Derwin Aikens, Yale ’16, Environmental Studies, Pierson Freshman Counselor, Dukes Men, Whiffenpoofs, posted in Overheard at Yale on Facebook:
I’m so tired of having to prove to people how this was never a debate about free speech. People are angry. People are asking faculty members to be removed from positions of power. People are threatening others, spitting on others (allegedly), and yelling at others because many people fundamentally don’t understand. Many of those actions are unproductive and maybe even wrong, but it’s because people are angry and tired of not being heard. This was never a discussion of free speech. That should have never been brought to the table. Dean Howard’s email was asking students to be culturally sensitive, to be aware of how your costumes were affecting those around you. And for some reason Christakis was made uncomfortable. She tried to regain her comfort by making this a discussion about free speech, but that was never the issue. The IAC was never asking students to censor themselves. They were asking students to critically engage with their costume choices and be sensitive to the ways in which it impacted those around them. Students are mad because Christakis found something wrong with that and abused her power as Associate Master to publicly announce her discomfort and justified it using free speech. Thus we now have this debate of respect vs. free speech, but it was never about that. Students are angry not because of free speech, but because cultural sensitivity made Christakis UNCOMFORTABLE. And there in lies the problem.
We need to change the conversation to one that is productive. Because we need to address why cultural sensitivity made her and perhaps many others on campus uncomfortable. Because I’m so sick of the debate forcing people to prove that cultural sensitivity and respect is somehow directly infringing upon free speech. We shouldn’t have to prove that, because it isn’t true. If you don’t understand this, please please please come talk to me because I’m so sick of this free speech debate. It’s bullshit and a total and utter misinterpretation of students anger. Listen up and do better, Yale.
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Jencey Paz, Yale ’17, Psychology and Ecology & Evoluntionary Biology, Silliman Master’s Aide published an editorial titled “Hurt at Home” in the Yale Herald, but has obviously had it removed subsequently, after it was quoted with negative commentary on several on-line sites (example). Currently available via Google cache.
As a Silimander, I feel that my home is being threatened. Last week, Erika Christakis, the associate master of Silliman College, sent an email to the Silliman community that called an earlier entreaty for Yalies to be more sensitive about culturally appropriating Halloween costumes a threat to free speech. In the aftermath of the email, I saw my community divide. She did not just start a political discourse as she intended. She marginalized many students of color in what is supposed to be their home. But more disappointing than the original email has been the response of Christakis and her husband, Silliman Master Nicholas Christakis. They have failed to acknowledge the hurt and pain that such a large part of our community feel. They have again and again shown that they are committed to an ideal of free speech, not to the Silliman community.
Today, when a group of us, organized originally by the Black Student Alliance at Yale, spoke with Christakis in the Silliman Courtyard, his response once again disappointed many of us. When students tried to tell him about their painful personal experiences as students of color on campus, he responded by making more arguments for free speech. It’s unacceptable when the Master of your college is dismissive of your experiences. The Silliman Master’s role is not only to provide intellectual stimulation, but also to make Silliman a safe space that all students can come home to. His responsibility is to make it a place where your experiences are a valid concern to the administration and where you can feel free to talk with them about your pain without worrying that the conversation will turn into an argument every single time. We are supposed to feel encouraged to go to our Master and Associate Master with our concerns and feel that our opinions will be respected and heard.
But, in his ten weeks as a leader of the college, Master Christakis has not fostered this sense of community. He seems to lack the ability, quite frankly, to put aside his opinions long enough to listen to the very real hurt that the community feels. He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain.
My dad is a really stubborn man. We debate all the time, and I understand the value of hearing differing opinions. But there have been times when I have come to my father crying, when I was emotionally upset, and he heard me regardless of whether or not he agreed with me. He taught me that there is a time for debate, and there is a time for just hearing and acknowledging someone’s pain.
I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns. I feel drained. And through it all, Christakis has shown that he does not consider us a priority.
Christakis attended the forum on Erika’s email at the Afro-American Cultural Center on Wed., Nov. 4, where students were vulnerable and shared deeply personal stories. After leaving the event early, Christakis tweeted an article on his personal account about the importance of free speech. Then, he retweeted his tweet using the Silliman Twitter handle. This is a clear and flagrant violation. No one should use the Silliman Twitter as a personal platform. The residential college Twitters are a place to share information relevant to everyone in the community; no one consented to having Christakis’ personal view published in a manner that indicated that the community was behind him. The event was indicative of a bigger issue: Christakis is using Silliman college as his intellectual sparring ground.
Further, Christakis has yet to truly acknowledge to the entire Silliman community that he has hurt people. The closest he has gotten to this is sending out an open invitation to brunch at his house to further discuss the issue. Essentially, it was an invitation to debate more. But we don’t want to debate more. We want to be able to go home at night in a place where we feel welcome and wanted.
Christakis’ actions have not been aimed at healing a divided community. Instead, they continue to frame the issue in an “us against them†split. Christakis needs to stop instigating more debate. He needs to stop trying to argue with people who are hurting, regardless of his personal opinions. Being the Master of Silliman is a position of power. To use it to marginalize so much of the student body is deplorable.
Today, when many of us, mostly students of color and Sillimanders, confronted Nicholas Christakis in the Silliman Courtyard, he said he was sorry that we were feeling pain. But is he really? I don’t think he understands what many Sillimanders are going through, nor has he tried.
Christakis hasn’t checked in on any of us. He hasn’t given us any indication that he is going to or wants to heal the community. If you know I’m in pain and you aren’t doing anything to try to help me, then how can you be sorry? Christakis is the Master of Silliman College, it is his job to take care of us, and he is failing.
The Future of Free Speech: Threats in Higher Education and Beyond. U.S. Senator Ben Sasse will deliver the evening keynote address. Other speakers will include Professor Charles Hill, Dr. Geoffrey Kabaservice, Roger Kimball, Professor Jytte Klausen,Greg Lukianoff, Anne Neal, Dr. James Piereson,Professor Bradley A. Smith, James Taranto, Professor Noël Valis, Kevin D. Williamson, and Nathaniel Zelinsky.
Nicholas Christakis, current Associate Master of Silliman College, is Yale ’84 and has an M.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Penn. He is a sociologist specializing in the study of social media. He and his wife Erica were co-Masters of Pforzheimer House, one of Harvard’s twelve residential houses 2009-2013.
Watch the female student tell Christakis to “Be quiet!” and then lecture him on how he should be doing his job as college master.
With race-baiters calling for his head, Christakis wrote the following email featuring a good bit of grovelling.
Dear Silliman students,
“Over the past week, we have spent many hours talking with students of color, and in particular to women students, and we realize now that the email I (Erika) sent, while well-intended and coming from a place of deep conviction, did not acknowledge how extraordinarily hard it is to be a person of color at Yale. We meant to express our confidence that you have far more personal agency than you may realize, and we see proof in our conviction in the tremendous expression at Yale this week. But we understand that it was hurtful to you, and we are truly sorry. We understand that many students feel voiceless in diverse ways and we want you to know that we hear you and we will support you.
“We hear the anguish of many of our students of color and it has deeply moved us. Seeing that we have contributed to this pain by articulating certain beliefs about the formulation of a fair society is a very bitter pill for those in our Yale community, like us, who see speech as a tool for social justice. Nevertheless, we recognize that many students have seen mockery and arrogance in this claim. Your feelings urgently demand respect, and we offer it most sincerely here.
“It is clear that the events of this past week have escalated, and we also write to reassure you of our commitment to each and every student at Silliman. Throughout the week, we have wanted to share our thoughts, but have been advised throughout to delay. But we feel that the events demand an immediate response and we have wanted badly to offer one. It is incredibly hard to create an omnibus response that will speak to everyone. But we find it too painful to imagine crafting separate messages to different constituencies when we believe, at our core, that in times of crisis we are one Yale. As Nicholas said to the group in the courtyard, we believe we are united by our common humanity and can use that commonality to understand each other.
“In the coming days, we will send you a longer meditation on the ideas, events, topics, and experiences we have shared in the last few days, including a more thorough examination of the contents and rationale for Erika’s email and our specific views on free speech, which many have asked to hear more about. We will also work to find spaces for all community members to channel their feelings into ideas that others (both allies and even enemies) might learn from.
