This essay first appeared at Front Page Magazine here
Life is funny. Turn back the clock and tell twenty-year-old me, "Girl, someday you are going to defend Confederate General Robert E. Lee." That Jersey girl would dismiss you with a short, sharp, two-syllable sentence, a sentence I cannot reproduce in a family-friendly essay. When I was young, I felt about the South what all liberal people around me felt about the South. "Ew."
There's
a process that sociologists call "othering." One attributes positive
qualities to oneself, and attributes the opposite of those qualities to the
group one "others." I knew that people from the New York metro area
were the smartest in the country. People from the South were stupid, and probably
infested with cooties. The mere thought of Southern food was nauseating. What
did they eat? Possum and cornpone. The Beverly Hillbillies ate possum. Truth to
tell, I had no idea (and still have no idea) what "cornpone" is. If I
ever moved so much as one toe into Dixie, I'd be arrested by a cop speaking with
a thick drawl and wearing mirrored sunglasses. I'd receive no Constitutional
protection and would rot in jail where I'd have to sing Negro spirituals I knew
by heart from listening to my mother's LPs. All morality stopped at the
Mason-Dixon Line. They did bad things down there. Dark, twisted things. While
playing the banjo!
Remember
that famous slap that Sidney Poitier delivered to the face of a Southern white
man in the groundbreaking 1967 film, In
the Heat of the Night? My mother and I witnessed that slap together in a
movie theater. She loved seeing American oppression topple. She was a big fan
of Paul Robeson, an African American Jersey boy who had made it all the way to
Mother Russia.
I vividly
remember a journalistic discussion during the Civil Rights Era. It went
something like this: "When we report violent crime, we often identify the
race of the criminal. By doing so, we associate the words 'black' and 'criminal'
in the mind of our audience. We want to eliminate that association. Therefore,
in future news reports of violent crime, we will not mention the race of the
criminal." A similar discussion took place, a few years later, around the
words "Palestinian terrorist," and then, later, "Muslim
terrorist." Journalists decided that they would just use the word
"terrorist." Later even that word, "terrorist," became
suspect. It was changed to "militant."
A
very different policy reigned when it came to the South. Journalists, scholars,
artists, and ministers were eager to use their power with language to brainwash
us into conflating the South, Southern culture, and Southerners with racism. As
Shelby Steele has described, in a rapidly
secularizing America, racism took the place that sin used to occupy. You could,
like Bill Clinton, commit a mortal sin – adultery – and still be president. You
couldn't, though, as Eisenhower and LBJ allegedly did, be thought to use the
N-word and survive politically. The South became our national cesspit of sin.
Thousands
of years ago, following a lengthy and painstaking ritual described in the Mishnah, Jewish priests laid all the sins
of the community on a goat. They adorned this goat with a scarlet, woolen
thread, lead into him wilderness, and threw him off a cliff. The high priest
prayed, "Oh Lord, I have acted iniquitously, trespassed, and sinned before
you. I and my household … Oh Lord, forgive the iniquities, transgressions, and
sins … On this day he will cleanse you from all your sins."
Modern,
secular liberals, no less than ancient Israelites, believe in sin. That sin is
racism. Unlike the ancient Israelites, liberals do not confess their own sins.
They confess others' sins. Liberals, obeying urges even more primitive than
those described in Leviticus, select the South as the goat. At least the
ancient Israelites confessed their own sins before sacrificing a goat. Remember:
othering is all about creating and then emphasizing opposites. When a liberal
stands up in public and scapegoats the South and Southerners as racist, that
liberal is publicly identifying himself as not racist, as, in fact, the
opposite of racist – as pure. This scapegoating rewrites history, and erases
any slaves that lived up North. Liberals locate all sin in the sin of racism,
and locate all racism in the South. More on this selective outrage, below.
Metonymy
is one linguistic tactic that serves the scapegoating of the South. In
metonymy, we take one property we associate with a larger idea, and use that
property to indicate the larger idea. For example, we use the words "Wall
Street" to refer to all bankers.
"Birmingham,"
the name of a Southern city, site of a 1963 church bombing; "redneck,"
a word for a poor Southern white whose neck is red from working in the fields;
"mint julep" or "moonlight and magnolia," which now refer
to improper romanticization of the antebellum South, and denial of the
harshness of slavery; "cornpone," which has come to mean
"rustic, unsophisticated;" Bluegrass banjo music, which filmgoers
inevitably associate with the anal rape in Deliverance:
all these previously neutral words and cultural markers are now metonyms.
