Posted on 12/02/2002 7:26:36 PM PST by stainlessbanner
NEW YORK--If you think you understand America's culture wars, try this quick quiz. Who said, "The days of one-sided, ignorant, and racist attacks are done. We will honor our heritage and speak out against the genocide of our culture"?
A) A black leader in Lansing, Mich.
B) A Latino spokeswoman in San Jose, Calif.
C) A white activist in Spotsylvania, Va.
The correct answer is "C," the white activist. He's Johnny Hostler, chair of the A.P. Hill Chapter of Virginia's League of the South. Hostler posted his remarks on the Internet last spring to condemn Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner, after Warner refused to designate April as Confederate History Month.
Blacks and women both have months to celebrate their heritage, other white Virginians argued. Don't Confederates deserve the same privilege?
Warner must hope to avoid the fate of Georgia's Roy Barnes and South Carolina's Jim Hodges, who both lost gubernatorial re-election bids this month amid controversies over the Confederate flag. Hodges backed the removal of the flag from atop his statehouse; Barnes supported a new state flag that minimized a Confederate emblem.
Across the South, meanwhile, the imbroglio has entered public schools through a different medium: teen fashion. Earlier this fall, a high school principal in Canton, Ga., barred students from wearing a popular line of Confederate-themed clothing. About 100 students defied the ban, noting that blacks wear clothes and hats with the "X" symbol of Malcolm X. Why shouldn't whites be allowed to wear their own X -- the Confederate battle flag?
In fact, the Canton school district also bans clothing with Malcolm X symbols. But whites' effort to invoke Malcolm signals an important shift in Southern sensibilities. For more than a century, white Southerners sought to impose a single ethos upon schools and communities. Now they're much more likely to argue in the idiom of modern multiculturalism, demanding "equal time" for their distinct "culture."
This maneuver closely echoes the recent strategy of anti-evolutionists, who have become fervent multiculturalists in their own right. Following the Scopes trial of 1925, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians demanded state bans upon evolution instruction in the schools. When the Supreme Court struck down such measures in the 1960s, however, activists began demanding equal time for so-called "creationist" views.
Even Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell now says that John T. Scopes should not have been convicted at Dayton, Tenn., because Scopes was merely trying to teach "both sides" -- evolution and creation.
Most of my fellow liberals will scoff at such claims, insisting that conservatives are co-opting pluralist language in order to promote their own political agenda. But I would urge liberals to view the new right-wing multiculturalism as an opportunity, not as a threat.
Don't celebrate -- analyze
First, the right-wing challenge should force us to reflect upon our own tendency to applaud -- rather than to analyze -- racial and ethnic history. Much of left-wing multiculturalism simply praises women and minorities, as Southern whites correctly sense. If blacks, Hispanics and Asians are celebrated in schools, Southerners ask, why not celebrate white Confederates?
The answer is that schools should not "celebrate" anyone, if by that term we mean uncritical homage. No group of people -- not even victims of horrid oppression -- has a monopoly on virtue. Black Africans participated in the slave trade; Spanish conquistadors enslaved and slaughtered Native Americans; and Native Americans slaughtered each other, sometimes as part of human-sacrifice rituals.
By ignoring or neglecting these facts, we clear the way for white Southerners to airbrush out their own foibles -- particularly their perpetuation of slavery after the American Revolution.
Second, right-wing multiculturalism provides a tremendous chance to promote the inquiry-based pedagogy that many liberals say they want.
According to the standard liberal critique, American education is too "fact-driven": especially as standardized testing increases, liberals complain, schools require children to recall information rather than to deliberate, analyze and explain it.
What better way to promote inquiry and discussion than to engage the conservative point of view? According Johnny Hostler's League of the South, for example, the Civil War was not really about slavery; instead, it was a war for Southern independence, modeled after the same principles as the revolution itself: freedom, equality and self-determination.
Imagine a high school history class that really debated this proposition. The class would have to examine the origins of slavery in North America; the drafting of the Constitution, which deemed each slave three-fifths of a person; the industrialization of the North; the extension of slavery into the West; the rise of sectionalism in the South; and so on.
In a full and fair discussion, I believe, most students would recognize that the defense of slavery was integral -- not incidental -- to the Confederate cause. Johnny Hostler believes otherwise, of course. Rather than celebrating our respective "cultures," then, let's subject them to analysis and argument in American schools. And may the best argument win.
Copyright 2002 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.
My goodness, I haven't encountered such a display of sophisticated wit since the last time I attended a reception at the British Embassy.
LOL, indeed. It is precisely because of this sort of infantile, reflexive derision that some of us have begun to stand up for the sociocultural heritage the South imparts to us.
Don't mind Hank, ladies and gentlemen; if he were adequately educated he would be familiar with Southern contributions to law, literature, and history, but alas! as he so freely demonstrates, we can't hold him to the standards of behavior evidenced by mannerly and broadly-read people.
Nah, they were just being polite. But I guess that was lost on you.
This is very much a characteristic post from him/her/it.
Funny how Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center has fans echoing his radical spew here at FR.
I find it singurlarly amusing that the author suggests that liberals want to teach students to analyze rather than recite facts.
I also find it interesting that multiculturalism is being hoisted on its own petard. Remember: Multiculturalism says that who you are is based on your group identity, not what you do. It is impossible to suggest such a thing as "analytical multiculturalism" since, as the article itself states, virtually no culture could survive an unbiased examination unscathed. And multiculturalism says thay all cultures (except male WASPs?) are inherently good. This liberal rant is basically saying: "OMG, they are using our weapons against us, the sky is falling, the sky is falling! No, wait! If we just suggest THINKING then those weapons are useless."
True, but then they become useless to the liberals as well.
I tell the same story when talking to northerners, only change the title of the book to "Yankee Culture." I get the same kind of response there too. Thin skin knows no prejudice and runs equally north and south, and true culture is rare everywhere.
I have a great fondness for the south, having lived many years there as well as the north, and while there are always some who are poor representatives of their own society, I have always found people in all parts of the south and southwest gracious, cultured, and interesting. I am truly sorry to see the old southern culture dying in so many areas, but the same is happening in the north. What we are really loosing is Americanism, I'm afraid.
(Now, if any of you southerners want to prove just how gracious and generous you are, you could send me some boiled peanuts, and I don't mean that commercial stuff, I mean some of those home style peanuts boiled ham juice.)
(stainlessbanner, thanks for the link.)
Capriole said: ...if he were adequately educated he would be familiar with Southern contributions to law, literature, and history ...
I readily admit I am not adequately educated, and never will be, even though I believe education is a life-long endeavor. Of southern contributions I am quite familiar, and proud to be associated with it if only by being part of the country founded on ideas, that, with the exception of Adams, are predominantely southern in philosophy, but saddenend by the history that includes those atrocities and crimes committed against the south called the civil war.
By the way, I appreciate all the responses, especially those that demonstrate some people still have enough guts and courage to stand for something. If we could only channel all that emotion and energy into restoring freedom and individualism in this country, we'd have something to fight for.
Hank
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