By Shalise Manza Young
Pete Hegseth is proud of traitorous enslavers and Ku Klux Klan leaders.
He said so himself.
Some of us have long suspected it to be true, and anyone who wanted to pay attention —say, the 50 cowards on the Republican side of the aisle in the Senate who voted for him to hold one of the most consequential roles on the planet—could have seen it, too.
As he fired or seemingly forced out Black people of import in the military once he was sworn in as Defense secretary, all of the people far, far, far more qualified to hold his job than he will be in this or nine more lifetimes, Hegseth could hide behind the story of the administration change and claim that President Donald Trump was entitled to install his people in those posts.
But during a recent Fox News interview, Hegseth decided he wasn’t going to camouflage his anti-Blackness in thinly veiled justifications anymore.
Asked about his decision to re-install a blatantly pro-slavery statue in Arlington National Cemetery that had been removed at the recommendation of Congress in 2023, Hegseth—born and raised in the Union state of Minnesota—used his angry voice to explain his racism reasoning:
“We recognize our history. We don’t erase it. We don’t follow the woke lemmings off the cliff that want to tear down statues…. The Reconciliation Monument will return to Arlington where it belongs to recognize the service of Americans…. We’re not tearing stuff down. We’re done with that. We’re putting statues back, we’re putting paintings back. We’re recognizing our history, we’re restoring the names of bases as we’ve done across the country because we’re proud of our history…. We’re going to teach it, we’re going to live it, and we’re going to fight for it.”
Setting the white supremacist jargon aside for a moment, the Confederates in that statue were traitors to the country you claim to love, Pete. They represented 11 states that wrote articles of secession. I know that’s a big word for you, so let’s make it a little easier to understand: they left the federal Union. They abandoned it. Their service was not as Americans.
They said they didn’t want to be part of the United States anymore if they had to stop owning human beings as property, raping them with impunity, beating and torturing them for sport, buying and selling them in town squares. They killed thousands to defend their ability to do so.
They were losers, Pete.
Though on second thought that might explain your affinity for them.
Hegseth called it the Reconciliation Monument, but it is more commonly known as the Arlington Confederate Memorial, and, like many of the statues lionizing miscreant traitorous slaveholders, it was erected during the Jim Crow era, a reminder to Black people to never forget their second-class status, though in a way that was less violent than the wanton lynchings that occurred by the thousands during that period.
It is over 30 feet tall, with Confederate soldiers rushing to save a white woman, naturally. There are two Black people depicted: an enslaved man who is the valet for his owner as he fights in the war, and an enslaved woman caring for the children of her owner during battle.
One of the statue’s planners was Alabama Congressman Hilary Herbert, who wrote a 79-page book lauding its construction and explaining its meaning, which is kind of weird. But Herbert didn’t mince words on why the Black man and woman are included on the statue: It was to illustrate “the kindly relations that existed all over the South between the master and the slave. … The astonishing fidelity of the slaves everywhere during the war.”
Nothing makes slavery apologists happier than portraying the enslaved as happy-go-lucky dullards joyfully singing in the fields and doing everything they can for “Massuh,” the great man who allowed them a roof over their heads, so grateful for his benevolence they would follow him anywhere.
The day before Hegseth announced that the Confederate memorial would return, the U.S. National Parks Service said it will restore a statue of Confederate officer Albert Pike in Washington, D.C. After the war, Pike is believed to have been a grand dragon of the KKK in Arkansas; there were Albert Pike Klan chapters in Illinois and other states.
These are the people the world will know the United States, under Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, reveres: violent turncoats whose cause célèbre was treating human beings like cattle solely because their skin was darker, and a hooded hate group that just happened to form after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and that rose again during Jim Crow.
Hegseth is also making it clear that when he says “we recognize our history,” the “we” is white people recognizing their history in this country. No one else matters. There is no history but white history, almost always the history of white men, told through their eyes.
Whitewashing the truth.
Pages on government websites devoted to civil rights leaders disappear and reappear. Plans to name Navy ships for the fearless Harriet Tubman, towering legal titan Thurgood Marshall, and labor leader Dolores Huerta are being reconsidered or have been scrapped.
Their contributions will never be acknowledged or celebrated as long as Hegseth is in office.
And let’s not overlook Hegseth’s last sentence on Fox. It was frighteningly telling, particularly for those of us whom Hegseth so clearly despises.
“We’re going to teach it, we’re going to live it, and we’re going to fight for it.”
Teaching a history of brutality, re-living a history of cruelty, fighting to praise a history of savagery—is that what he means?
Given the growing pile of evidence, it’s hard to think the answer isn’t an angry yes.
Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.