Ta-Nehisi Coates, Aug 4, 2017<\/p>\n
HBO\u2019s Confederate<\/em> takes as its premise an ugly truth that black Americans are forced to live every day: What if the Confederacy wasn\u2019t wholly defeated?<\/p>\n HBO\u2019s prospective series Confederate <\/em>will offer an alternative history of post-Civil War America. It will ask the question, according to co-creator David Benioff, \u00a0\u201cWhat would the world have looked like \u2026 if the South had won?\u201d A swirl of virtual protests and op-eds have greeted this proposed premise. In response, HBO has expressed \u201cgreat respect\u201d for its critics but also said it hopes that they will \u201creserve judgment until there is something to see.\u201d<\/p>\n This request sounds sensible at first pass. Should one not \u201creserve judgment\u201d of a thing until after it has been seen? But HBO does not actually want the public to reserve judgment so much as it wants the public to make a positive judgment. A major entertainment company does not announce a big new show in hopes of garnering dispassionate nods of acknowledgement. HBO executives themselves judged Confederate<\/em> before they\u2019d seen it\u2014they had to, as no television script actually exists. HBO hoped to communicate that approval to its audience through the announcement. And had that communication been successful, had Confederate<\/em> been greeted with rapturous anticipation, it is hard to imagine the network asking its audience to tamp down and wait.<\/p>\n HBO\u2019s motives aside, the plea to wait supposes that a problem of conception can be fixed in execution. We do not need to wait to observe that this supposition is, at best, dicey. For over a century, Hollywood has churned out well-executed, slickly produced epics which advanced the Lost Cause<\/a> myth of the Civil War. These are true \u201calternative histories,\u201d built on \u201calternative facts,\u201d assembled to depict the Confederacy as a wonderland of virtuous damsels and gallant knights, instead of the sprawling kleptocratic police state it actually was. From last century\u2019s The <\/em>Birth of a Nation<\/em> to this century\u2019s Gods and Generals<\/em>, Hollywood has likely done more than any other American institution to obstruct a truthful apprehension of the Civil War, and thus modern America\u2019s very origins. So one need not wait to observe that any foray by HBO into the Civil War must be met with a spirit of pointed inquiry and a withholding of all benefit of the doubt.<\/p>\n Skepticism must be the order of the day. So that when Benioff asks \u201cwhat would the world have looked like \u2026 if the South had won,\u201d we should not hesitate to ask what Benioff means by \u201cthe South.\u201d He obviously does not mean the minority of\u00a0\u00a0white Southern unionists, who did win. And he does not mean those four million enslaved blacks, whom the Civil War ultimately emancipated, yet whose victory was tainted. Comprising 40 percent of the Confederacy\u2019s population, this was the South\u2019s indispensable laboring class, its chief resource, its chief source of wealth, and the sole reason why a Confederacy existed in the first place. But they are not the subject of Benioff\u2019s inquiry, because he is not so much asking about \u201cthe South\u201d winning, so much as he is asking about \u201cthe white<\/em> South\u201d winning.<\/p>\n The distinction matters. For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South\u2019s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy\u2019s leaders were back in the country\u2019s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South.<\/p>\n Knowing this, we do not have to wait to point out that comparisons between Confederate<\/em> and The Man in the High Castle<\/em> are fatuous. Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.<\/p>\n The symbols point to something Confederate<\/em>\u2019s creators don\u2019t seem to understand\u2014the war is over for them, not for us. At this very hour, black people all across the South are still fighting the battle which they joined during Reconstruction\u2014securing equal access to the ballot\u2014and resisting a president whose resemblance to Andrew Johnson is uncanny<\/a>. Confederate<\/em> is the kind of provocative thought experiment that can be engaged in when someone else\u2019s lived reality really is fantasy to you, when your grandmother is not in danger of losing her vote, when the terrorist attack on Charleston evokes honest sympathy, but inspires no direct fear. And so we need not wait to note that Confederate<\/em>\u2019s interest in Civil War history is biased, that it is premised on a simplistic view of white Southern defeat, instead of the more complicated morass we have all around us.<\/p>\n And one need not wait to ask if Benioff and D.B. Weiss are, at any rate, the candidates to help lead us out of that morass or deepen it. A body of work exists in the form of their hit show Game of Thrones<\/em>. We do not have to wait to note the persistent criticism of that show is its depiction of rape. Rape\u2014generational rape, mass rape\u2014is central to the story of enslavement. For 250 years the bodies of enslaved black women were regarded as property, to be put to whatever use\u2014carnal and otherwise\u2014that their enslavers saw fit. Why HBO believes that this duo, given their past work, is the best team to revisit that experience is a question one should not wait to ask.<\/p>\n And all this must be added to a basic artistic critique\u2014Confederate<\/em> is a shockingly unoriginal idea, especially for the allegedly avant garde HBO. \u201cWhat if the white South had won?\u201d may well be the most trod-upon terrain in the field of American alternative history. There are novels about it, comic books about it, games about it, and a mockumentary about it. It\u2019s been barely a year since Ben Winters published Underground Airlines<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Storytellers have the right to answer any question they choose. But we do not need to wait to examine all the questions that are not being chosen: What if John Brown had succeeded? What if the Haitian Revolution had spread to the rest of the Americas? What if black soldiers had been enlisted at the onset of the Civil War? What if Native Americans had halted the advance of whites at the Mississippi? And we need not wait to note that more interesting than asking what the world would be like if the white South had won is asking why so many white people are enthralled with a world where the dreams of Harriet Tubman were destroyed by the ambitions of Robert E. Lee.<\/p>\n The problem of Confederate<\/em> can\u2019t be redeemed by production values, crisp writing, or even complicated characters. That is not because its conceivers are personally racist, or seek to create a show that endorses slavery. Far from it, I suspect. Indeed, the creators have said<\/a> that their hope is to use science fiction to \u201cshow us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could.\u201d And that really is the problem. African Americans do not need science-fiction, or really any fiction, to tell them that that \u201chistory is still with us.\u201d It\u2019s right outside our door. It\u2019s in our politics. It\u2019s on our networks. And Confederate <\/em>is not immune. The show\u2019s very operating premise, the fact that it roots itself in a long white tradition of imagining away emancipation, leaves one wondering how \u201clost\u201d the Lost Cause really was.<\/p>\n It\u2019s good that the show-runners have brought on two noted and talented black writers\u2014Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman. But one wonders: If black writers, in general, were to have HBO\u2019s resources and support to create an alternative world, would they choose the world dreamed up by the progenitors of the Ku Klux Klan? Or would they address themselves to other less trod areas of Civil War history in the desire to say something new, in the desire to not, yet again, produce a richly imagined and visually beguiling lie?<\/p>\n We have been living with the lie for so long. And we cannot fix the lie by asking \u201cWhat if the white South won?\u201d and waiting for an answer, because the lie is not in the answer, but in the question itself.<\/p>\n