The Weekly Sift

Confederate monuments and what they represent has been an issue I keep coming back to. In 2014’s “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party” I made the case that these are “victory monuments” for the eventual triumph of white supremacy in the South after the overthrow of Reconstruction. After the Charleston massacre in 2015, I urged people to “Please Take Down Your Confederate Flag“, arguing that pro-Confederate symbols of all types are hopelessly entangled in racism, no matter what you may intend when you display them.

Those points have only been magnified by the recent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Undeniably, Nazi, KKK, and other alt-Right groups take inspiration from Confederate monuments, and regard Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson as heroes because they fought for white supremacy. All over the country, monuments are being toppled or moved or transformed-in-place by the addition of explanatory plaques or statues of civil rights heroes.

A number of white supremacists and people who claim they aren’t white supremacists, including President Trump, are defending the monuments. But the points they’re making are almost entirely bogus. Here are my responses.

The Confederacy can’t be separated from slavery. Claims to the contrary usually hinge on a few half-truths. Abraham Lincoln, for example, didn’t run for president on a platform of ending slavery, but only of preventing its expansion. Once the war started he was slow to embrace it as an abolitionist crusade, and sometimes explicitly denied that purpose. (The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t take effect until January 1, 1863, more than two years after the first southern state seceded. Congress didn’t pass the 13th Amendment until the war was nearly over.) Although Lincoln hoped for slavery’s eventual end, war-for-emancipation was not his method of choice.

But the Confederate states, on the other hand, had no similar ambivalence. South Carolina’s “Declaration of Immediate Causes” for its secession pointed to Lincoln’s opposition to slavery as the most immediate cause:

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.

A few weeks before war broke out, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens gave his “Cornerstone Speech“, in which he found fault with Jefferson’s statement that “all men are created equal”.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

A long list of similar quotes could be produced. Slavery was the Confederacy’s reason to exist. The war to defend the Confederacy was seen at the time as a war to defend slavery; the two causes were identical. Only after the South’s defeat did the Lost Cause mythology postulate alternative causes for the war.

We should never forget our history, but not all of it deserves to be celebrated. In his speech just before the removal of a Lee statue, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said: “There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.”

To see that difference, contrast the Charlottesville statue of Robert E. Lee (particularly as it sat in Lee Park, before the city renamed it) to The Topography of Terror museum in Berlin, where the Gestapo’s headquarters used to stand. The Germans could have “remembered” that site by turning it into Himmler Park, and centering it on a triumphant statue of the Gestapo’s commander, but they chose not to.

Lee, of course, was not Himmler. A better German parallel would be Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, a brilliant military tactician whose genius was applied in the defense of an evil regime. Rommel actually deserves a somewhat better place in history than Lee, because of his suspected role in a plot against Hitler. Nonetheless, Germans don’t name their high schools after him. (According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 109 American public schools are named for Lee, roughly twice as many as are named for Benjamin Franklin, a far greater American. What’s that about?)

Vox underlines this contrast:

But unlike in Germany, where memorials to the victims of the Holocaust are erected on the ruins of Nazi buildings as a way to teach future generations about the sins and horrors of the past, most Confederate statues were designed to glorify the sins and horrors of the past.

Present-day defenders of the Confederacy create a false choice between celebrating Confederate history and erasing it. No one wants America to forget slavery and the rebellion that sought to preserve it. Critics of Confederate monuments simply want to stop glorifying the Slave Empire, particularly in cities like New Orleans, where so many citizens are descended from slaves.

Many Confederate monuments were built to promote false history. Mayor Landrieu noted that the South’s monuments are at best a selective remembrance.

So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth. And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.

So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.

Sometimes the lies aren’t by omission, but are direct Lost Cause propaganda. For example, the inscription on the Confederate monument in Decatur, Georgia tells a glorious story of the Confederacy that has nothing to do with slavery. It was erected in 1908, when Lost Cause mythology had become Southern dogma.

