Wow, this is far and away the most offensive book I’ve ever read – and that is really saying something, because I kind of read offensive literature for a hobby (i.e. this blog). The venomous and unrelenting racism is bad enough, but one of my privileges as a white person is being able to close the book and go do something else for a bit when that stuff starts getting to me. Plus white supremacy is the great-grandpa of all dead horses that has been getting flogged for 500 years now, so it’s not like Dixon had anything original or particularly interesting to say.

What I find most repellant and infuriating about The Clansman are its mind-boggling amount of historical inaccuracy and the endless, aggrieved, entitled whining on the part of wealthy white Southerners over the slap on the wrist they received for secession and 4 years of war. This terrible book has been instrumental to the propagation of the so-called “Lost Cause” narrative about the Civil War, which is a bunch of nonsense about how the noble South was only standing up for the essential republican value of “state’s rights.” This is false, it’s always been false, and there is a metric shit-ton of contemporary evidence to prove that it is false. The South started the Civil War over their self-appointed right to “own” human beings and subject them to chattel slavery. Period. Unfortunately, all of the historical inaccuracy and racist hysteria in this novel has provided a justification structure for white supremacist Confederate apologists, echoes of which we still hear in our present day political discourse. I cannot express how disappointing and regrettable I find this fact.

As if all of that weren’t bad enough, the popularity of Dixon’s novel and the subsequent film version directed by D.W. Griffith, “Birth of a Nation,” caused a resurgence of KKK violence in the first three decades of the 20th century that resulted in thousands of black Americans being lynched. (Again. The same thing happened during Reconstruction, events which were the basis for Dixon’s book.)

I hated this book, and I wish someone would build a time machine so that I could go back to 1905 and punch Thomas Dixon right in his dumb, racist face. If all you have to feel proud of is the color of your skin and/or your biological sex, neither of which you did anything whatsoever to earn, then you actually sound pretty pathetic boasting about either one. Especially if you don’t have the courage to do it without a sheet over your face. That’s all I have to say about Thomas Dixon, The Clansman, and the KKK.

Original text: Project Gutenberg

Annotated web version: Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Annotated PDF version, in four parts: