Fun fact: The UC Davis Office of Undergraduate and Prestigious Scholarships administers funds from the Ivy Douglas Ostrom Scholarship for descendants of Confederate Veterans or an old and notably worthy family of the South. financialaid.ucdavis.edu/scholarships/campus/awards/restricted.html These arent public funds, but the funds of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Their emblem is a five-pointed star, in the center of which is a cotton boll. Following the patenting of Eli Whitneys cotton gin, a mechanical device that separates cotton fibers from the cotton seed, the slave population of the South increased from 700,000 to three million by 1850. (1) Women at least 16 years old who are blood descendants, lineal or collateral, of men and women who served honorably in the Army, Navy or Civil Service of the Confederate States of America, or gave Material Aid to the Cause (2) are eligible for membership in the UDC. The Cause they refer to is short for the Lost Cause, which is an interpretation of the American Civil War (1861–1865) that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in the best possible terms. (3). One tenet of the Lost Cause, according to the Encyclopedia Virginia, is the assertion that African Americans were faithful slaves, loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom (3). This, of course, romantically obscures the long history of slave rebellion and resistance reaching back to the introduction of slavery to the Americas and the torture and genocide committed against their bodies, families, culture, and continent by European settlers and later by the old and notably worthy families of the South that this scholarship honors. Who cares right? Its just money for students, and thats what we want isnt it? Trouillot said that history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both what happened and that which is said to have happened (4). When the University of California honors the administration of private funds according to criteria provided by the UDC, it is legitimizing the UDCs historical narrative of antebellum romance and white supremacy. There are students whose education is literally subsidized by the maintenance of the idea that slavery was an honorable cause to fight for. Thats not the #powerofpublic. Thats the power of narrative. 1. teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24411 2. hqudc.org/about_udc/index.htm 3. encyclopediavirginia.org/Lost_Cause_The#start_entry 4. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Power and the Production of History. Pg. 2.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 20:30:04 +0000
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