“For now, however, we warmly invite all Silliman students who would like to talk about Erika’s email concerning free speech and Halloween costumes, and related campus events, for lunch on Sunday November 8 at 12:00. All Silliman students are welcome, regardless of their views on the topic. Please RSVP, if you can, to Nicholas and Sergio, so we can order sufficient food, but don’t let the lack of an RSVP be a barrier to joining us if you decide at the last minute.
“We hear all of you. Thank you for the privilege of working and learning with you.
Warmly, and also sorrowfully,
Nicholas and Erika”
Erica Christakis is a Harvard graduate with three Masters degrees, specializing in early childhood education.
Inadvertent comedy department: (above) Former master of (the soon to be re-named) Calhoun College & Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, now the first black Dean of Yale College, Jonathan Holloway found himself confronted yesterday on the cross campus, in front of Yale’s Sterling Library by hundreds of beneficiaries of Affirmative Action (just like himself) demanding “additional black faculty, racial sensitivity training for freshmen and the dismissal of administrators viewed as racially inattentive.”
Indignation over microaggressions at Yale rose to the boiling point this week because Silliman College Associate Master Erica Christakis responded to an admonitory pre-Halloween email from the Intercultural Affairs Council — a group of administrators from the cultural centers, Chaplain’s Office and other campus organizations — sent to the undergraduate student body warning against wearing Halloween costumes which could be interpreted as belittling or offensive: no sombreros, no blackface, no turbans.
The Oldest College Daily reports that Christakis responded with an email of her own, which
defended students’ rights to wear potentially offensive costumes as an expression of free speech, arguing that the ability to tolerate affront is one of the hallmarks of a free and open society. Her email compared adults selecting costumes to children playing dress up, and she asserted that imagination should be encouraged and not constrained.
“Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?†Christakis, who assumed the position of associate master of Silliman this fall, wrote. “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.â€
A Silliman student, Ryan Wilson ’17, drafted a letter in response, ultimately signed by “740 undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, faculty and even students from other universities… telling Christakis that her ‘offensive’ email invalidates the voices of minority students on campus. The letter, posted Friday night, state[d] that Christakis misrepresented the Intercultural Affairs Committee’s call for sensitivity as ‘censure’.”
After confronting Dean Holloway, a portion of the crowd went after Associate Master Erica Christakis’ husband:
A heated crowd of students encircled Nicholas Christakis after 3 p.m. and accused him of racism and insensitivity, with many in attendance demanding an apology for the email statement, which admonished the censure of Halloween costumes deemed culturally appropriating. They also criticized Erika Christakis’ behavior during an open forum hosted at the Afro-American Cultural House Wednesday night — in particular, her attempt to leave the room before speaking or answering questions directed toward her.
“I apologize for causing pain, but I am not sorry for the statement,†Nicholas Christakis told the crowd. “I stand behind free speech. I defend the right for people to speak their minds.â€
The gathering quickly became tense and confrontational after his response. Several students screamed at Christakis and called him “disgusting.â€
The suffering of Yale students of color at the sight of certain Halloween costumes was evidently quite considerable.
Students at Thursday’s protest said the e-mail ignored the way people of color experience such insensitive characterizations, and they recounted how students have faced threats of physical violence when they have questioned their classmates’ costume choices.
“There was so much coded language in that e-mail that is just disrespectful,†said Ewurama Okai, a junior.
Several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore. “They can’t stay in the master’s house,†one student said.
Thursday evening, students were drafting a formal letter calling for the removal of Christakis and his wife from their roles in Silliman. …
Some students said they believe the problem is broader, in that many Yale faculty members are unequipped to talk to black students.
Isaiah Genece, a junior, said he has never had a black professor at Yale. Nearly a dozen black students described the experience of being the sole black person in a class, and the unequal responsibilities foisted on them to speak on behalf of their race.
The university’s commitment to faculty diversity has come under heightened scrutiny since Elizabeth Alexander, a prominent black poet and essayist, announced her plans to leave Yale for Columbia. This week the university announced a $50 million, five-year initiative to enhance the diversity of the faculty.
