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We Don’t Care What You Think
Been working since 4 am and that, combined with SJWs on Twitter, I may be a little testy. I apologize, sort of, if this offends anyone, but for those of you that want to rip down our monuments, take down flags and/or whatever other symbols in the South offend people’s sensibilities now, here’s the deal.
If you don’t live here then we don’t want your damn opinion about our monuments, etc. You’re not here, so guess what? You don’t have to look at it! Go about your day and try to forget about us honoring our war dead or people we think were heroic, if not perfect leaders. After all, in the SJW world view, Lincoln himself was racist as well, so it won’t be long before we tear down the Lincoln Memorial. We know now that history began with Obama’s election, so why even acknowledge the past has been a bit more complicated than today’s college student at Evergreen may understand.
The South is plenty conflicted already about race, poverty, the war, and how we feel about some of our collective guilt and whatnot. Now Antifa is going all Taliban on us and tearing down any monuments they feel offends their Social Justice dogma. So don’t take up for them, don’t defend their position, don’t explain how they are really right but just a little overboard on their implementation.
They are wrong and most importantly we don’t give a good G.D. what they think. They need to go back to Seattle or wherever the hell they came from (probably UNC). As far as the Nazis and Antifa protesters go, is Virginia out of rubber bullets and fire hoses or something?
I heard the story as it was passed down
About guts and glory and Rebel stands
Four generations, a whole lot has changed
Robert E. Lee
Martin Luther King
We’ve come a long way rising from the flame
Stay out the way of the southern thing
Sure it does. America’s original sin was not regional. After the war, it was a Southern judge and former slave holder who dissented from Plessy v. Ferguson, not the judges from the North. To allow the sneering without some self-examination leads to a skewing of understanding, and this has a ripple effect on public memory.
For example, it’s a bit like the over-emphasis on the Underground Railroad in which the North engages. Every white Northerner had a “station” in their back yard except… they didn’t. The Underground RR was predominantly run by free blacks, but white Northerners have embraced the Underground RR narrative as theirs because… well… it feels good for them to think that there were large numbers of abolitionists actively working to circumvent the South’s slave society.
That’s kinda like making the Civil War a black hat/white hat conflict with only one big issue we now all agree is pernicious driving the men who fought it.
It’s easier to approach history this way, but I do think it’s relevant to note that these narratives just aren’t true. They’re as mythological as some of the romanticism associated with the “Lost Cause,” which has been put under a microscope. ;)
Yeah. Baton Rouge is one of the most racially segregated cities I’ve ever seen – and it’s majority-minority.
Well that is a perverse philosophy.
Perhaps you meant “excessive pride.”
Northerners were too busy setting slaves free. The truth is northern whites get just as much blame for slavery and Jim Crow as the south does. All the hate and sneering directed at the north is misdirected.
Jefferson understood the irony of penning “all men are created equal” while owning slaves. I think he and the other Founders also understood that within that paradox lay the potential seeds of the nation’s destruction.
But, when Madison’s Preamble to the Constitution began “We the People, of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union” there was an aspirational quality to it which promised someday this can be fixed.
I think you mean “regional” slurs, not ethic. :)
I guess everyone is a victim. Yankee is not a slur, for crying out loud.
I don’t particularly. Now the constant carping about what you think grates on my very last nerve.
I wonder what your sources are for this assertion. If the sources are less than twenty years old, there may be a bias in them.
A weird thing happened among very nice historians in the last twenty years. In a generous effort to help their fellow black historians and intellectuals, the white historians began to downplay the role of the northern white abolitionists in bringing about the Civil War because it was felt that giving whites some credit here somehow diminished the pride of the black community in freeing themselves. It was good psychology because all abuse is first and foremost humiliating, and so the kindly white people who helped the slaves escape have stepped back from being honored for their sacrifices.
Let no good deed go unpunished, as a friend of mine used to say. This gracious humility has unfortunately played quite well into the South’s wanting to assert that the Union soldiers fought only for the sake of the tyrant Lincoln and to control the South and not let them leave the Union. And the black community absorbed the new version of the story of the abolitionists to feather their black activist organizations’ nests as they happily told the black community that whites hate them and never lifted a finger to help them get out of slavery. The good intentions of the original abolition-story suppressors have resulted in a generation of black kids who believe all the whites hate them.
This is not the truth. It was not the truth.
Just as most of the soldiers in the Confederate armies were there to fight for the freedom of the South, not to protect the institution of slavery, most of the soldiers in the Union armies were there to free the slaves.
So the idea that white people hate black people could be put to rest if the facts of the abolition movement were once again brought to light. No greater love hath any man than that he lay down his life for a friend. This sacrifice is what the Gettysburg Address was about.