We can use them as powerful, shorthand invocations of demonization and
scapegoating of the entire South, every Southerner, and every aspect of
Southern culture, from food to music to people.
Metonyms
bypass rational thought. They immediately set off little explosions inside our
brains. We feel emotions before we can think thoughts. Mere mention of the word
"Birmingham" does not bring to mind a city with a history and decent
citizens who are more or less just like us. Mention of "Birmingham"
immediately brings to mind the horror of the 1963 church bombing that took the
lives of four little girls. In our minds, when we hear the metonym
"Birmingham," it is always 1963, and black lives are always being
sacrificed by powerful white supremacists.
In
their defiant song "Sweet Home Alabama," which tried to take on and
defeat scapegoating of the South, Lynyrd Skynyrd mentioned Birmingham, but
their song was not powerful enough to rewire our brains. When we hear "Los
Angeles" we don't immediately think of the on-camera torture and attempted
murder of white truck driver Reginald Denny at the hands of black criminals. When
we hear "Knoxville" we don't think of the torture-murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome. When
we hear "Birmingham" we do think of the bombing. The South has lacked
the cultural clout to defeat its scapegoating, and the reduction of its
cultural markers to metonyms that evoke images of racism and racists.
How
did I get here? How did I mature from a brainwashed girl who thought the South was
the geographic embodiment of evil into a woman who resists demonization and
scapegoating of the South? I went to graduate school. One of the first things
my professors and peers learned about me is that I am working class, Catholic,
and Polish American. These are not good things to be in graduate school. I was
assumed to be stupid, unclean, and racist – because of my class, religion, and
ethnicity. What I thought of Southerners, and for the same mental processes of
demonization and scapegoating, my grad school betters thought of me.
In
the same way that markers of Southern culture are used as code to communicate
"racism," markers of my culture were used to communicate the same sin.
Words like "hardhat," "blue collar," "factory
worker," "church-going," and even just the word
"Poland," were not neutral communications of actual realities in all
their complexity. These words were metonyms used to scapegoat and demonize. Being
treated like a leper in grad school provided me with many "Aha"
moments. Here's one. I was at a party in Berkeley, chatting with a new
acquaintance. We were hitting it off. I asked her name. I recognized it; she
was a potential employer to whom I had sent my resume. This liberal Berkeley
professor said, without any shame at all, "Oh, you're her? I got your
resume a while back. I took one look at your name at the top of the resume and
threw it away. I immediately imagined some surly, stupid, heavily-accented
Eastern European." She laughed. She thought it was funny. Here she was
discovering that I could eat with a knife and fork.
Yes,
yes, yes, you may be thinking. Americans do stereotype the South. So what?
There are good reasons for removing Lee's statues.
Okay,
let's look at some cold, hard facts. The American Institute of Architects list the Jefferson
Memorial in Washington, DC fourth on their List of America's Favorite Architecture. In
2016, the Jefferson Memorial welcomed three and a half million visitors. It is
the third most popular presidential memorial, more visited than Mount Rushmore.
My visit was a religious experience. I read, "I have sworn upon the altar
of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of
man." It was as if I felt Jefferson's immediate presence. In his
courageous commitment to human freedom, Jefferson was my ally and kin. He
remains my favorite Founding Father. Without him, I do not see my America
coming to be.
The neoclassical
Jefferson Memorial is patterned after the architecture of Monticello,
a slave plantation. When he was 44, Thomas Jefferson, historians say, and I
believe, raped his 14-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, his deceased wife's
half-sister. Hemings bore six children to Jefferson, all of them slaves. This
Jefferson is my enemy.
If we
employ a scale that measures human failings, and apply that scale's report to
which monuments we keep and which monuments we gauge out, that coldly rational
scale offers us no reason to keep the Jefferson Memorial and tear down a statue
of Robert E. Lee.
Andrew
Carnegie is the eponym of New York's Carnegie Hall. Carnegie made much of his immense
fortune off Bohunks like me. During the 1892 Homestead strike, Carnegie's
people murdered my people. One account reports, "The Hungarians, Slavs,
and Southern Europeans … were a savage and undisciplined horde, with whom
strong-arm methods seemed at times indispensable." Savage and
undisciplined. Use us, defame us, and kill us. This history hurts me. I feel no
need to tear down Carnegie Hall. Carnegie gave away 90% of his fortune – $80
billion in today's dollars. Carnegie funded three
thousand libraries. I love libraries. The world is a complicated place. The
world's complication is larger than my pain.