Another student, Dianne Lake, tied anger over the Halloween e-mail to recent debate about the title “master†used for the heads of the school’s residential colleges, asking: “Why do Yale students call these administrators master? The world is watching.â€
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50 years of racially-based favoritism have led to what? Certainly not to genuine equality of intellectual maturity, independence, and self respect. Not to gratitude and appreciation either. All the special recruiting, the very-heavy-thumb-on-the-scales Affirmative Action admissions, the invention and establishment of cultural identity academic departments and majors, all the specially-motivated faculty and administrative appointments, the university-provided-and-funded cultural houses, all that is not enough.
Student representatives of privileged and protected groups want more privilege, more protection, and feel entitled to demand that the University Administration wave a magic wand and change reality so that Yale’s illustrious faculty (mostly selected on the basis of real achievement) will feature still more conspicuous representation of their own group. Meanwhile, the Yale Administration ought to get busy establishing a totalitarian regime enforcing a punitive system of speech and thought control calculated to ensure that no member of a protected group ever experiences an affront (however subjective).
Victor Davis Hanson, like many of the rest of us, is tired of all the whining.
The cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous. Two high-school football players in Texas, angry that their team is losing and galvanized by their whining coach, decide to take out a referee and smash him with two cowardly hits. The reason? They claim the flattened ref got what he deserved — because of course he was a racist. The Marine Corps has discovered, as Nature might have advised it, that male ground troops on average perform more muscularly and effectively in rough combat-simulated training than do women. They apparently prove stronger, more combative, blood-thirsty, and aggressive, and fight with greater stamina. One reaction is not to accept the data, but, of course, by whining how the data has been improperly — and no doubt — socially constructed in sexist fashion, or is irrelevant altogether, maybe the standards can be lowered a bit.
In the logic of whining, Michael Brown did not commit a felony or two in the last minutes of his life, from strong-armed robbery to assaulting a police officer, but was instead begging for his life with “hands up†and shouting “don’t shoot.†There is less cause and effect anymore, only someone who must be excused from responsibility and culpability by his own claims on victimhood.
The 21st century has become a cowardly era in which we point to collective race, class, or gender rather than own up to our record of behavior and performance when our exalted expectations are not met. …
The culprits are not just our obsessions with race, class, and gender, or the careerist aspirations of elites. We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.
The bane of our age is not poverty but parity, or rather the perceived absence of a state-mandated equality of result. It no long matters how much one has, much less in comparison to those abroad or to Americans of our past. The rub is whether someone has something more or better than your own — and why and how that can still be possible in the American horn of plenty. Given those requisites, whininess is the lubricant of our national machinery.
On the other end of the social scale is the whining of the established elite, who bitch that the public has forgotten that they must be exempt to cross-examination and therefore must remind us of that by perpetual whining.
John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), Yale Class of 1804, 7th Vice President of the United States 1825-1832.
At the time, in the early 1930s, when Yale was creating the first ten residential colleges, John C. Calhoun was regarded as an inevitable choice for one of their names. Calhoun was only too obviously the single most illustrious statesman and political philosopher to have graduated from Yale.
Eighty-odd years ago, the political conflicts of the 19th century, the contest between Federalism and the Rights of the States, Secession and the American Civil War were viewed dispassionately as past history. Yale President James Rowland Angell was born in Vermont. Neither he not the members of the Yale Corporation of that time are likely to have agreed in the least with John Calhoun on Nullification, Secession, or the benevolence of Slavery, but they all properly regarded those matters as settled and the battles and controversies surrounding them as mere history, unconnected practically or emotionally to their own time.
Naming a Yale residential college for Calhoun simply accorded with a general American recognition of Calhoun as one of the most influential thinkers and most important statesmen in American history. As Richard Hofstader acknowledged, Calhoun was “probably the last American statesman to do any primary political thinking.”
Naming a residential college for John C. Calhoun obviously did not imply that the generally-New-England-bred authorities of that Connecticut University had suddenly converted into Confederate sympathisers. It merely signified their recognition of the accomplishments, personal stature, and historical importance of one of Yale’s most famous graduates. Doubtless, it was also intended, in a minor way, to recognize the national character of the modern university by honoring the champion of the (defeated) Southern section.
