I like to visit the different Civil War blogs and participate in the Civil War social mediashpere, but I often feel like a tourist. While I have been showing up in the Civil War space on the internet daily for a decade, it sometimes feels like a foreign country, or even a different planet.
I live in a world where no one argues about the right of a state to secede from the United States or claims that “slavery was not as bad as it is made out to be.” I never meet people with views similar to those of the infamous “Viginia Flaggers,” white people who defend Confederate statues by carrying Confederate Battle Flags.
When I read Civil War social media, the frames of the discussions take some getting used to. As an old girlfriend observed several years ago, “They are filled with white people arguing with white people about non-white people.” And this absence of people of color has been particularly striking over the last few weeks. It has allowed commenters on facebook forums and message boards to refer to protesters who paint graffiti on statues in Richmond as “terrorists.” The same commenters would recoil with horror if anyone used the term “terror” to describe the fear the Confederacy imposed on African Americans.
I don’t want to paint Civil War social media with a broad brush. There is plenty of good digital scholarship going on out there on the blogs, on twitter, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, too many facebook groups and message boards appear to still be in thrall to the Lost Cause and the tacit prejudices its modern form embodies.
George Floyd’s killing has changed the way Americans are talking about race. You would not know it from the discussions on some Civil War spaces.
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Pat, I’ve come to the conclusion that if someone is defending the confederacy online, then you can bet they’re racist also. I think I would win that bet far more often than I would lose it. The problem message boards have is if they removed everyone who was racist, they would have very little traffic. The best they can do is shut down the in-your-face racism by editing it out or admonishing the culprit, but if one reads the posts of these confederacy defenders one can see what’s behind them. Message boards have to tolerate that to stay alive. They’re between a rock and a hard place if they don’t want to tolerate it.