Outliving the White Lie: A Southerner’s Historical, Genealogical, and Personal Journey (UMiss Press 2024) by James Wiggins is a blend of public, family, and deeply personal history. The result is an important book that examines racism and slavery through a unique lens. As a descendant of Southerners who fought for the Confederacy, Wiggins shares his journey of growing awareness of the falsehoods he accepted as true while growing up in that most Southern of Southern places, the Mississippi Delta. Our indoctrination is so complete, that our “rehab,” he says, must become a “lifelong project of self-examination and self-reformation.”
This book is an impressive addition to the canon of literature devoted to reexamining the role of race in the development of the United States. The book differs from many others because of the author’s use of genealogical research to consider the effects of slavery on different branches of his own family. The intended audience is the general public, rather than academic scholars, yet thorough research on both a personal and a scholarly level underpins his story. Wiggins examines differences and similarities in slavery across time and countries. In many other societies, slaves were incidental to the economy. In five others (ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Brazil, Caribbean colonies, and the U.S.) slaves provided the primary source of wealth for their masters with their labor. Chattel slavery, the most brutal form of all, treated humans as moveable property that could be taken from their families and homes.
Despite the numbers of Blacks killed and abused by slavery in the United States, we have more museums devoted to the Holocaust than to slavery and Jim Crow. We persist in closing our eyes to our own national crimes, urging others to move on, to get over the past. Wiggins asserts, “We are like the privileged younger generation of an organized crime family swearing our own blamelessness but still hoarding the loot stolen by our forefathers.” In the United States, forced “Indian removal” was thus paired with coerced “African retrieval” to generate astronomical wealth” for a privileged few. Because slavery in the United States “metastasized. . . We as a nation almost died.”
Among the many topics Wiggins explores are how slave-owning Founders differed from slave-owning Confederate leaders, the negative effects of chattel slavery on the wealth and well-being of non-slave-owning Whites, the reversal of positions of our major political parties, and the rise of Donald Trump. Wiggins explodes the myth of happy Blacks joining the Confederate Army, the myth of the kind slave-owner, and the myth of a post-racial America under President Obama. Wiggins knocks Robert E. Lee off his pedestal as the quintessential Southern gentleman who opposed slavery. He did not. Wiggins reveals the truth behind Mississippi’s removal of the Confederate flag from a corner of the state flag: the state’s “real religion” demanded it. Football players threatened a boycott and National Collegiate Athletic Association threatened sanctions.
Even as the book explores the past, so much of the content speaks to major issues we are dealing with currently. Wiggins quotes Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis:
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
The message is as relevant today as it was one hundred years ago. Here’s another gem from the book that explains much of the political discord today:
It has always been possible to create a tribal sense of “us” by emphasizing shared values, but the quicker and simpler way to achieve that goal has often been to raise the specter of a common enemy, a convenient “them” for all of “us” to hate.
Only a sleepwalker wouldn’t have noticed how hateful our political discourse has become, how our tribal our allegiances have hardened. Delving into the current controversy of whether or not to remove statues of Confederates, Wiggins notes, “We can remember and honor the valor and sacrifice of individual Confederate soldiers, but we must also remember the moral bankruptcy of the cause for which they fought.” Wiggins urges us to consider that the Confederacy was willing to destroy this country to hold onto free labor resulting from human bondage (and he backs this up with quotations from Confederate leaders.) There is nothing noble, honorable, or patriotic about being willing to destroy our country.
Wiggins is a former instructor of history at Copiah-Lincoln Community College and features columnist for the Natchez Democrat.
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