My dad was in the KKK. By Rod Dreher. A long but interesting story.
A friend back in the US forwarded to me yesterday a Twitter thread in which a leftist journalist uncovered in archives proof of a terrible story that I had long suspected was true, but hoped against hope was not: that my late father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. Judging from his tweets, the journalist is hoping to use this terrible fact to hurt me — as if the hidden sins of my dead father were somehow my fault. …
The information appears to confirm my belief that in the 1960s, my father Ray was involved in the Klan. I can’t remember precisely how I came to suspect this about him, but I know it goes back to my childhood. The first arguments I ever had with him over race were shockingly fierce (shocking to me at the time; I was twelve or thirteen). …
That was only the first of a number of bitter arguments that would characterize my teenage years. They were almost all over race. Eventually we settled into a modus vivendi that a lot of white Southerners of my generation have done with their families: we agreed not to talk about it. I truly cannot tell you what anybody in my family believes about race today, because that conversation went into the deep freeze around 1985. It was a sensible thing to do, at least for anyone who wanted to continue to have a relationship with family. …
The political stereotype promulgated by the left is all wrong:
As much as I hated to admit it, my dad, who had grown up in rural Louisiana, and who had spent his career as the chief public health officer for our parish, knew more about actual existing black people and their culture than I did — because he had lived among them all his life!
For me, black people were mostly an abstraction. I had allowed the living, breathing human beings to be assimilated into an idea of Blackness — specifically, of black people as the eternal victims of white people.
When I first discovered Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Enduring Chill”, I was poleaxed, because O’Connor had seen right through me. It’s a story about Asbury, an intellectual son of rural Southerners, who goes off to college and comes home full of intellectual pride about how much smarter he is than his mother. Back on the farm, Asbury sought out the company of black farmhands, not because he wanted to know them as people, but because they were totems of his anger at his backwards mother, and of his pride that he was not a sinner like her. …
When I read that short story in college, I knew Asbury was me. In the story, O’Connor doesn’t justify the prejudice of Asbury’s mother, but she does use it to reveal that Asbury, in imagining himself free from sin, was guilty of a different sin. I also knew from reading that story that my dad understood things about black folks — at least in the rural South — that I did not, despite the fact that he was blinded by his own unconscious prejudice. The point is that I too was blind, but my blindness carried with it the taint of moral superiority. O’Connor showed me that both my father and I were guilty of making abstractions of black people to suit our own conflicting senses of moral order. She also showed me that this is the way it is with us human creatures. We are all at risk of assimilating our fellow creatures into ideas.
In the years that followed, I puzzled over how it was that my dad, with all his race prejudice, could more easily talk to black people than I could. He had a small farm before I was born. I puzzled over how he would cry telling the story of the love he and his old farmhand, Calvin McKnight, had for each other. I would hear about how he would go to town to bail black farmhands of his out when they had landed in jail for public drunkenness, and wonder: how does a white racist do that? At his retirement from the public health officer job decades ago, I couldn’t avoid reflecting on the fact that the racist white man who was my father had done more practical good to bring water and sewerage to the homes of poor black people in our parish than nice race liberals like me ever would, despite holding all the correct liberal views of race. …
The young liberal Dreher moves away from racist Louisiana:
As I grew older and moved away from Louisiana, I found it hard to understand how it was that my generation — the first one in West Feliciana to be educated in integrated public schools, and the first to be raised after then end of segregation — were never taught in our local public schools about Jim Crow or any of that. …
For us Southern white kids, the only source for any narrative that ran counter to white supremacy was network television. It was really true. If it hadn’t been for 1970s TV, the received narrative of our local culture would have remained unchallenged. …
My dad was born in 1934, and raised in an era in which radio and newspapers never, ever challenged the prevailing racist order. As we know, very few white Southern churches did. If you had been a white person who challenged the segregationist order, you would have put your life on the line, owing to the threat from terrorists like my father once was. It is excruciating to write that line, but if it’s true, then it must be faced. Reading the Ebony story, and being compelled to imagine the circumstances under which I could have been seduced by that same evil, was chilling to me. Why? Because it revealed how very, very close to me — historically, culturally, and even within my family — that kind of mob evil was. …
As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil passes down the middle of every human heart. Over and over I have condemned the Left for raising demons that it can’t possibly understand — this, by leaning heavily into frankly racist ideas of “whiteness,” and dividing us on questions of race. The spiritual and moral genius of Martin Luther King Jr. came from his profoundly Christian refusal to deny the humanity of those who oppressed him and his people.
