Namely: Did the Union actually win the Civil War? Were the anti-Enlightenment forces-the slavers, the worshippers of blood and land and race and hierarchy-truly defeated? Do those forces acknowledge the finality and the rightness of their defeat?įor those who say that, sure, slavery was bad and all, but we need to keep statues to slavers up so as not to “erase history,” we need only change the example.
I used to have little patience for “merely symbolic” issues: would that offensive statues and flags were the worst problems! But it now seems to me that the fight over Confederate symbols is just a thinly-veiled proxy for the biggest moral question that’s faced the United States through its history, and also the most urgent question facing it in 2017. Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s speech, setting out the reasons for the removal, is worth reading. So I was gratified that last week, New Orleans finally took down its monuments to slavers. Lee Parity Violation Elementary, was sadly never considered.) (My suggestion, that the school be called T. Lee Elementary-this summer renamed Russell Lee Elementary. My kids will likely attend what until very recently was called Robert E. As a now-Southerner, I have a greater personal stake here than I did before: UT Austin just recently removed its statue of Jefferson Davis, while keeping up its statue of Robert E. This is the moral imperative to take down every monument to Confederate “war heroes,” and to rename every street and school and college named after individuals whose primary contribution to the world was to defend chattel slavery. Yet there’s at least one issue where it seems to me that the Social Justice Warriors are 100% right, and their opponents 100% wrong. I cringe not only because I know that I was in the crosshairs once before and could easily be again, but also because, it seems to me, the Social Justice scalp-hunters are so astoundingly oblivious to the misdirection of their energies, to the power of their message for losing elections and neutering the progressive cause, to the massive gift their every absurdity provides to the world’s Fox Newses and Breitbarts and Trumps. I cringe when I read about yet another conservative college lecture shut down by mob violence or student protesters demanding the firing of a professor for trying gently to argue and reason with them or an editor forced from his position for writing a (progressive) defense of “cultural appropriation”-a practice that I take to have been ubiquitous for all of recorded history, and without which there wouldn’t be any culture at all. As you might know, I haven’t been exactly the world’s most consistent fan of the Social Justice movement, nor has it been the most consistent fan of me.
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