This
is what maturity demands: that I recognize that the unique heroism of Thomas
Jefferson gave me my country, and that that same man was imperfect in the way
that other men of his time were imperfect. John Adams, his contemporary,
utterly rejected slavery. I admire Adams, but he did not give me the
Declaration of Independence.
I
know a man, Otto, who has had to travel this route to maturity in his own life.
In unguarded moments, Otto, perhaps without even realizing it, has expressed real
love and admiration for his father. His father was strong, hard-working, and a
skilled iron worker. Otto's father abused him in ways too painful to detail
here. In fact, Otto's father was a Nazi. Otto writes about the unique
challenges of coming to term with an abusive, Nazi father in his essay "Ripples of Sin."
Otto's
father was unique in his life. No father, no Otto. Thomas Jefferson is unique
to me. No Jefferson, no America. These men's unique gifts demand that we react
not only to the horror we feel at their crimes, but, rather, that we
incorporate everything we feel about
these men into our final analysis. When we do this, we mature. We see not only
Jefferson and Otto's dad in new and deeper ways. We also see ourselves in the
only true source of light we can shine on ourselves if we want to be grown-ups.
In my worst moments, I have been as bad as Jefferson in his worst moments. I
want to overcome what is worst in me and live up to what is best in me. Knowing
the dark truths about Jefferson, and feeling
an overall tingle and tearing up when I think about the words in his memorial,
bring me closer to being my best self.
What
about Robert E. Lee? Is he unique in some way that requires us to mature to the
point where we can tolerate his statue in our midst? Lee is not important to me,
a Yankee, but Lee is uniquely important for Southerners.
Lee
was "The Marble Man," one who disciplined himself ruthlessly in order
to perform with the perfection that he demanded of himself and others. He shone
at West Point and earned accolades in the Mexican-American War. His immediate
family and in-laws included people who broke the law to educate slaves, and raised
money to free slaves. In an 1856 letter to his wife, Lee wrote,
"slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any
Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a
greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings
are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong
for the former."
In an
1861 letter to his son, Lee wrote, "As
an American citizen, I take great pride in my country … I can anticipate no
greater calamity … than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation
of all the evils we complain of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but
honor for its preservation. I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means
will be exhausted before there is a resort to force. Secession is nothing but
revolution."
After
being invited to serve the Union army, Lee paced back and forth during the day
and prayed at night. He could not take up arms against Virginia, his home
state. He commanded Confederate forces, and became the
bloodiest general in US history, losing the largest percentage of
his men. The carnage saddened him. Lee "aged twenty years in twenty months."
When loved ones saw recent photos, they thought it could not be he. He suffered
a heart attack in 1863; some theorize
this affected his performance at Gettysburg. In spite of ill health, he
soldiered on to the bitter end.
Anyone
with any human depth can only reflect when contemplating Lee's biography: what
would I have done? What would you do if you had sworn to uphold the
Constitution, and given your life to being a perfect patriot and soldier, and
your home state, imperfect as it was, was invaded? We must acknowledge that it
would be a damnable choice guaranteeing nightmares either way.
The
irreconcilable facts of Robert E. Lee's biography – patriot, traitor;
compassionate patriarch who lead a record of young men to their deaths – emerge
from the chaotic, multidimensional, whirling fan of real life. Liberals demand
that we view the South and indeed America only through the lens of
condemnation. Real life shatters their command. Life's complexity emerges in
shards that we must rearrange as our compassion and depth allows.
I don't
know, but I do guess, that many Southerners who cherish Robert E. Lee's statues
do so for the following reasons. Their conquerors continue to depict them as
lowlife scum. In him, they see an honorable man who excelled at everything he
put his hand to before the Civil War. They see a man who was not an unambiguous
champion of slavery but rather, like all of us, he was a person who was born
into an unjust world he could not single-handedly fix. A man who hoped that the
passage of time would resolve the world's problems. They see a man whose
decision to fight was informed primarily by his attachment to his home.
Look,
I'm not a Southerner. Why should I get worked up about liberal discourse about
statues of Robert E. Lee? Because that discourse is a microcosm of how the left
insists we talk about America. Leftists in power distribute glasses through
which I am ordered to see my own identity and my own history. I must see
America and Christianity as oppressors. Any nuance is denounced and punished. I
am not allowed to feel proud or to acknowledge success. I am not even allowed
to see shades of gray. I am denied respect and compassion for my fellow
countrymen with whom I disagree.