It is a cruel irony of history that today, it is the progressive Left that has returned us to crude racial politics, condemning some for the color of their skin (thereby holding them responsible for the collective sins of their ancestors), and exalting others, giving them carte blanche (so to speak!) to hate freely those unlike themselves, and to give themselves a moral pass for their own failures. This is not going to end well. It’s madness to believe that this can be managed absent a reign of terror. …
Moved back to Louisiana to reconnect with his wider family, but they rejected him over the cultural schism:
Readers of my books know that I moved back to Louisiana, to my hometown, at the end of 2011, following the death of my younger sister. I wanted to be reunited with my family in Starhill, our little community outside of St. Francisville, and to love and support them all. They ended up rejecting me, and us, because of my father’s pride — a pridefulness my late sister shared. I learned in the spring of 2012, from Hannah, that her sisters would never accept me and my family because their sainted late mother had raised them to think Uncle Rod was a bad person — a city person who was Not Like Us. …
I confronted my father with this knowledge. He had the power to change the narrative, but he wouldn’t do it. To do so would be to admit that he had once been wrong, and that was something he could not do. He told me in a separate argument that the Leming girls were right to reject us, “because y’all are so damn weird.” I fell chronically ill with mononucleosis, for four years, because of stress over all this. …
I began slowly to heal, and was able to be present when my dad, a few months before he died, apologized to me for the way he had treated me. He passed from this world with peace between us — a great gift from God.
Which strained and ultimately wrecked his own marriage:
Yet there were consequences to his pride. The family system that my dad prized above everything has ceased to exist.
My marriage effectively ended chiefly as a result of my family rejecting us, and making me so sick for so long. The pressure on us as a couple was too great. Earlier this year, as you know, my wife filed for divorce.
My mom still thinks that Julie and I had it coming, this rejection, even though it destroyed us. She contemplates this alone, because after what was done to my soon-to-be-ex-wife, to me, and to our kids after we made the mistake of returning to Louisiana with the hope of serving these people, of loving them and being loved by them, I no longer have the strength or the will to accommodate my family’s illusions about itself. …
The left is so wrong about this:
I do need to say this: people on the Left who expect me to denounce my father will wait in vain. I loved him, and do love him, and am proud to be his son. Those who spite me for that can — and I say this in all due Christian charity — f*ck right off.
He was one of the greatest men I have ever known. I say that even though he is guilty of being an accomplice to great evil back in the day, and even though I have suffered personally from the effects of his pride. I can’t deny that he was, in most respects, a courageous and good man. His hidden past in the Klan does not negate the good things I know for a fact he did to help black people (nor, to be clear, do those good things negate the evil of his Klan membership). His past does not negate the way he, as a landlord, showed mercy to working-class people who could not pay their rent on time, even though we didn’t have a lot of money either, and had to make do with less. His past does not negate the many, many kindnesses I watched him show to his friends and neighbors, and even to strangers who needed a hand. And he was a tender and loving father to my sister and me, giving us a childhood for which I am deeply grateful, despite its flaws. I can say without fear that many of the best things about my own character come from his example. …
My dad thought I was a disloyal son because I didn’t share all of his beliefs. Out of their belief that they were defending their Way Of Life, he and my sister laid the groundwork to make it impossible for this prodigal to come home. My wife and I shattered our own marriage on the rocks of their hard-heartedness. And yet, I testify in all truth that I love and respect my dad, and pray for God’s mercy on him, wherever his soul resides today. …
Lessons for the next generation:
Just yesterday, standing on a street corner in Cambridge, my son, who is finishing his undergraduate degree in history, said that he would like to visit the Balkan countries some day. I advised him to read Rebecca West’s great book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, based on her travels in the Balkans in the 1930s. Read that, I said, and you’ll see how extremely difficult it is to moralize history, because every group there treated every other group there horribly at some point over the centuries. Everybody is guilty. Everybody. The distribution of guilt among the populations depends on where you draw the line in history.
I’m not sure he quite got what I was saying. I know it would have been hard for me to have grasped it at that age. But then, when I was his age, I was sure that my father was a bad man because of his antiquated racial views, and I was sure that my own heart was pure, and therefore that my judgments were sure. I was wrong, and prideful.
The fact is, all of us can fall into this crevasse. I think this is exactly what is happening now, in the Great Awokening. The Left, and all the institutions it has conquered, is throwing into the bin the wisdom of Martin Luther King, which entails the truth that the only way we can live in peace and mutual respect is to judge each other not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.
This is what Christianity teaches. We no longer live in a Christian culture. There was never a Christian paradise on this earth, but one reason why King’s leadership was so effective in the face of Southern segregation was that he highlighted the utter hypocrisy of these men and women claiming to be followers of Christ, but oppressing people of color so violently. King’s message could only have worked on a country that still harbored memory of having been Christian. …
People on the Left who traffick in racial identity politics are calling up demons on the Right that have barely been subdued, historically speaking. The great evil that was the Ku Klux Klan has, for now, been defeated. But hating people on the basis of their race, and holding them collectively guilty for things their ancestors, or even people of past generations who share their skin color, did — that’s the road to hell. …
This woke ideology that holds all whites equally responsible for the sins of the past is not only unjust, it is stupid if the goal is to create an America where we can all live in peace and mutual respect.
A searingly honest piece. Read it all at the link.
