When My Son Asked About the Confederate Statue
The fourth-grade social studies worksheet came home on a Tuesday. My son spread it across the kitchen counter, and I saw the word “Slavery” printed in bold at the top of a timeline. He pointed to a line about the Civil War and asked, “Why did people want to fight to keep slaves?” I remember standing there with a wooden spoon in my hand, the pasta water not even boiling yet, and feeling my stomach tighten.
I’m a white Southerner. My family has been in Georgia for over a hundred years. I grew up in a brick ranch house on a street named after a Confederate general, and I never thought twice about it until I was in my twenties. When I was my son’s age, history felt like a story that happened somewhere else, even though the battlefield parks were twenty minutes from my front door. My teachers talked about “states’ rights” and “the Southern economy.” They said the Civil War was about “ideals,” not about the people my ancestors were holding in bondage.
So when my son asked me that question, I had to decide how to answer. Not just what to say about the Civil War, but about all of it: the centuries of slavery, the generations under Jim Crow, the redlined neighborhoods, the schools that are still segregated in all but name. I didn’t want to lie to him the way I felt I’d been lied to.
The first thing I said was, “That’s a really good question, and it’s not an easy one to answer.” Then I turned off the stove. I didn’t want to say something lazy like “People back then thought differently.” That’s true, but it’s also a cop-out. So I sat down at the table with him, and I told him the truth: the war was fought to keep Black people enslaved. The people who fought for the Confederacy were fighting for a country built on the idea that some people could own other people. I didn’t say “our side” or “your ancestors.” I said “people in this state, people with the same last name as your grandfather.”
He looked confused. He knew his grandfather, a kindly man who taught him how to bait a fishing hook. “But Grandpa wouldn’t think that,” he said.
That was the moment I had to explain that people can be complicated, and that history isn’t a straight line. A person can love you and still have a deeply flawed heritage. A state can have beautiful mountains and lovely peach orchards and also have a brutal history of lynching and segregation. Both things are true. I told him that his great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy and that I don’t know if he owned enslaved people, but I know he was part of a system that supported the institution. I told him that understanding history means sitting with discomfort, not turning away.
The practical part came later, when I realized I’d made a mess. I’d given him a big emotional truth with no place to put it. So over the next few weeks, I did some things that I think helped him digest it, and they’re the same things I suggest to other parents when they ask me how I handle this.
First, I stopped relying on my own memory of history. My Southern upbringing gave me a visceral sense of place, but it also gave me a filter made of fear and silence. So I bought actual books written by historians who knew more than I did. I read “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi (not the youth version, the adult one) and I got my son a copy of “Before She Was Harriet” by Lesa Cline-Ransome. I read him the pages about what it meant to be enslaved, and I didn’t soften the language. He cried a little. I let him cry.
Second, I started pointing out the physical landscape. We drive past a plantation home that now hosts weddings. I used to see it and think it was pretty. Now I tell my son, “Look at that house. The people who built it didn’t get paid. They were owned.” We drive through downtown Atlanta, and I show him the street names: Forrest Avenue, Gordon Road. I explain that naming a street after someone was a way of honoring them, and that we have to decide, now, whether that’s the kind of honoring we want to keep doing.
Third, I changed how I talked about “modern” issues. When we pass a homeless encampment, I don’t just say, “Some people don’t have homes.” I say, “There was a time when Black people couldn’t buy houses in certain parts of this city because the government said so. That means some families never got the chance to build wealth, and that still affects people today.” I don’t know if every word lands, but I can see him starting to make connections. He notices that our elementary school is mostly white, and he asks me why. I tell him about school segregation and white flight and the ways those decisions continue to shape who sits next to whom.
What I’ve learned is that the impact of slavery and Jim Crow isn’t just a historical question. It’s a present-tense one. It’s in the fact that Black families in Atlanta have a median net worth of a fraction of white families. It’s in the way my son assumes he can walk into any store without being followed. It’s in the way I don’t have to explain to him what it feels like to be stopped by the police just because of the color of your skin.
As a white parent, I can’t give my child an embodied understanding of that. But I can give him context. And I can help him see that the past isn’t over. It’s in the language we use, the monuments we walk past, the unequal resources in neighboring school districts.
I’ve also had to have uncomfortable conversations with my own parents. My father once said, “Why do they keep bringing up the past?” I didn’t argue. I just asked, “If your house was stolen from your grandparents, wouldn’t you want it back? Or at least an apology?” He paused and said, “I guess I never thought of it that way.” That’s progress, maybe. Slow progress, but progress.
I don’t have this figured out. There are days when I feel like I’m making it up as I go. I stumble over how to explain the specific horrors of lynching to a nine-year-old without giving him nightmares. I worry about whether I’m overcorrecting into white guilt, or undercorrecting into distance. But I keep talking. Because I remember what it felt like to be taught a lie wrapped in a gentle, familiar voice. I remember the eerie silence that surrounded the words “slave” and “segregation” in my own classrooms.
So now, when we drive past a historical marker, I read it out loud. I question it. I ask my son, “What do you think that sign is leaving out?” Sometimes he shrugs. Sometimes he asks a question I can’t answer. I say, “I don’t know. Let’s look it up together.” That seems to work. He’s learning that history is not a settled thing. It’s a conversation we have to keep having. And as a white Southerner, I’m beginning to understand that my job isn’t to feel guilty or to defend. It’s to make sure the next generation sees the seams in the story, and has the courage to pull them apart.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » When My Son Asked About the Confederate Statue