“The South lost the Civil War and we’ve never recovered as a nation from that. There’s this angry white guy mentality that’s never gone away. They’re bitter and they want white people to rule the world.” – Eric Andre

“I would sell my mother into slavery to see a movie called V for Vendetta Part II. Okay guys, people took over. What would they have done a day later? How would they re-organize the power? The same state, how would they restructure the power?” – Slavoj Žižek

At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo drops the One Ring into the fires of Mordor and ends the threat of Sauron and his army; Middle Earth enters a new era and, in the film version in particular, there is a sense of peace, love and friendship which permeates the lives of every character. At the end of The Matrix: Revolutions, the humans and machines—after centuries of fighting with each other—reach a truce and develop, we understand, a respect for one another—celebrated by Michael Popper enthusiastically screaming out to a group of terrified humans, “the war is over!” Not to dismiss the multitude of layers which can be found in each of these works of fiction, this is a trope we’re familiar with: the story wraps up, the conflict is resolved, the musical score reaches a crescendo and everything is right in the world. Similarly, in 2005’s film adaptation of V for Vendetta, V accomplishes his goals, blows up parliament and an endless crowd of masked supporters of the cause to overthrow the tyrannical government signal to the viewer that change is coming, and for the better. The victory narrative continues—but as Slavoj Žižek once asked regarding the ending of this film: “What would they have done a day later?”

Perhaps William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished provides an answer for this, and it’s not one that would necessarily fill seats in a theater—or at least wouldn’t allow anyone to feel good after leaving the movie. Despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Confederate troops in the Civil War, the reality, as Faulkner illustrates in “Skirmish at Sartoris” is that the Confederacy doesn’t necessarily die. The Emancipation is not the destruction of the One True Ring, the end of the Civil War doesn’t bring about a change of heart for those who saw Black people as inferior—it only shifts the legal structures and when Ringo says that Blacks aren’t “n——, in Jefferson nor nowhere else” the answer to Žižek’s question emerges: the war doesn’t end—what happens next is the realization that the war “just started good” (Faulkner 199).

Legally, the war ends. This is what is meant Eric Andre says that the “South lost the Civil War.” But the reality is, as Faulkner’s narrative portrays, that Andre’s “angry white guy mentality” remains, and this is the true law, the law which placed Black people into bondage in the first place (Darville). The Civil War doesn’t erase the desire to see “white people rule the world,” because that desire cannot be distilled into some simple binary opposition of the kind that we typically see in war films, both of the fantasy and realistic variety. It is not a magical object to be burnt and removed from the world, it is not a villain who can be vanquished and written out of the script moving forward. Faulkner tells us this in “Skirmish at Sartoris” in the most cynical of ways by placing a wedding in the midst of a racist seizure of an election, preventing Blacks from voting. In this moment, the delusion of the Right to naturalize oppression, to bake it into its legal structure, is signaled through a wedding, a swearing-in of sorts, a celebration of bride and groom with the “Yaaaaay, Druisilla! […] Yaaaaaay, John Sartoris! Yaaaaaaay!” (Faulkner 210). Andre’s “angry white guy mentality” lives on through the wedding as a symbol of a return to a natural way of things for the Confederacy, and in this way they don’t so much as lose, as they make an attempt to defy, to rebel (Darville). It is a Ring that refuses to melt, a tyrannical overlord who refuses to vanish from the page, two sides of a war who refuse to agree even after the bullets stop flying. Faulkner gets us asking the kinds of questions Žižek asks at the end of V for Vendetta, and it provides an answer: What happens next is that the losing side refuses to lose.

Through The Unvanquished we can, perhaps, alter our conversation about the Civil War and speak with greater nuance about the cultural and ideological actions which take place after weapons are laid down (or at least the weapons aimed between white people, not the weapons still aimed at Blacks and minorities). Perhaps it becomes more effective to say that Civil War never truly “ended,” as some have chosen to do when speaking of nuclear disarmament in the context of the Cold War. Perhaps we need to be more clear about what ends after events such as the Civil War: Legal institutions may shift, but the underlying ideological impulse remains, and until we address that and its origins, we may end stuck with an eternal legacy of racism which no mere illusion of a “fellowship” can dissolve.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. Vintage International, 1991.

Darville, Jordan. “Eric Andre Is Insanely Honest Because Who Else Is Going To Be?” The FADER, The FADER, 8 Nov. 2017, www.thefader.com/2016/10/26/eric-andre-interview.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Slavoj Žižek: Why There Are No Viable Political Alternatives to Unbridled Capitalism.” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Nov. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7JgfB8PaAk.

About three or four years ago, various posts—original and shared—made their way through my social media streams; celebrities and friends of mine, all white like myself, had gotten it in their head that a way to creating safer spaces for those among us we condensed into the monolithic phrase “people of color,” was to openly wear a safety pin on our clothing, letting anyone know that they were “safe with us.”

I’ll confess to the reality that I gave into this for about a week. I punctured a pocket flap of my denim jacket with an obnoxiously large safety pin and went about daily life, attended some political protests, went to work, school, etc; the size of this thing reminded me of a production of The Glass Menagerie I had once heard of where the utensils used for the dinner scenes were exaggerated in size to give the sense that it was all a dream, a memory. Perhaps it was a combination of this memory, an observation of other white people I knew who were doing this and the way I felt around black and brown people I knew that keyed me in to the negative aspect of what I was doing, topped off with articles and blog posts I had come across from minority perspectives about the effect this was having: I was making the conversation about me, about me being white and about me performing a kind of allyship to make myself feel better without considering what the gesture meant.

This is what came to mind through a reading of Native Son. Jan, who arguably does wish to create a safe space for Bigger when they meet, comes from a place where he considers the reality, or at least a part of the reality, of racism and wants to create a safe space for Bigger. It’s hard to read this scene, however, with any sense that the actions are comforting for Bigger or are at all changing the power dynamics between a white and black person—let alone giving sincere contemplation to the reality of them. Jan’s handshake comes with a demand, “Come on and shake” he says and continues to “tighten” his fingers and hold on to Bigger’s hand (Wright). The scene is one of discomfort; the interiority of it reveals a nervous state in Bigger’s mind, he’s not sure what to do with Jan’s demands that he not “say sir” to him and Mary’s insistence that Jan “means it” does nothing (Wright). These actions, if anything, remind Bigger of his otherness, making him “conscious of his black skin [creating] a prodding conviction that Jan and men like him had made it so that he would be conscious of that black skin” (Wright).

Jan is, in effect, making this space about him, making it about gestures that absolve him of any guilt he may carry over his role in the system of racism. He doesn’t realize that though the words and the actions are shifted, the commands are still the same: he’s still commanding Bigger’s body and speech—he’s not allowing a space to exist where Bigger can be who he is. This is what reminds me so much of the issues surrounding the safety pins; my realization was in fact that I was demanding a kind of attention by this gesture, and the reality was that of the white people who I knew who still continued to do this, none of them were asking these questions; in fact, the safety pin allowed things to continue as they were, it was the least amount of minimal effort, a gesture of “desperate, [cheap] sincerity” as Baldwin might put it (Baldwin 23). These performative gestures did nothing to address the “badge of shame” which Bigger carries on his skin, and it, in its most destructive sense, created a “single sharp point of attention” of otherness among whiteness (Wright). It was an empty, performative gesture which made the conversation about what white people were doing, not about the ways in which we were creating harmful spaces in the first place.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. Delta Trade Paperbacks, 2000.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. Harper, 2008.