your high school is skewered by John Oliver. Maybe you caught that segment on the Confederate flag and racist mascots. If not, you can check it out here before reading further.
You might think that Vestavia Hills, Alabama, is a Southern backwater, full of gun-toting, cross-burning survivalists. Not so (though I did twirl a rifle in the color guard - is that toting?). Vestavia is an upscale place. The high school has every resource it needs to pull off its multiple athletic and academic championships. My lifelong friends and fellow alums are accomplished, educated, church-going professionals. And, yes, thank you, we are all still very proud of that 1980 State Football Championship.
So what's up with the struggle to keep a plantation owner as a mascot?
The argument is for "heritage," they say. This is not about racism.
I can see now what I couldn't see as a teenager, namely that there's a certain privilege in casually disregarding how Confederate symbols continue to wound and exclude all who cannot sing Dixie with pride. Clearly, no community should imply in its symbols or narrative that if all things had gone according to God's true intentions, the South would be living into its proper legacy of profitable, slave-driven agricultural success. Fear not, many Vestavians can see this now, and are very active in the community conversation. But others persist in an effort to sideline a race discussion by claiming that the Rebelman plantation owner mascot is a "wise old man," as one of my childhood friends said on Facebook. For now, Vestavia has decided to keep the Rebel, but give him a new look.
I have the insider's privilege of understanding the "heritage" argument if you want to hear it and hate it. I don't know how the Civil War, Reconstruction or the Civil Rights eras are taught in Vestavia now, but I can tell you that in the 70's and early 80's they were barely taught at all. When I was in 8th grade, the memories of Bull Connor and those fire hoses were only 12 years and 8 miles away. I'm guessing that our black civics teacher bailed on giving us the risky truth in favor of letting someone else tell us all about it later. When I was in 9th grade, I was able to opt out of 6 weeks of Alabama history because I was Talented and Gifted. This was awesome news, since the young coach, clearly more interested in that football championship, was boring us to tears reading the textbook aloud instead of teaching. My friend and I worked on a history of Vestavia Hills as our out-of-class project, but no teacher helped us identify our hometown's white flight origins - even though Talented and Gifted kids like us could have handled it.
Perhaps the painful stories of the Civil War and Civil Rights had not yet become narratives that could be told with self-reflection and analysis, so they were instead told briefly and with a loser's bitterness. I remember more than one history book that contained less than half a page on Reconstruction - enough to demonize the Yankee "Carpetbaggers" and "Scalawags" who ravaged a defeated South.
When I was in grade school, our report cards suddenly changed from Jefferson County School cards to Vestavia Hills School District cards. As an 8-year-old, I had no way of knowing that this was Vestavia's way of avoiding desegregation and busing. Local historians remember that the Rebel mascot was chosen as part of the fight against this latest government attack on the white Southern way of life.
As kids we inherited the feelings of pride without the facts, and the symbols without their stories. In upscale, educated Vestavia, we weren't taught to hate, but we weren't taught about white privilege either. Look away, look away. That is why Vestavia Heritagers can tell you with clear eyes and full hearts that the Confederate flag and the Rebel are only about school spirit and football. They mean it.
This is the careful, non-articulated social space in which nice, safe white people live. For heaven's sake, if we bring up all of this stuff in public, we risk being told that we are not as nice as we think we are. Our elders created nice, safe physical and social space for us by developing the land over-the-mountain from the messy racial politics of downtown Birmingham. In a thousand ways, I am thankful for the safe, beautiful childhood I was given. Every child deserves one. I am thankful to my father who chose Vestavia so that his wife and kids could step up from his hard-scrabble country upbringing. I am thankful for an excellent high school experience. I am thankful for our 1980 State Football Championship (did I already mention that?).
My childhood friends and I had to grow up and leave town to find out that the rest of the world flinched when we said that we were from Birmingham. Our defensive arguments about benign "heritage" symbols and a racism-free Vestavia were met with disdain and ridicule. But sometimes we were met instead with the kind of patient, compassionate, hopeful explanation that only a loving friend, brother/sister in Christ, or tenacious faculty member will ever give you. I have tremendous gratitude for these friends and mentors, even the ones who whapped me over the head until I got it. And I am grateful to my husband, a proud black man who still has to explain things to me. At least we can laugh together when some silly white man locks his car six times at the sight of my sweet, apparently very scary husband. Beep beep beep beep beep beep. A lot of my Vestavia friends have done their own research into the part of the narrative that was not passed down to us. These journeys have included sharp and painful truthtelling, and the consequent readjustment of self, identity, and faith. A refiner's fire.
Maybe you don't care about my pain, and I'm good with that. You have your own pain to deal with. I get it. I only tell you about mine to remind you that when we set out to revise someone else's narrative around race, the revision, however righteous, will be experienced as pain. You can roll your eyes all you want at South Carolina's flag or Vestavia's Rebel, but if you pretend that the pain is so unjustifiable as to be unworthy of acknowledgement, you'll miss an opportunity to revise the narrative.
Moreover, in this era when the ascension of a black President has brought explicit, hate-fueled racial tension to the surface, I want to remind us that we can run into a different brand of racism - an ignorance that is not fueled by hate, but by a nostalgic appeal to a narrative that is no longer powerful or necessary. These are people with hearts that can be softened for change. I was... and am... one of these people.
Rev. Paige Eaves
Lead Pastor, University UMC, Irvine
Board President, Progressive Christians Uniting