Background Information

We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.

Audre Lorde, 1983

MONUMENTAL MYTHOLOGY & THE WHITE-WASHING OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The Neutral Ground highlights America’s most enduring contradiction - that a country dedicated to freedom only exists because of its history of oppression. This film also exposes the enduring structures founded upon the logic that both, colonizers and slave owners, used to justify the devastation they perpetrated upon millions of Indigenous and Black people. Supremacist thought, specifically, white supremacy was a foundational “American” idea. This contradiction was present when Thomas Jefferson declared the “self-evident” truths that “all men are created equal” while he forcibly (and legally) enslaved at least 150 human beings (Horton & Horton, 2006). Institutionalized white supremacy was present in 1964 Mississippi, when Civil Rights Activists engaged in strategic campaigns to register Black Americans to vote despite laws that explicitly suppressed their ability to exercise equal freedoms as whites. These founding contradictions are being resisted today as we witnessed, in March 2020, when social unrest on a similar scale to the outrage following Martin Luther King, Jr’s 1968 assassination erupted across American cities. These uprisings expressed a collective sentiment of solidarity against anti-Black racism and police brutality following the police killing of George Floyd. Importantly, as The Neutral Ground makes visible: histories of oppression are exactly as long as histories of resistance.

This film asks contemporary viewers to reckon with the inheritances and legacies of these foundational contradictions and our national inheritance of the violence of white supremacy. Today, debates around memory, history, and identity as seen in The Neutral Ground are ones that take place in public spaces, public schools, and public discourse. We are asked to grapple with what false histories these monuments represent and what feelings they continue to inspire in individuals.

Origins of Lost Cause Mythology

The Civil War was a battle over the institution of slavery. After the Confederate lost the Civil War, and the 13th Amendment abolishing the institution of slavery was ratified, and in response to Reconstruction, the Lost Cause myth was created to minimize and manipulate the truth that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. This myth framed the Confederacy’s goals as heroic. The term "Lost Cause" dates back to 1866 when Edward A. Pollard, a proslavery propagandist and graduate of the University of Virginia, coined the term and set out to exonerate Southern whites. Origins of the false “history” that constitute the Lost Cause mythology began a memory tradition that reframed pro-slavery white Confederates as fighting for what they reframed as a “noble” cause. They used the language of “state’s rights” to manipulate the truth of history. This momentum and myth has been legitimized not only through language and reframing, but also through white supremacist power structures in place in the 19th Century that spanned politics, law, and - as the film highlights - education.

The Lost Cause myth was created, positioned as truth (then rendered as history) by white people with power and gained strength as it was passed on as a way for family members to cope with the loss of Confederate soldiers. The Lost Cause is fiction: it is a story that includes plot twists where defeated Confederates framed slavery as good for Black people, and the cause of the Civil War as a war over states’ rights and not slavery. Whites’ and Confederates’ desires to be “good” or “innocent” in the eyes of history has had devastating and lasting effects on how we collectively remember the cruelty of white supremacy within the institution of slavery. The power of the Lost Cause mythology, and the way white people co-opted the position of victimhood, continues to impact America’s capacity to collectively reckon with the reality of American Slavery and to acknowledge the truth of our nation.