Reconstruction history has been similarly misrepresented. One of the most shameful episodes of the Reconstruction Era was the Colfax Massacre, where a disputed election led white Democrats to attack blacks defending a county courthouse and murder those who surrendered. Such violence was a key element in whites regaining control of southern state governments and ultimately disenfranchising blacks completely. The official marker describes it like this:

Many Confederate monuments were intentionally built to celebrate white supremacy and intimidate uppity blacks.  “Historical” monuments are rarely entirely about the era depicted; usually their builders are also trying to make a symbolic statement about their own era.

You can see that in the following graph of the creation of Confederate monuments. There are two peak periods: During (and just after) the establishment of Jim Crow early in the 20th century, and when Jim Crow is being disestablished during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s; this is also when the Confederate flag regained popularity.

Wikipedia:

Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.

National Geographic:

Once the Dixiecrats got a hold of it as a matter of defiance against their Democratic colleagues in the north and the African Americans in their midst, then the Confederate battle flag took on a new life, or a second life. In the 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement built up steam, you began to see more and more public displays of the Confederate battle flag, to the point where the state of Georgia in 1956 redesigned their state flag to include the Confederate battle flag.

The timing suggests that Confederate symbolism has less to do with remembering the Civil War than with reminding blacks that whites are in power.

There is no slippery slope from Robert E. Lee to George Washington. In his Tuesday new conference, Trump asked:

So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

George Washington did indeed own slaves. Thomas Jefferson not only owned slaves, he fathered children with one of them and raised those children as his slaves. None of these facts should make Americans proud, and the monuments we build to Washington and Jefferson should acknowledge such failings. (Mount Vernon and Monticello do acknowledge them.)

In each case, our challenge is to see our Founders as people of their time and place, rather than as faultless gods. Slave-owning complicates our pictures of Washington and Jefferson, but doesn’t undo the positive roles they played in creating the United States, defining ideals we still struggle to live up to, and leading the nation through its difficult early decades.

The difference between the Founders and Confederate heroes like Lee, Jackson, and Davis is that the Confederacy is their only claim to historical significance. When we honor them, then, what we are honoring is their defense of slavery, because they have no positive accomplishments of comparable importance. You cannot, for example, separate the Charlottesville statue of a uniformed Lee on his horse from what he is doing on that horse: leading the defense of a government created to protect the right of whites to enslave blacks.

By contrast, I know of no monuments to Washington and Jefferson as slave owners — no statues showing Washington with a whip in his hand and blacks cowering before him, and none honoring Jefferson’s sexual abuse of Sally Hemmings. If there are any, they should come down; those are not the things we want to celebrate about Washington and Jefferson. But monuments to the Declaration of Independence, the Yorktown victory, and the early presidencies should stand.

What should be done with Confederate monuments? Each one should be judged separately according to

1. what the purpose of the monument is, and
2. how the local community feels about it.

Let me start by describing two monuments I think should stay. After the war, Robert E. Lee became president of Washington College, which is now Washington and Lee University. He is buried on campus beneath Lee Chapel, where there is a statue of him sleeping. The statue is clearly a remembrance of the man rather than a celebration of white supremacy. Similarly, Stonewall Jackson was a professor at the Virginia Military Institute before the war; it is entirely appropriate for VMI, a military school, to honor their most famous general.

Other remembrances should stay as well: Plaques and monuments enhance cemeteries and battlefields, as long as the inscriptions are accurate. And of course there should be museums that give a broader context to historical events.

No one really wants history forgotten, least of all the victims.

But a monument is suspect if it glorifies people or events that those who have to live with it find shameful or insulting. (To bring that point home to white Southerners, someone started a Facebook page proposing to erect a statue of General Sherman in Atlanta.) Some historical names are so offensive they could pass for inventions of The Onion, like the majority-black high school in Florida that until recently was named for KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. (Forrest had no personal connection to the area. The name appears to have been chosen in the 1950s to protest court-mandated school desegregation.) If Arlington, Virginia wants to rename its segment of the Jefferson Davis Highway, it should be allowed to do so.

One hopes that local people can meet each other with empathy and work out compromises. Sometimes moving a statue to a more obscure park or to a museum would suffice. A critical plaque could be added, or the impact of a monument balanced by new competing monuments. What will not do is an attitude of “We like it, so deal with it.” That’s what supremacy is all about.

