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Lift high the cross
Where white supremacy and the Christian right converge
By Ann Burlein Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2864-X
Chapter One
Countermemory, Children, and Ignorance-Power
Religion as Countermemory: The Source of the Right's Popular Appeal
One day in September 1992, I find myself sitting in the city plaza in the North Carolina town of Goldsboro (east of Raleigh). The sun bakes the cement and burns the back of my neck red as I take notes. I am listening to Virgil Griffin, Wizard of the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, as he shouts:
And they want to talk about equal rights. I'd love to have some equal rights, ladies and gentlemen. I'd love to get a welfare check, drive a Cadillac, get food stamps, and get a check to pay me every month to live in a cute brick apartment like they're getting.... What's happened to our schools? They took parents out, thanks to Madelyn O'Hare the Bible [was] took out, they put the niggers in, and our schools they became jungles, ladies and gentlemen. And the only way we gonna straighten our school systems out is to put the niggers back in Niggersville, the whites in Whitesville, the Klan Bible back in ... throw the faggots out and you will see our schools straighten out. They teaching your children today in school to be ashamed of theirselves cause of slavery. I tell you one thing, if you are a working person you are a slave today, a slave to the welfare system and theirgive-away programs.... I'm not in this organization for Virgil Griffin. I don't fight the courts in Washington, D.C. and other states to win my rights; I want to win rights for that little boy right there.... If you don't stand up and demand your rights, and get in the streets and fight for 'em, they will have no rights. Your children, your grandchildren, nor mine will have no rights! ... There's people in North Carolina they want a coon dog; they go out and buy one. Won't let 'em do it with any other dog; buy a thousand dollar pen, put that dog in and protect that dog.... But they'll take their little six-year-old daughter to the gate Monday morning, kick her out that gate, put her on a bus with forty damn niggers and don't care how much she's mixed, how much she's mongrelized!
This was the first Klan march I ever saw and it shocked me. I'd heard many protest speeches that use religion as an alternative way of remembering history and empowering people to stand up. Theorist Michel Foucault called this kind of alternative history a countermemory. African American Christians read the Bible in ways that resisted slavery; black churches today continue to read the Bible in ways that reject racial discrimination and exploitation. Rastafarians blend biblical traditions celebrating Ethiopia with images of Zion, narrating countermemories that protest the unequal power relations implied in naming certain sections of the globe Third World. The American Indian movement invokes traditional beliefs to counter the dismissal of Native ways of living as obsolete and to denounce greed for Indian lands. Feminist forms of spirituality protest the denigration of women by celebrating forgotten foremothers. Greens use spirituality to craft a less exploitive relationship between humans and the environment.
In such countermemories, religion does more than provide beliefs to which people give intellectual agreement, professing "I believe in x"-as if "I" and "x" were somehow separate. Instead, religious symbols and rituals, texts and practices, institutions and moods help form identity and subjectivity-the very existence of that I-by shaping how people remember their histories, orient themselves within particular identities, and invest in their world. Used as a countermemory, religion can empower people to reframe their histories, identities, and worlds by reversing mainstream perspectives in ways that counter existing power relations.
Countermemories effect such reversals by working the in-between spaces, or interstices, where individuals are not separate from either the beliefs they hold or the contexts (cultural and political, historical and economic) in which they come to hold these beliefs. Listening to Virgil Griffin, one can hear the concrete grain of the multiple contexts from which he comes and to which his voice speaks: the regions and generations in which his Southern accent is spoken; the class-inflected grammar; the nostalgic and almost physical comfort offered by a world where the events of life-its joys and sorrows, births and losses-are always already written amid the well-thumbed pages of a family Bible whose weight can be held, solid, in the palm of your hand.
Listening to Griffin today, in my home, I hear the paradox of human agency, its double-cross: how vulnerable people are to the contexts that produce them. Vulnerable, and yet therefore ultimately how responsible. No one is a sovereign subject: clear in motivation and intention, free because undetermined by the sheer contingencies of particular life circumstances. Children are born into a world they do not make and whose power relations shape them without their say. Indeed, it is through submitting to relations of power that a child becomes a subject capable of having a say. Think, for instance, of the technologies of power at work in being given a name. What's in a name? A veritable world: gender and sex, race or ethnicity, patrilineage and property as well as national identity-all are assigned when swaddling a babe in language.