It appears, now, that the 21st Century Yale under a newer and more cosmopolitan leadership is about to reverse President Angell’s decision and to reject 80+ years of Yale history by removing the name of John C. Calhoun and renaming his residential college.
President Peter Salovey, last Saturday, welcomed the entering freshman class and announced an “open conversation” on renaming Calhoun College.
We all know what that means. Yale will accede to the loudest, shrillest, most emotionalist, and most radical voices. There will be a narrative about the injured feelings, the wounded sensitivities, of 21st Century African American students. Rational observations will be shouted down, and with complete pomposity and sanctimony President Salovey will express regret, but explain the vital necessity of bowing to contemporary political correctness. Calhoun will be out. His (previously vandalized) stained glass window pulled out and replaced. His name chiseled out of the Gothic sandstone. And you can bet that the college will be renamed, specifically in order to rub it in, for some personage of color, somebody like the world-famous Edward Bouchet, Yale Class of 1874, the first African American to graduate from Yale.
Philip Eil, in the Atlantic, contemplates with unease the posthumous rise to fame and pop culture ascendancy of the visionary horror pulp writer H.P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft, you see, was not just a pulp writer. He was a passionate, nearly hydrophobic racist and anti-Semite, whose letters are absolutely filled with expressions of distaste for the presence, appearance, physiognomy, and even the odor, of Jews, Negroes, Asians, and persons of Southern European origin. The sight (and the smell), when encountered on city streets, of the result of 1900-era mass immigration could make the Mayflower-descended Lovecraft literally physically ill.
Hence, the dilemma troubling Mr. Eil: today’s American establishment culture faithfully worships at the altar of fame and success, but it simultaneously wants to cast out and obliterate anyone or anything incompatible with its own fanatically egalitarian ideology. Some pretty serious chin-stroking is in order here.
[N]o tale of posthumous success is quite as spectacular as that of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the “cosmic horror†writer who died in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1937 at the age of 46. The circumstances of Lovecraft’s final years were as bleak as anyone’s. He ate expired canned food and wrote to a friend, “I was never closer to the bread-line.†He never saw his stories collectively published in book form, and, before succumbing to intestinal cancer, he wrote, “I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales, and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.†Among the last words the author uttered were, “Sometimes the pain is unbearable.†His obituary in the Providence Evening Bulletin was “full of errors large and small,†according to his biographer.
My feelings on Lovecraft—as a bibliophile, a lover of Providence history, a Jew, a fan of his writing, a teacher who assigns his stories—are complicated. At their best, his tales achieve a visceral eeriness, or fling the reader’s imagination to the furthest depths of outer space. Once you develop a taste for his maximalist style, these stories become addictive. But my admiration is always coupled with the knowledge that Lovecraft would have found my Jewish heritage repugnant, and that he saw our shared hometown as a haven from the waves of immigrants he saw as infecting other cities. (“America has lost New York to the mongrels, but the sun shines just as brightly over Providence,†he wrote to a friend in 1926.)
I haven’t made peace with this tension, and I’m not sure I ever will. But I have decided that perhaps he’s the literary icon our country deserves. The stories he conjured, in many ways, say as much about his bigotry as they do his genius. Or, as Moore writes, “Coded in an alphabet of monsters, Lovecraft’s writings offer a potential key to understanding our current dilemma.â€
John Hinderaker commemorates the anniversary of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown with a skeptical response to the WaPo’s agitprop story “Black and Unarmed“.
[T]he constant emphasis on police shootings of *unarmed* men that we see in the press is, for the most part, crazy. If you are a perp, or a suspect, or an inoffensive person walking down the street, you may be unarmed, but the police officer is not. Nor, in most cases, will he have any immediate way to know whether you are armed or not. If you attack him, what do you expect him to do? Challenge you to an arm-wrestling match? He is entitled to use deadly force to defend himself. Attacking a police officer rarely ends well. Likewise with fleeing a police officer who is ordering you to stop.