Transsexualism is the latest example of a difficult truth: Everything you thought was a category is actually a continuum.

The interview. When I started watching Diane Sawyer’s interview with Bruce Jenner (as he was still calling himself in late April), I can’t say I was fully comfortable either with transsexualism in general or with the idea that the hero of the 1976 Olympics [see endnote 1] thought of himself as a woman.

I sort of understood transsexuals in the abstract, or at least I could repeat the right words: For some reason nobody can adequately explain, the gender that society assigns you (based on your genitalia) just feels wrong; you think of yourself as a woman with a penis or a man with breasts and a vagina. Jenner described the feeling in Christian terms: feeling like he had “the soul of a female”.

But as someone who has a hard time pointing to his own soul or tracing its outlines, I can’t really claim I know what that means. At times I have felt like a dissenter from various aspects of male culture — the violence, say, or the joy so many men take in humiliating others — but I have always experienced myself as reaching for a different kind of masculinity (just as so many women in my generation reached for a different kind of femininity) rather than rejecting the whole concept. I’m not sure what it would mean to not feel like a man “inside”. I’m like the fish who hears another fish say that swimming in water just feels wrong, that he was meant to fly through the air. And I respond, “Water? What is water?”

In my personal life, no one has forced me to come to terms with transsexualism. More than one of my casual friends has a child who has adopted a new name and a new pronoun. But learning that name has been about all the adjustment required of me. Occasionally I have found myself in a social setting with someone whose gender was ambiguous — combining breasts with a beard, say. And I have been uncomfortable, but what I mainly felt was fear of making a social error. My discomfort manifested as a desire to be somewhere else, not to harm that other person or make him/her be different.

So I was perhaps the perfect target audience for the Sawyer/Jenner interview. The distance — identifying through a screen with Sawyer sitting across from Jenner — was about right for me to put aside my discomfort and listen with empathy as he (at that time, Jenner was still using the masculine pronoun and talking about “her” as a person he had not yet revealed to the public) discussed his decision to create a new public identity as a woman.

First reactions. After watching that interview, a few things seemed obvious to me:

• At 65, Jenner is old enough to know what s/he wants.
• Jenner gave masculinity a fair shot. If it hasn’t worked, it hasn’t worked. In some ways, his external success — being an Olympic hero, trying marriage with three gorgeous women, fathering six and step-fathering four “wonderful, wonderful children” — makes the case clearer. A less successful person with Jenner’s inner life might have blamed himself and said: “Masculinity would be fulfilling if only I were better at it.”
• Sixty-five is a do-or-die point for a lot of things in life. If there’s something you’re going to regret not trying, you better get on with it.
• If Jenner’s kids and step-kids are OK with the transition [2], why should the rest of us object?

So this week, Jenner’s new female identity — Caitlyn — made her public debute with an Annie Leibovitz portrait on the cover of Vanity Fair. (Looking at that photo, I assume Kim Kardashian is happy with the way Caitlyn “rocks it”. [2])

Not pink and blue, red and blue. The public reaction has generally split on political lines. Liberals like me have mostly praised the courage it took to go public with something this controversial, while the conservative reaction has been described by the Washington Post as “apocalyptic“. The American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer said on his radio show:

If you want one snapshot of just how corrupt, how morally corrupt, how morally bent, how morally twisted, how morally confused, how morally bankrupt we have become, all you’ve got to do is take a look at the cover of Vanity Fair magazine.

Matt Walsh wrote for The Blaze:

It’s all so evil and so bizarre and so unthinkably ridiculous that no dystopian sci-fi writer could have predicted that the collapse of western society would look like this.

President Obama has praised Jenner, while Republican candidates to replace him have either said nothing or lined up against her. (Lindsey Graham is the exception. And while the WaPo article lists Hillary Clinton as “generally supportive”, I can’t find a quote.) Mike Huckabee has been particularly interesting to watch, as he defended the Duggar family’s handling of their son’s abuse of his sisters (but then removed their endorsement from his web page), while trying to make a joke out of transsexualism.

The social-conservative base that the Republicans need to appeal to has been anything but silent. All you have to do is pick any of the links above and read the comments. They’re not just opposed, they’re actively hostile about it.

