I created this website, around this time of year, back in 2016, and I find now to be a good opportune moment to return to this blog.

I’m home in Texas, teaching, and enacting the pedagogy I’ve been working on since the Fall of 2016. And importantly, I have the opportunity to work with the young people of central Texas; as they develop their own ideas about and identities within the world, we (teachers) have many critical opportunities to help them learn, grown, and discover issues and themselves as they produce the work of the Composition classes we teach.

A friend of mine recently commented about the now—as of early March 2022—ongoing invasion of Ukraine and other issues in the world as stemming from conflicting identities. In our conversations, we’ve discussed the history of issues being at odds with the way that people want to remember those issues. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the history of the South.

Two days ago, March 2nd, Texas celebrated its independence from Mexico. And around the same time, I’ve been getting targeted ads in my social feeds advertising separatist sentiment and an overwhelming amount of Confederate iconography. I think this could be due to a number of reasons, but because the research of my master’s degree focused so heavily on narratives of nation and identity in the South during Reconstruction, apps and sites are peddling images of the Stars and Bars, and other icons to me, to whatever end.

Naturally, as someone who’s been committed to examining and understanding Southern identity following the financial and social destruction of “The South” during the Civil War, I’ve wanted to read the comments of folks whose identities are tied up in, and in some cases founded on, the Myth of the Lost Cause. In some cases, I put in my oar.

A lot of what I’m seeing is that the “Civil War wasn’t about slavery” it was about “states’ rights” or “economic policy” or “banking and sovereignty infringement” and so on and so forth. But what many folks don’t realize—because they are so caught up in the narrative that the separatists have sold to people—is that the documents of history, themselves, set out the priorities of the seceding states. In Texas, this takes the form of the Declaration of Causes (1861, Austin, GPO). In that declaration, Texas explicitly states:

She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal
constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as
a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the
servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first
settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future
time. 

And by showing this to people I’ve gotten two kinds of responses—deflection or the cessation of discussion.

Where I have plenty of bibliography for folks to read, that isn’t the kind of efficacious argument that we need to engage in to persuade people about the nature of these fights. And the way that I consider myself doing this work is in one other way: I’m hopeful that other people reading these comments, not those that they’re directed to, are learning something. The people who haven’t yet made up their minds, or the people who are still thinking about the issues and are willing to learn more.

But I think there must be some way of reaching people whose identities are tied up in these narratives of “Lost Cause.” In the coming weeks, I want to reflect on these issues: the secession of Texas from Mexico as well as the secession of Texas from the United States—to the end that understanding these narratives of dissonance might give us some insight into the political upheaval we see in our world, today.

In this series of posts, I’ll include academic and non-academic sources on narrative, the Myth of the Lost Cause, and Texas’ (actual) history.

Stay tuned.

Image retrieved from Wikimedia at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Texas_Declaration_of_Causes_of_Secession.djvu/2