The Post-Racial Society
By 
Whites in North Carolina who can read between the lines–Racism, fuck yeah!
Confederate supporters arrived first, establishing a Saturday morning base near the town waterfront with “Save our history” signs and Civil War information sheets. Some sported red MAGA hats and shirts that proclaimed “America First,” or, in one case, “If you don’t like Trump then you probably won’t like me and I’m OK with that.”
The opposition showed up about two hours later carrying stark white signs with black letters: “Remove this statue.”
For the next two hours, as they’ve done nearly every Saturday for the past three years, the groups mingled with confused tourists in a seemingly unending fight over a Confederate monument at the heart of this historic town, whichis nearly 60 percent Black.
What started as an effort to promote racial unity in Edenton by reconsidering its most prominent downtown symbol has done the opposite. A chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, long extinct locally,sprang to life. The forgotten Confederate Memorial Day was resurrected and commemorated again last month with a wreath-laying and roll call of the rebel dead.
And the town council, which had formed a Human Relations Commission in 2020to consider steps for racial reconciliation, last fall came up with a novel way to handle the statue of a generic Confederate soldier:
Take it down from the waterfront. Add it to the courthouse.
Facing north, the green-patina figure of the soldier — one of many that were once found throughout the South — stands atop a stone column on a grassy traffic median where the town market once stood. Enslaved people were bought, sold or offered for hire on that spot.
The Civil War is a small part of the long heritage of Edenton, a town of about 4,500 located in Chowan County near the western end of Albemarle Sound. Today the town thrives on tourism, its streets an Americana confection of pre-Revolution Colonial homes next to Victorian fantasies next to 1920s cottages. Broad Street is lined with shops and restaurants, a promenade of quaintness leading straight down to the water and the Confederate monument.
Now mired in legal challenges, moving the monumentwould be the first time in a decade that any locality in the United States has added a Confederate statue on courthouse grounds, according to a study published last month by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation.
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Head researcher Rivka Maizlish said the slowdown is at least partly attributable to the revival of Lost Cause sentiment by President Donald Trump, whohas called for reinstating Confederate names on military bases andhasissued an executive order that could restore Confederate monuments to federal property.
The tone from the White House gives an extra sense of empowerment to those who have come out to defend the Edenton monument every weekend for the past three years. On a recent sunny Saturday, Ron Toppin, 80, and two helpersset up a canopy over tables neatly lined with trays of Confederate information sheets and hit the sidewalk two hours before their opponents arrived.
Trump’s election “made the country a whole lot better,” said Toppin, whose late wife used to organize the informational materials for the group and who said his great-great-grandfather was a rebel soldier captured by the Union in 1863. “We’ve got America back.”
Just in case you weren’t clear what Trump means to his base, though I know you all are in fact clear on that.