I grew up in a small town north of Boston with a great house in the center of our town with a stop on the Underground Railroad in its basement. It’s quite real to me. As is the abolition movement. It was a huge and strong movement, with God at their backs.
I think the segregation level depends on which region you’re in. There has always been a certain level of racial tension in my neck of the woods (NEARK — near Memphis), but generally people were still polite to one another. I think the original racial tension is due to both cultural differences and not being able to predict a stranger’s intentions towards you. Since Ferguson, it has gotten so much worse thanks to outsider meddling and media mis-handling.
I never said otherwise. But how it was fixed has been complicated and involves a lot of moving parts. James Madison is more at fault for allowing slavery to flourish than Robert E. Lee was.
Argue all you like (applied equally across the board), and not to distract you from your argument, but by-the-by I would like to suggest that the Charlottesville crowd has succeeded admirably in exacerbating tensions and divisions across our nation. The divisions that hold the most potential for harm now aren’t geographical, or even cultural, but philosophical – and political in the sense of applied philosophy. Please don’t be distracted by what the magician is doing with his left hand.
Because he brokered the 3/5 compromise which allowed for the Ratification of the Constitution and deletion of the Articles of Confederacy?
Lincoln might have tried to fix it and he might not have. Most of the Southern States seceded before he even took office out of fear that he might do that exact thing… so we’ll truly never know what might have been in that regard.
But it does seem obvious to me that sooner or later, the institution of slavery was literally going to have to pried from the cold, dead hands of Southerners – at least, that appears to be what was going to be required because a political solution was made impossible by those same people.
I think this is an important point. One of the casualties of this weekend – as we have already seen in Durham – is the idea that any removal should go through a democratic process led by local officials and the citizens of the place where the statue exists.
Two other observations: this debate as I’ve followed in my own state (Maryland), has not been one of the political left against the political right – there have been plenty of progressives arguing for retention of statues in Baltimore (and Annapolis and Frederick), and people on the right arguing for their removal. Oh, there are clearly trends that one side is more left and the other more right, but it’s nowhere near universal. (Of course, all the Baltimore statues just came down overnight last night; I’ll be interested in seeing the full reaction. So far, I’ve seen nothing but celebration, which is not terribly surprising for a majority-black, overwhelmingly Democratic city.)
The second is that this is a complicated issue that has a lot of compelling arguments from all sides, but the loudest voices in favor of removal and those in favor of retention are all driven by emotion, and that makes it very hard to discuss and make decisions as a community.
a postscript to my comment 159:
This suppression of the story of the northern abolitionists has played very well into the hands of the Democrats who have used the distorted history to sell themselves as the saviors of the blacks and as the party of the black community.
I recently read a book on black political heroes written for middle school kids, and the absence of the abolitionists was striking.
How convenient this has turned out to be for the Democrats.
The fact is that it was the abolitionists who found Lincoln and pushed him to election. He was an abolitionist who suddenly found himself president of the United States. So he floundered for a couple of years over his role as president. The Republican Party was founded by the abolitionists.
Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience was about slavery and the government’s support of it. It was not about running stoplights you think are poorly placed and unnecessary.
The abolitionist movement was a stealth movement for a long time. It gained strength in the same way the early colonists promoted independence from England–small local groups of people scattered throughout the countryside united only by their small local newspapers. And the lyceum circuit helped too. It was an evening lecture program that dotted the towns in New England. People before the era of nightly television went to lectures in the evenings. The speakers had a route they took so they went to a series of lyceums. It was set up like the traveling ministers. Thoreau was one of the lyceum speakers.
The well-intended suppression of the role of the white people in freeing the black people from slavery has had dire consequences for our entire country. It has elevated the Democrats quite falsely for one thing, and it has resulted in a new animosity between blacks and whites that will be difficult to quell going forward.
It is where I come from. Basically the same a carpetbagger with a good amount of self importance, demanding and condescension added to the definition.
@marcin, I am not trying to take anything away from white people who did support the Underground RR, but the shift at looking at the numbers is not a matter of bias.
Good historians like David Blight (Yale) and Eric Foner (Columbia) have backed up their assertions quite well, even though they are currently working in the academy. You see, historiography does not wipe out previous historians, but it does look closer at certain aspects of what has been written, and what has been written about the Underground Railroad is in part myth.
Have some sensibilities changed amongst historians? Yes. Of course. And some of these shifts are ideological and should be taken into account while analyzing any thesis put in front of you, but we are not talking about “social justice warriors” here. We are talking about careful work that is undergirded by lots of primary evidence.
