In this segment of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Nate Wallace, co-host of Red Spin Sports podcast for another edition of our weekly segment “The Red Spin Report.” They discuss efforts to remove the name of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Washington-Lee University in Virginia and Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as the intellectual bankruptcy of the “Lost Cause” narrative advanced by new-confederate factions.

Nate coached high school football for the now (since desegregation & white flight) nearly all black Lee Generals (Jacksonville, Fla.) varsity football team in 2009 & 2010, and he connects how that experience -and the role team sports play more broadly in identity formation for players and alums- affects and complicates the issues of school names & mascots.

As always, the social and political contradictions that exist as a natural byproduct of living under a fundamentally exploitative economic system that continues to fuel augmenting income & wealth inequality, are unpacked and explored within the context of the still ongoing battles over appropriately characterizing the Confederate government for what it was -and the logic of its reactionary ideology still is, a criminal enterprise built on naked economic exploitation, an unparalleled system of human trafficking, & the violently enforced bondage of the most basic human rights of enslaved African peoples. The enduring mythos of "The Lost Cause" is a testament to the power of white supremacy in these United States. Why? If not for the -racist decision- to abandon the promises made to emancipated peoples in the form of ending federal military reconstruction in 1877 (a decision long in the making by the time it became official), the militarily, but not necessarily ideologically, vanquished "redeemers of the South" never could have returned to power to institute a Jim Crow system of racialized terror in the 1880's and 1890's. Furthermore, "Lost Cause" propagandists such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy would not have had the political power to advance their ahistorical narratives into K-12 school curriculums across the states of the former Confederacy and beyond; it is precisely because of the UDC's ideological victory in being able to craft racist and classist narratives about the Civil War and what it was truly fought over (i.e. SLAVERY and the "rights" of slavers to expand their "peculiar institution" into the westward and rapidly expanding settler colonial geography of the mid 19th century United States).

So the reality is as William Faulkner so accurately put it: "the past is not dead, in fact, it's not even past." Those words couldn't have been more true on Thursday, March 25th, in both the auditorium and overflow crowd in the adjacent library of Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Fla.

Checkout the 90 seconds (I -Nate- could have managed better but was caught off guard after waiting nearly 4 hours to speak) I had to speak on this issue in the tweet below. Despite the self-criticism, it still gets at the core issue: the continued power of the fallacious "Lost Cause" narrative which tries to explain away why the "morally superior" Confederacy was vanquished on the battlefield. Those who ascribe to "Lost Cause" history are invariably delusional, masters of white "grievance politics," acting as if they are somehow "the victims" while ignoring and having contempt for all who dare point out the ahistorical contradictions their arguments rest upon.

https://twitter.com/NateWallace9/status/1378023534048514054?s=20

Recorded and aired on Friday, March 26th, 2021 in Washington, DC.

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