“Angry White Southern Men”?

In June, the Washington Post published an extended article on an ongoing dispute in Edenton, North Carolina, over a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier erected in 1902 to honor the 47 war dead of Chowan County. Every weekend, the article explained, pro-statue and anti-statute locals offer their respective cases in favor of either keeping the statue in its prominent place as a monument to a distant heritage, or moving it elsewhere to reflect America’s changing values.

I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that it was not particularly sympathetic to those seeking to preserve the statue’s pride of place in a quaint tourist town of about 4,500 featuring everything from pre-Revolution Colonial homes to 1920s cottages. The article quotes a Southern Poverty Law Center report as if that organization is a disinterested party — a “legal advocacy organization,” as reporter Gregory S. Schneider risibly defines it. It quotes four anti-statue activists in comparison to two pro-statue proponents. One of the latter, Mike Dean, is described in specifically emotive terms, getting “angry” at “any attempt to associate the statue with slavery.” Those critical of the statue, in turn, are portrayed as enlightened, participating in thought-provoking book clubs and “meditating” on important matters such as civil rights and the legacy of slavery.

I hope I do not offend too many Abbeville readers to observe that no one group, even Southerners, is insulated from bad behavior and erroneous thinking. It is certainly in the realm of possibility that Dean and his fellow pro-statue collaborators are racist jerks who, as the WaPo obliquely insinuates, intend the statue to communicate to local black residents that they are inferior citizens of our nation. Yet, by that same token, it’s also possible that the anti-statue activists are subject to a widely-prevalent woke groupthink that interprets everything about Southern heritage as necessarily backwards and bigoted.

And that failure to empathize, I would argue, is the problem with these periodic journalistic pieces on the spats regularly occurring throughout the South over how to interpret our nation’s history and legacy. There is little, if any, attempt to really consider the white, conservative Southern voice as possessing a unique perspective worthy of respect. White Southerners who articulate any defense of memorializing their forefathers — whether it be out of a dutiful sense of filial piety or a feeling of white supremacist arrogance — are all consolidated into a single token identity worthy of unalloyed censure.

Certainly the hypocrisy of that position is blatant. A fundamental tenet of liberal ideology is the sacredness of the individual. Our academy celebrates not only a multi-culturalism that seeks to elevate the voices of long-overlooked minority groups, but “intersectionality” and micro-cultures within those minority communities. Hence we hear not only of blacks, or black women, but Gen X black female lesbians engaged in urban farming. Yet there is little such willingness to consider the perspective of a white southern male who thinks that removing the statue that honored his ancestor is offensive. Such a man, in the eyes of the liberal ideologue, is just as bad as the Klansman burning crosses in the front yards of his black neighbors.

Yet more concernedly, the collapsing of all conservative white Southern identities and opinions into a single, homogenous bogeyman reflects a deeper repudiation of the very idea of filial piety. The great historian of the South Eugene Genovese is said to have declared that no man should be coerced to spit on the graves of his ancestors. And yet that is precisely what generations of Americans have been taught to do, not only with slaveholders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, but even Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The arrogance and ignorance of such opinions — what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” — is somewhat comical, eliding as it does the fact that we ourselves may one day be posthumously interrogated for failing to abide by the ever-fluid mores of future generations.

Admittedly, this is an odd argument for a person such as myself to make. I have no immediate familial stake in the quarrel over Confederate memorials. As far as I know, the only ancestor of mine who fought in the Civil War was a first-generation Irish immigrant who was conscripted to serve in the Union Army shortly after arriving in the United States. (My children, on the other hand, are descended from a Confederate captured at Gettysburg through their mother.) And yet I make the argument still, because I recognize that a civilization that refuses to honor its ancestors, however checkered their story may be, is in decay and on its way to self-destruction.

Moreover, what is now being overturned is a pact forged by our nation at the end of our bloodiest, most terrible conflict: Southerners who lost the Civil War would be welcomed back as citizens, their constitutional rights protected, their own unique civilization permitted to be memorialized. Post-war presidents honored both “the blue” and “the gray” precisely to emphasize that we are all one people under one flag. Woke attempts to scrub all memorials to the Confederate war dead thus amounts to a nullification of that sacred agreement.

I certainly hope Mr. Dean and his compatriots in Edenton, North Carolina are virtuous, upstanding citizens of our republic. They will need patience and courage to withstand the unfair calumnies cast upon white Southern conservative males by an elite class who view them as little more than ignorant hicks who represent a dying culture of “white supremacy.” And, in Dean’s defense, I might be a bit angry too if I was told that monuments to my ancestors in my home town were no longer welcome “because racism.”

Yet we must remember the impulse motivating the pietas that seeks to preserve some place for memorializing our ancestors is ultimately one of love. We love our forebears, because they are a part of us, and we seek to share their story with our children, flourishing by both emulating their virtue, and learning from their mistakes. “Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you; that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you, in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Deut. 5:16). What the South requires is a narrative that gains the rhetorical high ground over our woke critics, demonstrating that it is not them, but us, who truly know the meaning not only of pietas, but caritas

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

Casey Chalk

Casey Chalk has degrees in history and education from the University of Virginia, and a masters in theology from Christendom College. He is a regular contributor for New Oxford Review, The Federalist, American Conservative, and Crisis Magazine. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands (Sophia Institute).

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