To say that the abolition movement was “huge and strong” is certainly inaccurate by any account, whether given in the last 20 years or for many decades right after the Civil War. Abolitionists made up a small subset of the free labor movement, which was not predicated on human equality or ending slavery in the South. (There is a reason that the Radical Republicans were called radical.)
I’ll grant that there has been an over-stress on some black agency in this period. Blight and Foner look at how some Underground RR movement in the South is massively overstressed, too, because… well… it was SUPER hard to move North from certain Deep South locations, whatever your color.
By the way, this doesn’t mean that I don’t think the free labor movement was good… a step in the right direction. Nor do I believe that men like Lincoln didn’t understand the gross injustice slavery foisted on blacks. Nor do I know if your town’s underground depot was legitimate without some research.
I think all sorts of men in the North and the South had to think about these things despite cultures that taught them there was nothing immoral about an institution that had existed… forever… because I believe in objective morality, and I can look at the things these men wrote back then. (They were thinking for sure, just as the Founding Fathers had.)
But the North has not examined its own culpability in the peculiar institution to quite the degree that Southerners have.
I mean, my goodness. Segregation was an idea that originated in the North. (Here, while not a perfect work of history, you can visit C. Van Woodward’s classic book The Strange Career of Jim Crow.)
I think Charlottesville has put the monument question to rest. They will all now be removed. I am seeing politicians all over coming out to be on the right side of history and promising the removal of the monuments. It will take years to destroy them all (or place in storage to be lost) but it will happen. This issue is over.
Just curious… @thewhetherman, Did they remove Taney from in front of the court?
As the OP states, the move now, even by conservatives, is to acquiesce and take down monuments, etc. and, in the view of Rich Lowry at NRO, move them to museums. That is just one (tiny) step from throwing them in the smelter altogether. Here is an example from my neck of the woods that reared its head just a few weeks ago:
http://www.henryherald.com/news/nash-farm-battlefield-museum-to-close-after-commissioner-requests-removal/article_3a80ebfb-c5e6-55e3-9079-3abcd22dbfa9.html
Essentially, a newly elected Democrat to the Board of Commissioners decided that county funding should not be used toward a museum that showed artifacts (i.e., Confederate flag) from the Civil War. There you go, Rich.
And, of course I’m sure you have heard the renewed calls this week by a gubernatorial candidate here calling for the removal of the Stone Mountain carving.
This has the potential of getting really ugly.
I am not in any way advocating the suppression of white abolitionism from our history. The abolitionists gained strength, in fact, from the Second Great Awakening, which has always been part of my Christian narrative.
However, I am a history professor.
We have to be very careful to not write out the abolitionists’ story–as it seems was done in the middle school book?–but we must not make it bigger than what it was either.
At least not if we’re actually concerned about understanding the past.
If so, there’ll be another within a few months.
I think that’s true, but it still makes me profoundly sad, especially as a person who has dedicated the second half of my life to grappling with history.
I wonder now when they will sandblast the face off of Stone Mountain in Atlanta.
Nothing I say will be helpful here. Your sources are credible and respectable.
Perhaps we can leave it that you might keep an open mind so that if you see something in the future that looks more like the story I’ve told, you’ll at least consider it.
Exactly what Antifa wanted.
They did. All four monuments were removed overnight, and now our (Republican) governor is advocating removing the Taney statue in Annapolis, something he had previously opposed.
Oh, friend. I always have an open mind when it comes to history. This is why I don’t want to obscure any of it.
I mentioned this, too. When they are closing small museums about the Civil War per budget issues, I wonder how they will justify the expense of doing that. That’s no small feat, removing that carving. I can’t even imagine the time or costs.
Talk about stirring up a hornets’ nest.
This is, again, why having White Supremacists as the “defenders” of history is counter-productive. But how can conservatives stand up and say “Noooooooooooo” when we don’t contextualize these monuments?
I don’t, by the way, mind that at all. Change the plaques!!! Fine. Teach kids to do critical thinking. Yay. But this is a road that people have not really thought about deeply if they think it leads to a nicer, more tolerant society.
I always liked Art Garfunkel’s “A Heart In New York.”
Well, I can’t stand a lot of things Taney did–I tend to dislike all activist judges–but if the statues of a Supreme Court Justice can go… the chief justice of SCOTUS, then absolutely no monument to anyone in history is safe for preservation.
I may be incorrect, but I don’t think that the minieball caused greater wounds than the musket ball that it replaced. What it did was make infantry weapons much more accurate, increasing the number of wounds and, more importantly, making previous tactics obsolete. The whole “line up and charge” thing worked reasonably well against the range and accuracy of Revolutionary War weapons, but not against the greater range and accuracy of minieball weapons.