Yet, vulnerability is only one side of human agency. For the contexts wherein we emerge as people do not determine us so fully that we escape responsibility for the beliefs to which (and with which) we commit our lives. To the contrary: it is our vulnerability, the way we both root in and branch out into specific contexts, that makes us capable of determination, of acting in and on the world. Picking up whatever tools they have been given, people put them to use-and thereby transform the partial, tangled, and contradictory connections they have inherited. Such is the positive performative power, the promise and the hope, of countermemory; shaped within the crucible of power relations that no individual controls, people can perform power relations in different directions and in the service of different commitments.
Countermemory on the Right
Scholars have tended to emphasize the positive aspects of countermemories, as if all countermemories were by definition opposed to oppression. In contrast, Griffin's speech reveals how countermemories can be crosscut, undermined, by conflicting currents. For although Griffin's countermemory sought to reject the pain wrought by economic globalization, he did so by calling white folks to stand up for white rights in the name of a Klan Bible and that little white boy right there.
Viewed in retrospect, Griffin's countermemory tangled together all the major themes that would emerge later, when I researched the Right. Imagining civil (or equal) rights as "special rights" to a Cadillac and a cute brick apartment. Tracing national decline to Supreme Court decisions prohibiting mandatory school prayer. Decrying a federal government whose plans for a "new world order" are not framed with working people in mind. Sentimentalizing parental authority by insisting on the need to protect little white boys from gay teachers and little white girls from black boys. Romanticizing the home as the place where all our deepest needs are met, where each man takes care of his own.
Right-wing countermemories string these themes together by means of biblical plotlines. Liberation stories that portray God as political: listening to people when they cry out in bondage and siding with the oppressed. Images of Zion that identify the nation as God's holy temple, promising plenty and peace. Nationalistic stories of a rebellious generation that took its prosperity for granted and scorned its fathers' ways, bringing curses on the nation as a whole, including loss of sovereignty. Erotic symbols that depict disobedience in sexual terms, embodied in women. Traumatic memories that portray God's people as forgetting their identity whenever they come into contact with foreigners. Ideologies that cast historical relations between peoples as a transcendent duel between the one true God who is jealous and the many false foreign idols whose promises prove empty.
These biblical memories and plotlines have not "stayed put" in the ancient contexts in which they arose and to which they first spoke. Precisely by being included in the Bible, these themes take on a life of their own. Unmoored to move through time and across space, biblical stories and symbols have been remembered, which means reinterpreted for new times and spaces, often in ways that have little or no relation to the ancient contexts wherein they first took root. Consider how the Puritans who came to this continent identified themselves as Israel wandering in the desert, and how African American slaves who were forcibly brought to this land identified themselves as Israel enslaved. Such multivalent and contesting overlays, which circulate through and around biblical texts, are how the Bible "speaks" to people today, and therefore are how biblical authority is produced, performed, and perceived. Griffin's speech derives its power from engaging with these tangled cultural resonances, which he attempts to harness through the signifier of biblical authority.
Whereas most observers analyze today's Right in terms of legal issues, political parties, or public policies, in Lift High the Cross I argue that the Right engenders popular appeal by using religion as a countermemory that enables people to protest the present. These conservative countermemories use the symbolic space of the Bible to provide the cultural crossing point for tying (or articulating) these diverse themes to one another. The point of articulation is rearticulation: taking memories apart and reassembling their bits and pieces to mean something completely different. Countermemories work less by freezing meaning and more by producing movement, slipping multiple (and often conflicting) memories into, between, and through one another to reaccent and even reverse popular memories.
Yet, movement works both ways. As the prefix implies, if countermemories take shape inside the mainstream, drawing on mainstream currents to redirect their flow, then such memories are, by definition, always open to being themselves redirected, respun, reversed. As I listened that hot September day in the Goldsboro town square, Imperial Wizard Virgil Griffin redeployed rhetoric, symbolism, and practices of protest associated with the 1960s as tools for a white supremacist resistance that empowers white Christians to get up, stand up for their rights.
In the chapters that follow I explore the performative power of such reversals, trying to make sense of their popular appeal as well as their claim to truth. Although my focus is on the contemporary Right, using religion to perform reversals is nothing new. Indeed, right-wing discourses are astoundingly repetitive; names and places might change, but the plots and conclusions remain numbingly the same. Earlier I noted the positive power created when people pick up the tools they have been given and use them for different ends; right-wing countermemories like the one spun by Griffin highlight the negative side of religion's performative power.
Attending to the negative side of countermemory is particularly important because it is not just the Virgil Griffins of the world who get caught in the underside of these interstices. As Audre Lorde reminded, the tools that lie ready to hand are most often the master's tools. As such, both those tools and our relation to them (the manner in which we reach for them, the way their weight shifts in the palm) are embedded in and obscured by vulnerability and loss, by deeply held fantasies of power as well as by passionate attachments to the terms of our subjection. Investigating the popular appeal of today's Right testifies to how hard it is to pick up the tools we have been given and use them differently-and how necessary.
Consider how Griffin produces an empowering sense of agency by representing white Christians as a victimized minority fighting for the survival of its endangered young. "I'm not in this organization for Virgil Griffin," he proclaimed. To which I promptly respond: Methinks the gentleman protests too much. Yet Griffin continued, "I want to win rights for that little boy right there." I would be the last to deny that Griffin invokes children to gain political points, but these words rang true.
Children Are the Crossing Point
Rather than dismiss this claim of care for children as "mere" rhetoric, I contend that Griffin's claim illustrates the key characteristic of contemporary conservative countermemories. The first part of my argument asserts that the Right's popular appeal hinges on its use of religion to construct countermemories; the second part of my argument suggests that these conservative countermemories hinge on children, or, more exactly, adult images of children.
From xenophobic narratives about a rebellious generation that forgets its forefathers to liberatory visions of Zion, children are the hook whereby the Right's memory-work hits home with sufficient power to reorient people's identities, histories, and worlds. Children act as affective magnets, attracting fears about sexuality and gender, race, class, and nationhood in ways that move people into the Right's orbit without requiring them actually to agree with its philosophical, doctrinal, or political positions. Conservative countermemories use children as the crossing point by which to reverse the direction of people's affective investments.
For adults, children embody the possibility of a future. Paradoxically, however, seeing children as the very hope of futurity means that children also become a site onto which people project individual and cultural fears. For just as there is no hope without fear, so there is no idealizing anything (including children) without casting something into the domain of the unideal or abject. This backhanded gesture is how ideals are produced: through an ongoing (yet disowned) relationship with an "outside" where unideal people, bodies, or things are stigmatized, which is to say held at bay-close, but not too close. Thus, the abject can never be banished to a complete remove because its presence is required, even if only as an absence.
This interactive production between hopes and fears, idealization and abjectication, love and hate is what makes the popular appeal of countermemories like Griffin's so difficult to analyze and confront. A politics of fear engenders its attractiveness, not simply by playing on how vulnerable (and violent) people can be when they are at their worst (although it does that too), but also, and even more powerfully, by playing on how vulnerable (and violent) people can be when they are trying to do "what's best." I contend that it is not so much an explicit commitment to (or attraction for) hatred, prejudice, and bigotry that hooks people into the Right's politics of fear. Rather, what renders people susceptible to, indeed, already implicated in, right-wing countermemories is their hopes for their children.
Recall the words spoken that hot September day in the Goldsboro town square: "I'm not in this organization for Virgil Griffin.... I want to win rights for that little boy right there." From this hope, Griffin spins out a series of fears: black rapists violating little six-year-old white schoolgirls, gay teachers recruiting children in public schools, welfare mothers having babies as a way to scam taxpayers and avoid working. Each of these images engenders its popular appeal by addressing, and constituting, its audience as parents. Griffin's speech engenders popular appeal by playing on these interlocking fears, which are embedded in, and therefore are constitutive of, the nation's most cherished hopes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lift high the cross by Ann Burlein Excerpted by permission.
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