Critical Confederate Theory (CCT)

From social media to school board meetings across the country, there’s an incredible amount of lot of talk about Critical Race Theory from those suffering from the newly discovered condition of “Foxitis.” Personally, I’m far more concerned with Critical Confederate Theory.

From its inception, the U.S. government has habitually tolerated and placated a separatist impulse from the Southern states that demanded their own adaptations. I’m talking about things like the ghastly Three-Fifths Compromise for the census. It all goes back to the very beginning.

This nonsense about regional insecurity and expected national adaptation is a fixture of Southern history. It started at the country’s founding, continued in the Antebellum period straight through Reconstruction, into Jim Crowe, right on past the Civil Rights era and into the present.

The South has always insisted that the rest of the country make special adaptations for them and their “particular institutions.”1 It’s part of their way of life. While insisting they’re the most patriotic of all, they’re continually half-joking, half-threatening to leave if they don’t get their way.

It’s more than just that, though. It’s also the manner in which critical examination is stifled. The American South has an Honor-Shame Culture where there is an “ongoing attribution or loss of esteem by one’s peers, family, social-class, city, and so on,” as Michael Gorman put it.

Think Klingons in Star Trek. As a result, Southerners past and present insist that we collectively whitewash their regional history unto the point of its glorification. “No, no,” they say, “It’s about appreciating the virtues of our genteel culture.” To quote Dr. Evil, “Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.”

For a little personal context to what follows, my dad was originally from Waco and my mom is from Minneapolis. They met in Tulsa, where I was later born, but I consider myself a Minnesotan despite having lived in the Southern states of Oklahoma, Georgia, or Texas for 24 years.

I was a history major at a conservative evangelical college in northeast Georgia. It was there that, after encountering this strange counter-narrative for the causes of the Civil War, I decided to read each and every one of the Southern states’ unambiguous declaration of why they seceded.

When given any push-back from educated people who’ve actually bothered to read the primary source documents and can offer direct citations, I’ve found that a rather large swath of Southerners are culturally conditioned to resort to a mass gaslighting of the rest of the country.

If you can’t get honor with the facts, the next best tactic is to avoid shame. Quite often their default pattern of behavior is to guard their honor by fuzzying up the specifics, appeal to patriotic pride of one’s home, and make critics feel bad for speaking ill of their ancestors.

And don’t anyone dare try to dismiss me as a carpetbagger or by saying, “Your family isn’t from here. You wouldn’t understand.” That would be false. The Clark and Wallace sides of the family are from right here in Texas and I have ancestors who foolishly fought for the Confederacy.

This is my Critical Confederate Theory: The South tacitly demands that the rest of the country acquiesce to their unhealthy cultural norms and practices in order to keep the peace, then gaslight anyone who dares bring up unsightly facts that make them feel shame instead of honor.