So one of the books I'm reading is "Robert E. Lee and Me, A Southerners Reckoning with the Lost...
...Cause Myth."
A Southerner's Reckoning with the Lost Cause Myth, Robert E. Lee and Me.
It's by Gen. Ty Seidule (Ret.) Emeritus History Professor at West Point. He received his bachelor's degree at Washington and Lee University, which includes a chapel dedicated to, um, Robert E. Lee.
In it, General Seidule confronts the racism of his youth, growing up White in Virginia in the 1960's and 1970's, speaking about he was raised to racism and how now, as a man, a soldier, a historian, a scholar and an officer how he needs to confront it, hold it up in the light, and understand how tragically ugly it is.
I grew up in New York, and was raised to praise some distant ancestor who fought for the "Union." General Seidel perceptively announces in the early pages that there was no such thing as a "Union Army." It was the United States Army fighting armed traitors who were killing US Soldiers in order to retain a right to enslave, rape, and torture other human beings on what General Seidule insists should not be called "plantations" but rather what they were, "Enslaved Labor Farms."
But reading of General Seidule's youth, I see, with more than minor squeamishness, striking parallels to my own. After all, I watched the same Disney Movies he decries and read the same Disney books, loving, as he loved it Uncle Remus.. Perhaps I did not read the children's history books on the "Noble" Robert E. Lee, but it took me a long time to really see Lee entirely clearly for what he was, a cruel, vicious slaveholder, who betrayed an oath he took before his God, to kill his fellow Americans to preserve and perpetuate human slavery.
Any white man of my age who wants to face who he is, would do well to read this book. This is not a book for Southern White Men. It is a book for American White Men who came of age in the mid 20th century.
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