Come, return with me to the summer time of 2020.
Hundreds of thousands 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: previous statues fell. Accomplice generals have been pulled from their pedestals. Slaveholders have been toppled from marble thrones. Base names, college plaques, and public memorials have been reexamined and, finally, rejected. Even Aunt Jemima bought fired.
It was extraordinary not simply because these relics had stood for therefore lengthy, however as a result of they have been by no means imagined to fall. These monuments had been rigorously constructed to final, not simply in stone, however in story. They have been erected not within the instant 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 “needed 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 move laws. They accused activists of erasing historical past, regardless that what had truly been toppled was propaganda. Faculty boards began banning books. Governors started defunding variety packages. The phrase “Vital Race Principle” grew to become 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 have been battles over that 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 attempting 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 army base not being named after a Accomplice household.
With full-throated vanity, he introduced that the Louisiana Nationwide Guard Coaching Middle in Pineville will as soon as once more be referred to as “Camp Beauregard,” a reputation beforehand stripped for its ties to the Confederacy and white supremacy. Beauregard was one in all a number of Accomplice figures, together with Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, whose monuments have 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 army base till now.
What makes this transfer so brazen is that Landry didn’t simply resurrect a Accomplice title; he discovered a brand new strategy to venerate the identical previous 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 army 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 approach.
That’s who Gov. Landry desires Louisiana to recollect with pleasure. 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 file. 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 via coverage, propaganda, and PR.
That is about Making America Nice Once more, and that requires restoring the myths that after held America collectively, even when they have 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 underneath a brand new title. It’s about placing a recent coat of patriotism on the identical previous plantation logic.
They’re not even hiding it. Landry paired his announcement with a headstone meme studying “WOKEISM.” He wrote in a Fb publish: 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 should always all the time 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 a substitute of a petty, ahistorical tantrum in opposition to progress.
No person erased the lifeless. We simply stopped pretending they have 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 referred to 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 a complete 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 referred to as moral readability.
The Confederacy wasn’t misunderstood. It wasn’t unfairly maligned. It was a violent, racist rebel 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 suppose they have been sitting on cotton bales considering, “You already know, 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. And so they constructed methods that also hang-out us. Refusing to sentence that isn’t neutrality, it’s complicity.
Judgment is how we be taught. 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 remainder can keep condemned and thrown into the dustbin of historical past.
The irony, in fact, 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 assist Black suffrage.
After the Civil Warfare, Basic P.G.T. Beauregard, sure, the identical man who ordered the primary photographs at Fort Sumter, truly did a political about-face. By the early 1870s, Beauregard grew to become a outstanding 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 just accept the political actuality of Black citizenship and warned that continued resistance would doom the South to financial and ethical destroy.
Actually, 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 a substitute 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 a substitute 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 final 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 have been warned about isn’t coming from activists tearing down statues, it’s coming from the state, placing them again up underneath 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 watch for the information cycle to maneuver on.
The press, for essentially 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 assets 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 easy: trolling liberals and appeasing racists is extra essential 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 underneath siege. Faculty curricula stripped of fact, DEI packages dismantled, and Vital Race Principle demonized as if it have been some contagious affliction reasonably than a framework to know systemic inequality. Naming a army 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 combating for historic readability and racial justice.
This renaming is going on within the shadow of a bigger, extra sinister mission: the try and 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 recreation performed with historical past, and it tells us the whole lot about the place America is headed underneath 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 writer of “Spare The Youngsters: Why Whupping Kids Gained’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Kids In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
SEE ALSO:
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