Why? Now, part of me (and probably part of you) is saying, “What else is new? Conservatives are rejecting somebody for being different from them, sometimes in very aggressive, insulting ways. Par for the course.” But it’s worth considering all the reasons that it didn’t have to be this way.

• Jenner is one of their own. In the Sawyer interview, Jenner self-describes as a conservative Republican who “believes in the Constitution”. Jenner talks about God creating his male body and female soul, and thinks seriously about what mission God had in mind for that combination. And Jenner is not just a nominal Christian, but has a real relationship with a congregation. In the WaPo, a minister describes how the Jenner/Kardashian family was “an integral part of this nondenominational evangelical church” and put considerable effort into founding a new church in their neighborhood.
• There’s really no scripture about this. You’ll search in vain for a verse that says, “A man shall not become a woman.” (If God foresees all, why wouldn’t He have included that verse in His scripture?) The Bible assigns different roles to men and women (not always consistently), and Deuteronomy 22:5 bans cross-dressing (though this rabbi interprets that ban in a limited way). But as for spelling out how you tell whether God meant for you to be male or female, the Bible is silent. Biblical verses supposedly condemning transsexualism all require a lot of interpretation. What motivates people to do the work necessary to arrive at that conclusion?
• It’s not our business. We all have the option to say, “I wouldn’t do that, but I guess it takes all kinds.” In Thomas Jefferson’s words, Jenner is neither picking my pocket nor breaking my leg.
• It’s a freedom thing. Who knows, maybe Caitlyn has made a mistake she will eventually regret. But she’s risking her own future life and happiness, not yours or mine. People following their own vision and risking it all for a goal that seems important — that’s something conservatives usually admire.
• Jenner is a great family-values story. When unexpected challenges arise in the life of one of its members, does a family pull that person closer or push him or her away? The Sawyer interview shows Jenner embedded in a matrix of close family relationships, and the family supports Caitlyn. I’ve got to admire that, and you’d think people who define their politics around “family values” would too.

So there’s plenty of room for conservatives to support Jenner, or just to shrug and move on. But clearly they don’t want to do that. Why not?

What I think is going on. When I look at my own initial discomfort, I think it traces back to a source so basic that it’s pre-verbal. Before I can talk about it, I need to tease it out. So bear with me while I seem to go off on a tangent.

The human mind is kind of a kludge. It has to be. After all, how is a three-pound piece of meat supposed to make sense of such a vast and complicated universe? One of the kludgy short-cuts our minds take is to break the world into categories, i.e., to clump different things together and treat them the same. Many of those categories are binary: male/female, child/adult, right/wrong, friend/enemy, and so on. Others have more options. (In grade school I was taught that there are three races of humans: caucasian, negroid, and mongoloid.) Some of the categories seem in-born, while others are taught to us so early they might as well be. For example, a certain amount of species recognition is practically hard-wired. Kids at an early age will tell you that two dogs are similar while a dog and a cat are different.

We really, really want to believe that the categories in our heads are objective descriptions of the world out there, but science keeps telling us that they aren’t. For example, there are no races, but rather a continuum of genetic difference. If you pluck two people from distant parts of the continuum, they may look like members of distinct races, but in the world as a whole, you won’t be able to trace any boundary line between those races.

Similarly, species are not platonic ideals, but clusters in the genetic continuum. So (contrary to Plato) there is no ideal horse or dog, just lots of individual horses and dogs, any two of whom resemble each other. There are no gay people and straight people, but rather a continuum of bisexuality. There are no nationalities — a point made very strikingly in a fascinating book called The Discovery of France. And like nationalities, modern languages are largely political constructions. In medieval Europe, for example, each village would have a dialect slightly different from the next. If you plucked people out of distant places on that continuum — say one from Paris, another from Madrid, and a third from Lisbon — they would sound like they were speaking different languages you could call French, Spanish, and Portuguese. But, like races, there were no boundaries where one butted up against the other — until politics created those boundaries and imposed them.

And now we are discovering that gender is a binary categorization imposed on an underlying continuum with multiple dimensions. It’s more complicated than just John Waynes with penises and Marilyn Monroes with vaginas.

