terrain are shown in this Linked Descendants presentation and handout at the Coming to the Table 2021 National Gathering.)
Kelly’s third way to be a Confederate descendant involves moving through both the shame and the silence, to a place of accountability. It’s a necessary part of this journey to focus on ownership as well as self-compassion (Kelly has a separate post for that here). As Kelly says, “folks seem to assume a false dichotomy that there are only two ways to be a descendant of confederates: either you are a venerator or you should feel shamed to silence. If a descendant speaks of their ancestry, they are suspected of either being a venerator or someone engaging in performative shame.”
As descendants of Confederates, if we ignore this legacy and are silent, then we contribute to the perpetuation of the Lost Cause mythology. Kelly says, “if we don’t see descendants of the Confederacy who are against its reverence, then we assume they must not exist.” And she also points out, what many doing this work already know, “we need to picture Black Americans as descendants of the Confederacy, because it is true and their voices matter.” What if we could shift the culture, if rather than the UDC being who is brought to mind when one thinks of descendants, instead it’s as Kelly imagines, people committed to tearing down white supremacist culture in ourselves, our families, and working to heal history?
This is not an easy journey. Joining Linked Descendants is one way to gain support, to be with others who understand. Once we learn our true family history, and especially if we are prone to feeling “it’s all in the past, why dig it up?”, (take a look at Kelly’s blog post, “An Open Letter to Confederate Sympathizers”). It’s imperative we break the pattern of silence—both to tell a more whole truth about our ancestors’ and their actions, to give voice to what has been denied or glossed-over for too long, and to support Black communities and leaders in addressing the systemic racism in our communities, states and country. As Ibram Kendi has told us in How to be an Antiracist, inaction is complicity. It is vital to move to the third stage of both inward and outward action and involvement. In this way, we can begin to heal not only the descendants of the those our ancestors victimized, but all of us, future generations and our society as a whole.
Action can begin with the provision of family records to public databases and websites. Many more actions have been detailed by the Linked Descendants African American Advisory Board here. Kelly has published a blog post aimed at Confederate descendants who still believe the false narratives around the Civil War, and has spoken in support of Black leaders in her community. Other types of action can be taken by working to shift our mindset and our culture’s perception of what it means to descend from the Confederacy.
Kelly acknowledges that this journey from shame to action is not easy in her blog post, Two Conditions for Healing: “For me trustbuilding looks like this. I own my ancestors stories, all of them. I don’t avoid using my family name, in fact I insist on using it. I’m not just Kelly Merrill, but Kelly Carter Merrill. I tell people my family’s history, especially as I do trustbuilding work. I own implicit biases that still cross my mind, and humbly confess them to others. I continuously work to understand my unearned advantages. I do not wear message tshirts or buttons. I allow people to assume what they need to of me. I observe any defensive feelings I have as signals that some assumptions might hold truth. I welcome my own discomfort on this path toward owning and self-compassion. This is where the healing is.”
How are you working to shift your internal concept of what being a descendant of the Confederacy means? What actions can you take to make discussions like these more visible? What support do you have in place as you begin or remain on this lifelong journey?
©2023, Kelly Carter Merrill and Linked Descendants. All rights reserved.
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Delighted to come across all the resources that Kelly Carter Merrill offers to help descendants of enslavers and Confederates process their heritage into a stronger, more honest identity and into clearer action options. Thank you!
yes,yes, and more yes. in away there are some interesting correlations for me and my family. recently,i hada mother in law who came to the usa from then south vietnam. i usedto hear her talk about the fragmentation that came with that war. how some of her family went to fight for the north. this war split the family and some died fighting for their righteous cause. my mother in law translated thich nhat hanh’s work on walking meditation to english. i learned the same of my ancestral family of the us civil war. we had fragmentation and dissent wthn our very own famly. there s unspeakable and unknown truths “that there are no winners n war. only loss and more loss.”
It’s always interesting to try to understand the choices our ancestors made, especially around the issue of slavery during the Civil War. I am not sure who you are quoting, but to me the war in Vietnam was completely different, fought for different and more tragic reasons, an outgrowth of US Cold War policy, etc. Even though I sympathize with the hardships my Confederate ancestors experienced, I wish they had made a very different choice. Virginians opposed secession initially, and it was a close vote. My ancestors could have done the right thing, but they chose not to. They clung to their privilege and to their enslaved people. Would the US have abolished slavery without the Civil War, I think not. And if the Lost Cause mythology and Jim Crow had been beaten back at the time, we would be in a very different position today.
yes,for me, i was drawing or trying to draw the correlation of both countries in civil war.i learned of my recent or recently learned by being with a genealogist in the basement of the lovingston,va. courthouse about my ancestors. in the mid 1800’s my family clan,the fitzpatricks, married into the cabell clan or family. part of the marriage was a gift of land,property, and the enslaved who transferred with the property. i stand and would want to advocate for freedom for all and compensation in the form of reparations.