If there is a problem here, it does not demand a thorough revamping of American police practices. Rather, it suggests that those who have influence with a small demographic group–6% of the population, according to the Post–impress upon them that they should not attack police officers under any circumstances, and if told to stop, they should stop. If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot.
One last note: the Post casually adds that 18 law officers have been shot and killed by a suspect in the line of duty so far this year. No mention of the race of the officers or of the persons who shot them. Race is only relevant in certain highly selective circumstances, when it can be of political benefit to the party favored by newspaper reporters and editors.
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Larry Elder points out just how racially-slanted the outrage is.
[A]ccording to the Centers for Disease Control, police shootings of blacks are down almost 75 percent over the last 45 years, while police shooting of whites remained level. And never mind that the media engages in selective concern.
Selective concern?
In just the last two weeks, two cops, who happened to be white, were killed by two suspects, who happened to be black. And an unarmed white teen was killed by a cop. …
In South Carolina, an unarmed teenager was shot and killed by a cop. Zachary Hammond, 19, was out on a first date when he was fatally shot by a Seneca police officer during a drug bust. His date, who was eating an ice cream cone at the time of the shooting, was later arrested and charged with possession of 10 grams of marijuana. The shooting is under investigation. But the police claim Hammond was driving his car toward the police officer who was attempting to make the stop, an act that resulted in the officer firing two shots, striking Hammond in the shoulder and torso.
The Hammond family wonders why so little national attention has been focused on their son’s death. “It’s sad, but I think the reason is, unfortunately, the media and our government officials have treated the death of an unarmed white teenager differently than they would have if this were a death of an unarmed black teen,” said Eric Bland, the family’s attorney.
A police officer in suburban Dallas shot and killed a college football player during a struggle after the unarmed 19-year-old crashed a car through the front window of a car dealership, authorities said Friday.
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the dead man as Christian Taylor, of Arlington. Taylor was a sophomore at Angelo State University in San Angelo.
Officers were responding to a burglary call about 1 a.m. Friday in Arlington when they discovered someone had driven a vehicle through a front window of the Classic Buick GMC, according to a statement from the Arlington Police Department. The statement said police approached the suspect and a struggle ensued. At some point during the struggle, an officer shot Taylor.
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This surveillance video shows Taylor entering the lot of a closed automobile dealership at night, then first vandalizing cars then breaking into one. Taylor then leaves the lot and gets into his own vehicle, which he uses to break down the entrance barrier. He apparently then drove his SUV right through the dealership’s glass window onto the showroom floor. The police arrived and Taylor was shot after apparently resisting arrest.
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Newsmachete, at American Thinker, collected a hilarious group of liberal reactions via HuffPo to the “tragic death” of Mr. Taylor.
I suppose that is true regardless of what race you happen to be, but there is no doubt that the likelihood of dying increases exponentially if you are black.
We live in a contemptibly stupid society in a loathsome time in which bigoted morons and moon-maddened fanatics occupy the most prominent and influential establishment positions in the land and get to call the shots nearly all the time concerning our laws, institutions, history, and culture.
Americans have been living under a Second Reconstruction regime for roughly 50 years now. The first Reconstruction affected only the states which had seceded, been defeated in the war, and were under military occupation, and lasted only 12 years. The Second Reconstruction has been national in scope, has already lasted five decades, and shows no signs of ever coming to an end. No Knights of the White Camelia are coming riding to the rescue as they did at the end of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). (How’s that for an un-PC reference?)
The national establishment has been taken over by radicals and fanatics whose opinions and philosophies are typically somewhere to the left of those of Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Benjamin Butler.
Currently, pretty much the entire national media, all of the left and quite a number of Quislings on the right, are busy mau-mau’ing the public display of the Confederate flag and are even demanding the removal and/or replacement of public monuments to Southern military leaders and statesmen. The Southern Confederacy, and all its heroes and leaders, must be ostracized for the crimes of Racism and a belief in White Supremacy.
