In plain sight
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Sometimes America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a hastily passed voter suppression law that many are calling the new, new Jim Crow on Thursday night, surrounded by a half-dozen white men, he did so in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved.
The fitting symbolism is somehow both shocking and unsurprising. In using the antebellum image of the notorious Callaway Plantation — in a region where enslaved Black people seeking freedom were hunted with hounds — in Wilkes County, Ga., as the backdrop for signing a bill that would make it a crime to hand water to a thirsty voter waiting on Georgia’s sometimes hours-long voter lines, the GOP governor was sending a clear message about race and human rights in the American South.
Clear and ferocious. As Bunch notes, plantations weren’t just places where Black people were compelled to do hard labor for zero dollars, they were places where Black people were subject to horrific violence at the whim of the people who presumed to “own” them. Kemp’s pretty picture of the plantation is not all that far from Camp Auschwitz guy’s sweatshirt.
The portrait of the plantation was the starkest reminder of Georgia’s history of white racism that spans slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and today’s voter purges targeting Black and brown voters — but it wasn’t the only one. At the very moment that Kemp was signing the law with his all-white posse, a Black female Georgia lawmaker — Rep. Park Cannon — who’d knocked on the governor’s door in the hopes of watching the bill signing was instead dragged away and arrested by state troopers, in a scene that probably had the Deep South’s racist sheriffs of yesteryear like Bull Connor or Jim Clark smiling in whatever fiery hellhole they now inhabit.
Why was Kemp’s signing of the bill a behind closed doors ceremony in the first place? Is that normal? If it is, why is it?
As Kemp’s tweet of the closed-door bill-signing ceremony was making the rounds Thursday night, I had questions about the Old South-looking scene that the governor’s office had centered in the photo. Thanks to crowd-sourcing and specifically the help of my Twitter pal Brendan McGinn (@TheSeaFarmer), I learned that the painting is called “Brickhouse Road — Callaway PLNT” (PLNT for “Plantation … subtle, right?) by Siberian-born artist Olessia Maximenko, who now resides in the area of Wilkes County in east-central Georgia.
Today, the Callaway Plantation is a 56-acre historic site where — as the Explore Georgia website cheerily notes — tourists can get “a glimpse into the by-gone era of working plantations in the agricultural South.”
I’ve seen advertising like that; it always makes my hair stand on end. Camp Auschwitz, baby.
In short, the Callaway Plantation is a monument to Georgia’s history of brutal white supremacy that unfortunately didn’t disappear when Mariah Callaway and the other enslaved people were emancipated in 1865. By the 1890s, Georgia’s white ruling class enacted a series of harsh Jim Crow laws to segregate all public facilities and block most Black people from voting. The state, for all of Atlanta’s “Too Busy To Hate” bluster, was a KKK hotbed in the 1960s’ civil rights era, and in the 1980s Georgia blazed a trail into the new era of mass incarceration and voter suppression, epitomized by Kemp and his purges of legitimate voters and other Jim Crow-inspired tactics.
In 2021, it’s tempting to call Kemp signing the bill in front of the plantation painting “ironic,” when in fact it’s all too fitting. Understanding the symbolism here helps us to understand what’s really important, that the voting law is the latest cruel iron link in an unbroken chain of white supremacy that extends all the way back to 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in North American soil. But familiarity shouldn’t deaden our sense of outrage.
I’m not at all tempted to call it “ironic.” It’s about as ironic as a kick in the face.
H/t What a Maroon
They just get more and more grotesque. Trump gave them permission to become openly supremacist; he showed them that there was no penalty, and that a large number of voters (fortunately not the majority, but enough to swing an election using an archaic system designed to keep power in the hands of rural landowners) will not only not care, but will vote for you because of it.
One wonders if this will persuade such as Ben Shapiro & Coel to go on rehearsing right-wing talking points and claiming against all the evidence that institutional racism does not exist. I suspect not.
I have just been having a squabble on the internet with a set of creationists over one of Ray Comfort’s pathetic videos, and I must say that the deniers of institutional racism do not seem to be much different in their ways to the deniers of evolution.