If you think seriously about how flawed the fundamental building blocks of our thinking are, it’s scary. At any moment, some part of the Universe you’ve been assuming away could come back to bite you. That’s the human condition.

That’s why we get such an oogy feeling whenever we see an example of something we were raised to think didn’t exist: an effeminate man, two women kissing, a child with dark brown skin and frizzy red hair. It’s a reminder that we don’t really grasp the Universe; we just apply kludgy notions that more-or-less work most of the time.

What social conservatism is. At its root, social conservatism is a way to deny that fear and transmute it into anger. Conservatism reassures us that the categories in our heads are real. We didn’t make them up; God created them. They’re natural.

You can see that principle operating across the board. For example, that’s why social conservatives have such a hard time accepting evolution: If species are real things and if humans evolved from some other kind of primate, then each being in that mother-to-child chain belonged to a species. Somewhere along that line, the impermeable boundary between species had to be crossed: an ape mother gave birth to the first human child. Impossible!

Likewise abortion. The moral worth of a member of the human species is a unitary thing. It can’t develop gradually along a continuum, but has to exist either in its entirety or not at all. And a fetus is either a member of the human species or not. We aren’t allowed to recognize that in its early stages, a human fetus is virtually indistinguishable from the fetus of a pig or cow, or that it begins to differentiate from a chimp fetus even later.

This reification of the categories is why conservative rhetoric is obsessed with the word real: real men, real Americans, real conservatives. Liberals are more likely to describe themselves as authentic. Authentic is a relative word; it points to a harmony between what I am and the image I project. Real is absolute; I am a real X because I match an ideal definition of X that exists eternally in the mind of God.

Now, not even social conservatism can deny the existence of things that don’t fit neatly into the proper categories. But it can reject them as abominations. The list of abominations depends on the categories you were raised with: Men attracted to other men are abominations. Women who operate heavy machinery are abominations. Families who cross from black to white are abominations. Americans who can’t speak English are abominations. Mixed-race people are abominations. Genetic engineering produces abominations.

Functionally, an abomination is anything that causes confusion by making us doubt our categories. And by labeling it as an abomination, we transform our doubt and confusion into anger at whatever confused us.

So: Caitlyn Jenner is an abomination. Just by existing, she creates confusion about the kludgy notion of binary gender. She points out that there is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies … or our religions. That’s a scary idea, and by raising it, she becomes an object of anger.

[1] I remember eating Wheaties out of a box with Bruce Jenner’s picture on it. In the 1970s, (moreso than today, for some reason) the Decathlon was a legend-making Olympic event. Americans who won it — Jim Thorpe and Bob Mathias, for example — were famous for more than just a four-year cycle. They became the defining image of the perfect all-around athlete. Physically, they were what every American boy was supposed to want to become.

Bruce Jenner was a record-setting Olympic Decathlon champion, and he arrived at a moment in history when white males were starting to feel insecure about their athleticism. Black sports heroes (Jesse Ownes, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson) had once been tokens, freakish exceptions who were “credits to their race”. The next generation of black athletes (Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown, Willie Mays) claimed their place in the mainstream. But by the mid-70s, it was white players (Rick Barry, Dave Cowens) who looked like tokens in the NBA, and the NFL and MLB seemed headed in the same direction. Blacks would never be great quarterbacks, we told each other. But secretly we wondered if there would ever be a white running back on the level of O. J. Simpson, Tony Dorsett, or Walter Payton. (According to this CheatSheet.com top-ten list, the answer was no.) Even the last American Decathlon champion (Rafer Johnson) had been black.

And then came Bruce Jenner, the hero we needed at the time we needed him. A white man’s white man. Or so we thought.

[2] The most amusing reaction Jenner reports came from step-daughter Kim Kardashian. Following a “breakthrough” conversation with Kanye West (of all people), Kim became “by far, the most accepting” of the children. Jenner quotes her volunteering to help shape Caitlyn’s style:

Girl, you gotta rock it, baby. You gotta look good. If you’re doing this thing, I’m helping you. You’re representing the family. You gotta look really good.