All my life I have had fantasies of freeing slaves. I believe I have this fantasy more than most because I was raised in Illinois—Land of Lincoln, home to the Great Emancipator—and came of age in a house with numerous Civil War books, including the ubiquitous Time-Life series of hard back, faux-leather-bound books (though they sure did smell like leather) with gold embossed lettering and gold-edged pages. These were some of the first serious books I attempted to read.

Further fueling this fantasy was the release of the film Glory, which I saw in the theater with my best friend who was a drummer boy in a Civil War reenactment group. The story of the all-black Massachusetts 54th regiment and the soundtrack, which I purchased with my paper route money, featuring the angelic voices of the Boys Choir of Harlem and martial drumbeats, created in adolescent me a near-ecstatic level of pride and pathos.

Later, as a college junior, a course simply titled “Southern Literature” introduced me to the power of Faulkner, O’Connor, Toomer, and Wright—writers whose personal struggles with the “peculiar” history of the South are very often expressed in plots shot through with psychological and physical violence.

And this isn’t even to mention my life-long love of jazz music and the college radio show I disc jockeyed, and how one night I stumbled upon a recording of Dizzy Gillespie’s Manteca in which he chants, “I’ll never go back to Georgia; I’ll never go back to Georgia” over and over, a reference I later discovered to the segregation and overall poor treatment his band members faced while touring in that state.

All of this is to say that my view of the South, seen through art and literature, was that it was a backwards, violent, and racist place.

Now, living in Virginia, teaching at a small women’s college that used to be plantation, a college that has records in its yearbooks of student minstrel shows, these fantasies of freeing the enslaved have returned with a vengeance, as the notoriously cruel month of April has been proclaimed by Governor Bob McDonnell Confederate History Month.

You have no doubt heard that this proclamation, punctuated by the officious-sounding “Whereas,” makes no mention of the institution of slavery. McDonnell’s defenders have argued that this is a noble rhetorical move meant to promote unity and healing: the proclamation makes numerous references to understanding how “the past” informs “the present,” and how the way “we” lived then informs the way “we” live now.

I find myself obsessively using scare quotes here in order to call attention to the clumsily, broadly painted strokes—strokes so broad that I can’t help but read between them.

For me, written boldly between these strokes is “fear”—fear that evoking the “s” word (slavery) will stir up bad blood in the state that saw more fighting than any other and supplied more generals than any other.

And while I am not promoting gloating, or a shame campaign, let’s be honest, we all know first-hand how fear can motivate the omission of fact or artful obfuscation of truth. We like to say that we are being polite or tactful, but really, deep down, we know that it’s just plan lying.

I’m not calling the Governor a liar—he seems genuinely apologetic for the omission—but I am completely comfortable saying that race is something that Americans lie about. We tell ourselves that race no longer matters, especially the younger generations who speak and behave as though they single-handedly, due to their laid back, live and let live ways and their social networking software, are responsible for this “post-racial” era that paved the way for the election of a black man to the presidency.

Now, well into my third decade, living in Virginia working and living on the site of a former plantation, I do not feel the subversive thrill I felt so keenly at fourteen when I listened to Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet or watched Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. Now I just feel ill—ill that we are still lying to ourselves about the importance of race in American history and culture.

It’s an illness borne from the fact that it seems that defending McDonnell is defending the decision to strike slavery from the historical record because it is no longer “fair” to discuss it or its legacy, though it most definitely lives on, especially in places where slaves are buried (like on the campus where I teach), or in a city like Detroit that still bears scars from race riots that took place fifty years ago.

To defend the institution of Confederate History Month sans slavery is like saying that the statute of limitations has run out on slavery; that to mention it in the Governor’s proclamation would be to violate the law of Double Jeopardy.

But let it not go unsaid that the North has its own legacy of racial violence. Lynchings took place in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Indiana was long home to a very active branch of the KKK. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was pelted with rocks and spit upon when he marched in Skokie, IL, a western suburb of Chicago.

So, sure, the roots of the Civil War are various and complex, but is it really unfair, irresponsible or historically inaccurate to say that the North’s victory forever marks the beginning of the end of slavery? (That rates mentioning, right?)

I’m not going to pretend to understand what it’s like to be a Southerner; to have been born and bred in the South, to have relatives who bravely fought and died in the War Between the States. I don’t know what it’s like to feel so embattled and reviled.

What I do know is that in our great desire to form a coherent story about who we are and where we come from, romance takes the place of tragedy, heroism the place of cowardice, certainty the place of ambiguity and complexity.