This
enforcement of a rigid, monochrome view is in stark contrast to how liberals manipulate
narratives they choose to privilege. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have
attempted to make palatable even the most extreme jihadi atrocities with
references to the Crusades. On February 3, 2015, ISIS released a meticulously
produced video of the burning alive, in a cage, of captured Jordanian pilot Muath
Al-Kasasbeh.
President Barack Obama responded to ISIS'
hideous crime, on February 5, 2015, two days after the snuff video's release.
Americans were waylaid by horror. They looked to their president for moral and
strategic guidance. Obama's response is breathtaking. Obama told Americans not
to exercise a "sinful tendency" to "get on our high horse"
and judge ISIS torturers. Don't be "so full of yourself and so confident
that you are right and that God speaks only to us." Don't think that
"somehow we alone are in possession of the truth." Rather, Americans
must "start with some basic humility" Obama counseled against any
criticism of Islam, mentioning how wise the Founders were to create,
"freedom of religion." Free speech, also granted by the Founders,
must not be used to criticize Islam. We must "stand
shoulder-to-shoulder" with Muslims.
Nowhere
in his almost three-thousand-word speech does Obama thoroughly and
unambiguously condemn the immolation of Al-Kasasbeh. Rather, he condemns
"slavery and Jim Crow." There you have it, ladies and gentleman. Are
you upset, shattered, even, because you have just watched an innocent man burned
alive in a sadistically choreographed freak show? Well, then, your president
just told you that you should condemn slavery and Jim Crow. All sins are
located in racism. Racism is located in white Christians living in the American
South.
Obama
also mentioned the Crusades and Christians who "committed terrible deeds
in the name of Christ." Scholar Bernard Lewis has pointed out that these
references to the Crusades are illogical on a couple of points and obscure
rather than illuminate. No matter. Mention any jihadi crime and some liberal
will pipe up, "The Crusades!"
Liberals
demand that we acknowledge the complexity of life and human motivation when it
comes to jihadis. Liberals demand that we exercise humility and show compassion
when confronting jihadis' unspeakable crimes. Liberals forbid us from doing
this work when it comes to the South.
The
left's draconian approach to the South is a recipe for continued conflict. Liberal
Seattle, Washington, hosts a massive, sixteen-foot-tall statue of Lenin. For me
and others whose loved ones survived the Soviet Empire, Lenin is the architect
of our Hell. I think, immediately, of the Katyn Massacre, when Soviets shot 22,000
captured Polish army officers in the back of the head and buried them in mass
graves. If I lived in Seattle, I would not work to tear down Lenin's statue. I
would work to educate the citizenry so that they wanted to tear it down
themselves.
I
would do this – work respectfully for grassroots education and
popularly-supported change – because when the hand of Big Brother reaches down
from above to erase people's popular history, things end badly. If there is one
thing that the French Terror, Nazism, and the twentieth century's People's
Revolutions have taught us, it's this. The self-described pure ones who erase
the past and begin anew with a sparkly new calendar are those most likely to
fertilize the earth with more human corpses than she can rapidly consume.
As
someone who has written a prize-winning book addressing WW II, I've
often tortured myself and others with this question: what was the final match
that touched off the conflagration? If I could turn back time and change just
one detail, I would eliminate the Versailles Treaty's imposition of financial
reparations on Germany. That stipulation contributed to many average Germans
feeling misunderstood and dominated. Hitler gorged on those feelings. Had
Germans not felt so humiliated, Nazism would have lost appeal. We should
respect Southerners and their understanding of their history for our own good.
We should push for change with patience and compassion – the same patience and
compassion that liberals demand for ISIS murderers.
Who
celebrates most joyously when a Lee statue is taken down? White supremacists.
Nothing polarizes people and inspires them to man the barricades like the
feeling that they are under attack by others whose goal is, effectively, to
erase them by rewriting their history. "You will not replace us," chanted
protesters on May 14, 2017, after the sale of a Lee statue in a
Charlottesville, Virginia park. If you don't want to empower white nationalists
like Richard Spencer, then don't communicate to Southerners that you want to erase
them.