Of course, by contemporary standards, everyone alive in 1860 and 1865 and not as fanatically Afrophiliac as Thaddeus Stevens, was a “Racist” and a “White Supremacist.” The list of guilty parties can hardly be held to be restricted to members of the Confederate Government, like Jefferson Davis, or generals in the Confederate Army, like Nathan Bedford Forest. Ulysses Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln himself were all, by current standards, indisputably racist believers in the intellectual and cultural inferiority of the Negro race and –worse, yet!– White Supremacists bent upon a vision of a future United States comprised of an overwhelmingly white population of European descent and governed by white men.
Be sure to send the bulldozers over to the Lincoln Memorial, as soon as they finish crushing the statue of former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.
This little exercise in sarcasm is intended to be funny, but it really is not a joking matter. Rush Limbaugh and some other commentators have already warned that, if the radical left is permitted to succeed in defining the Confederate Flag as a hateful emblem of Slavery, Racism, and White Supremacy and get it pulled down from every public display and banned like the swastika in post-WWII Germany, they are next going to come after one more American historical icon after another. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-owners! Get their names and faces off our currency and out of our public buildings. The American Flag flew over a once White Supremacist and Segregated America. Looking at the Stars-and-Stripes snapping in the breeze is bound to be painful to Ta-Nehisi Coates as a reminder of the days when Slavery even flourished in Northern states. We need to tear that flag down as well, and adopt the Gay Rainbow Banner as our national colors.
We’ve obviously reached a point where we need to draw the line and say: Enough! The Civil War ended 150 years ago. Segregation ended more than 50 years ago, and we’ve had 50 years since of Affirmative Action, Federal supervision of Americans’ hearts and minds, national grovelling to victim groups, self-hatred, and reverse racism. Enough. The Civil Rights era should be declared over and the era of Political Correctness and of National Rule by Rancid Radicals should be over, too.
There were, all rational adults should recognize, complexities in the politics of the 19th century. There was more than one possible legitimate point of view on how, when, and by whom slavery ought to be ended. Slavery was not somehow mystically forgivable when practiced before 1783 in Massachusetts, before 1841 in New York, or before 1848 in Connecticut, but a crime against Humanity when practiced in South Carolina or Alabama in 1861.
Secession was undoubtedly constitutionally problematic, but it is necessary to reflect that when sectional passions were uncontrollably inflamed, and overwhelming majorities of state conventions and votes in state-wide referenda confirmed that political course, the best, the most intelligent, the most honorable and patriotic men of Southern states, many of whom had always opposed secession, accepted the decision of the citizens of their own states and supported the cause of Southern Independence.
The preservation of the Union by forcible conquest and armed invasion of fraternal states was, I think it is very easy to argue, rather more problematic legally and constitutionally even than secession. Several former presidents, including two Northerners (Pierce & Buchanan), opposed and condemned Abraham Lincoln’s decision to wage war on fraternal states, and one former president (John Tyler) actually served in the Congress of the Confederacy.
It is simply not the case that the sectional conflicts leading to Civil War are reducible simply to being for or against Slavery. And the generation of Americans residing in Southern states in 1861 were not personally responsible for institutions and economic circumstances inherited over the course of two centuries.
History, Fate, and God (if you believe in God) decided against the cause of Southern Independence. The South was conquered and forcibly reunified, but Abraham Lincoln, and Grant and Sherman, his leading generals, all believed in generosity on the part of the victor toward the vanquished. The country was successfully reunited, within the lifetimes of many men who served in the Confederate Army, precisely because Northerners rejected the policies of the Northern radicals, allowed Reconstruction to be ended, and in general took the position that Southerners had fought gallantly and honorably, if perhaps misguidedly, and treated their former adversaries with affection and respect. There is a touching film clip of a 1913 (50th Anniversy) reunion at Gettysburg. Old men who decades earlier had faced each other as enemies met this time as friends, and as aged Confederates limpingly tried reenacting a portion of Pickett’s Charge, their former adversaries stood atop Cemetery Ridge cheering for them.
The American left is utterly and completely intoxicated with the pleasures of racial politics and is carried away with its success in obtaining any and all demands it cares to make after applying the moral jiu-jitsu of pointing to some pitiable victim. It’s long past time to declare the Civil Rights Movement and politics of the 1960s over and done with. We need to tell the leftists and their craven conformist establishment allies we’ve had enough and we are putting out more Confederate flags.
