Negotiating strategies in New Orleans’s memory-work: white fragility in the politics of removing four Confederate-inspired monuments

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore the controversy surrounding the removal of four Confederate-inspired monuments in New Orleans through the narratives of key figures and organizations. We show how pro- and anti-monument supporters employed particular tactics that informed strategies on a continuum, from indirect to direct, to deny and to address white supremacy in the landscape and beyond. These strategies differed in their degree of deference to whiteness, deference that reveals how white fragility is interwoven into the politics of social justice and equity in the memorial landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Confederate
• memorialization
• memory-work
• New Orleans
• public space
• white fragility
• white supremacy

Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. We especially thank the journal’s editor, Steven Schnell, who offered invaluable guidance as we shaped our theoretical argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Sheehan earned her doctorate in Geography from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University. She is a broadly trained cultural geographer with research interests in gender, identity, memory, popular culture, and race, specifically concerning public space and cultural landscapes.

Jennifer Speights-Binet is an Associate Professor of Geography and currently serves as Chair of the Geography and Sociology department at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. She received her doctorate in Geography from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Her research interests include cultural landscapes, literary urbanism, and the memorialization of public space.

Notes

1 Confederate monuments continue to be erected. For example in the 2000s, North Carolina communities have added 35 Confederate monuments (Hampton 2017), and Arizona has erected four (DeBerry 2017b).

2 We use the terms dialogic and counter-monument here to refer to any attempt to reject or modify the traditional meaning of monuments. Counter-monuments explicitly work against established monuments, rejecting the historical memory that they present, whereas dialogic monuments offer an addition to or pairing with existing monuments, with the purpose of complicating the history that is being memorialized (Dwyer 2004, Stevens et al. 2012, Osborne 2017).

3 While some assumed that the renaming of Lee Circle and Jefferson Davis Parkway would follow the removal of the Lee and Davis statues, these street names remain.

4 The Liberty Place monument was removed in 1989 for street repairs and after their completion was initially not re-erected. In the courts, however, supporters, including white supremacist David Duke, argued that because street improvements used federal funds and the monument had been designated as a historical marker, it should be re-installed. They won. Though the city had declared the monument a nuisance in 1993, the city relocated the obelisk to a less visible, but still prominent, location on Iberville Street passed daily by locals and tourists alike (Reed 1993, see also Gill 1997, Dwyer and Alderman 2008, Chadwick 2017).

5 While other local and national newspaper coverage warrant a comparative study concerning how narratives surrounding the Confederate-inspired monument controversy were reported upon, that is not the purpose of this article.

6 While the Lost Cause and heritage narratives as well as the Southern Strategy more broadly are the main tools used to defy opponents of memorializing the Confederacy, it is not the only means to buttress a favorable position about the Confederacy. Scholars also show that memory and commemoration in the form of vigils, protests, pilgrimages and pageants, and naming, for example, may embody white dominance through repeated performances (Hoelscher 2003, Rose-Redwood 2008). These performances connect with the material landscape and discourse in the public sphere, to render them, whatever their temporal dimension from daily to yearly, as fixes to white supremacy too.

7 The Lost Cause Myth has a long history and robust academic literature exploring the evolution of the narrative. A review of such literature is beyond the scope of this paper. For additional reading, see Cox (2003), Foster (1987), McPherson (2003/1988), Blight (2001), and Gallagher and Nolan (2010/2000).

8 Lee was never in New Orleans.

9 While removing or keeping the Confederate monuments have black and white support in Louisiana, the poll conducted by Ron Faucheux, a political consultant, found that 5% of white voters compared to 46% of black voters supported monument removal. This subject is part of our ongoing research (McClendon 2015g). Yet, we would like to note that this is not “simply” a black and white issue, literally and figuratively.