The
attitude informing Southern monument removal is triumphalism: "We won, you
lost; we are good, you are bad; shut up and let us tell your story in a way that
makes us heroes and you villains." Here's a typical sample of triumphalist
rhetoric: Lee was a "traitorous inbred coward and terrorist"
and Southerners "were evil. Period." For every action,
there is an equal and opposite reaction. Triumphalism is a provocation: "I'm
shoving you because I want to shove you, but I'm also shoving you because I'm
spoiling for a fight. When you push back, I'll get the fight I crave."
The
Left's selective application of respect, patience, and compassion, combined
with the Left's selective outrage, vitiates and disgraces any attempts leftists
make to fight racism and slavery. If you have never condemned slavery as it exists today, including among
Muslims in African states like Mauritania, you have never condemned slavery. If you care only about racism
and slavery committed by white Americans, you really don't care about racism or
slavery. You care about demonizing and scapegoating white Americans. You are
merely exploiting natural human repugnance at injustice to advance your
campaign of hate against white American Christians.
In
May, 2017, while journalists were recording every detail of New Orleans monument
removal, another story broke. This story received a fraction of the attention.
A low-caste woman in Haryana, India was gang raped, mutilated, and killed. Her
body was left for dogs to consume. There are an estimated 160,000 million
Untouchables in India. In all my years of being a meeting-attending, petition-circulating,
protest-marching leftist, I never heard a single one of my comrades breathe a single
word about the caste system. Borders did not stop us; we were devoted to
resisting apartheid in South Africa and many are obsessed with Israel's every misstep.
Untouchable women raped; Untouchable children used in human sacrifice:
unworthy of leftists' concern. "Racism," leftists guarantee, is a
word we associate with the American South.
There's
a final reason monument removal bugs me.
The
other day I was walking down a narrow street in Paterson, NJ, a majority-minority
city, and one of America's ten most unsafe small cities. Paterson
children are among the most likely in the nation to grow up in single-parent
households. It is a heroin hub. A 2016 study found that only seven percent of
Paterson's high school students were college-ready. Mayor Jose Torres was
recently indicted for corruption. Paterson's streets
are notoriously strewn with garbage.
I
heard loud beeping and impatient yelling. I saw the source: a black man was
sitting in the middle of this narrow street. It was rush hour. At least twenty
cars were backed up behind him.
I
approached the man. "Are you okay?" I asked.
He
moved slowly and with apparent difficulty. Perhaps he was having a heart
attack, or stroke. Perhaps he was on drugs. "I'm fine!" he snapped.
I was
not convinced. "Can I help you?" I asked.
"No!"
I
walked away. I walked away because I am white, and the man was black. If I
risked helping him, I might touch him. I might call the police. With any of
these actions, I risked being interpreted as a stereotypical, racist white.
I bet
that man has no idea of the monument removal controversy. That controversy has
no impact on his life. Those cheering on monument removal would probably not be
caught dead in his neighborhood. After years of observation, and participation
in, left-wing fixes for the underclass, I have become convinced that
conservative thinkers like Shelby Steele, Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell are
the ones offering real help to people like the lost and desperate black man
sitting in traffic. Making headlines out of antiquated monuments is just more
Kabuki-theater virtue-signaling, just another attempt to tell a story that does
not advance black people's lives.
Danusha
Goska is the author of Save
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I am Southern, born and bred. I have loved Robert E. Lee all my life, not because he was a Confederate General but because he was a true gentleman, a true Christian and a genuinely good man. The times were hard then and I agree with your analysis of the situation he was in. Like all wars the people fighting the war never knew the real reasons for it. Politics then was just as corrupt as it is today. I deeply resent the way the liberals have demeaned my heritage, my state, my ancestors. The people of the South love and cherish the men who fought and died in that war. It is our right to do so and to do so with pride. How dare anyone this day and age be so full of hatred and rage for people long dead. These are our heroes, whether they were Confederate or Union soldiers. They fought for what they felt was right. They are to be remembered with honor and respect. All of them. They all did what they did at great cost to themselves and their families. My own great-great-grandfather fought with Gen. Joe Wheeler. You make some good points in your article. I appreciate the thought and feeling that went into it. Gen. Robert E. Lee will remain a hero in my eyes forever. If you haven't read the book, Company Aytch written by a Confederate soldier who had the privilege of meeting Gen. Lee, you should. The soldier, Sam Watkins wrote the book some 20 yrs. after the war but his account of his experiences are clear and detailed. His deep respect and love for the General is obvious.
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