Can Conservatives be Anti-Racist?

Can Conservatives be Anti-Racist?

Why we should stop looking at Confederate and racial history as a binary of good and evil.

(Workers remove the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. Source: The New York Times)

I am very pleased that my opinion about Lee-Jackson Day garnered such an animated response, with over 1,000 Facebook comments and a flood of letters to the editor. Unfortunately, many of the commentators online and outside of the W&L community doubled-down on their denial of slavery’s role in the Civil War, accusing me of being “academically dishonest,” “ignorant,” a “hate-filled liberal,” and worst of all, a “northern sympathizer” and a “yankee.”

Anyone who knows me can attest that my love for sweet tea, biscuits and gravy, and Southern cookin’ must nullify any approbation I could possibly have for life above the Mason-Dixon.

But on a more serious note, these rebuttals, though they did not always result in personal attacks, highlight exactly the type of ignorance of misunderstanding that afflicts both extremes of the “Confederate” debate in America. This theme can also be extended to almost every debate in the country, from Palestine to voter laws. And it seems as though the loudest and most vindictive commentators have the largest presence in public debates, as well as the most time to stalk social media.

I’ve offered some advice on how I think my generation can have better conversations regarding Palestine, for example. And so now I would like to return to the racial question that seems to still be a deep and unhealed wound in the American psyche. 

Allow me to recount a conversation I had about my Lee-Jackson piece. Most W&L professors, as you may suspect, dislike Robert E. Lee. But several faculty members appreciated how I considered multiple perspectives and acknowledged the dangers of the Lost Cause. One professor went so far as to say I was an anti-racist in my rebuke of the Lee-Jackson Day rhetoric.

And so that got me thinking: can a conservative be an anti-racist? That’s one of those terms that we avoid like the plague, right alongside “pronouns” and “Marxism.” And I doubt other people would call me an anti-racist. I certainly would not get invited to speak to incoming W&L freshmen like Ibram X. Kendi was back in 2020.

Mulling it over, I realized that my biggest critique of the word is the binary it creates. You are either racist or not racist. There is no in-between. There is no nuance. And that nuance is what I seek, a middle ground which I hope to convince others to adopt. 

After all, nobody can justifiably call me a racist person — not that it’s stopped a few people from trying. But I also won’t go so far as to condemn every member of the Confederacy as well as Abraham Lincoln for being racist, as Kendi’s anti-racist philosophy insists. By that logic, every historical figure, including the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., will at some point in time fall victim to the perceived moral superiority of the current generation.

So antiracism is a problematic concept, a sort of modern religion that John McWhorter has warned is overzealous and “stifles nuance and debate.” But you don’t have to be anti-racist to condemn racism and criticize individuals of the past.

Looking back on antebellum America, there is much to criticize. There is also much that we struggle to even comprehend, from the daily habits of the Victorian-era to the “peculiar institution” of slavery that legitimized various degrees of equality and oppression. 

Take the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 by a group of wealthy white men who thought that slavery was inhumane but that the only solution was to send black people “back” to Africa. The idea sounds ridiculous, and it obviously did not end slavery.

Leaders like Henry Clay, who served as the ACS’s president at the peak of his political career, sincerely rebuked the expansion of slavery. But he himself failed to resettle any of the 122 people he owned over the course of his life. Talk is cheap, and Clay is but one of many political elites who did the same (others include Thomas Jefferson and James Madison).

It would be too hasty to immediately condemn all those intellectuals for their perpetuation of slavery. But it would be intellectually dishonest to ignore the problematic side of their life, or as did several critics of The Spectator, deny the existence of “slave plantations” in general. 

At the end of the day, our own personal experiences will frame the way we understand these subjects. I was born fifteen minutes from Henry Clay’s house, and I have admired him for years. But would someone born in New Jersey see Clay in the same way? Probably not. 

What if they were the descendants of slaves? Jefferson’s descendants, many of whom came from Sally Hemmings’ line, each see their ancestor in starkly different terms. 

But as one descendant, David Works, said, “there’s a whole lot of good that happens when people talk to each other and get beyond their assumptions.” That is the goal: discussion and understanding.

Of course, to get to that point requires an acknowledgment of the truth. In David’s case, he had to accept that Thomas Jefferson had children with his slave, Sally Hemmings. Many people still deny that claim.

In Lee’s case, people need to acknowledge that the Civil War started over slavery. Honestly, this is not a point I expected to have to defend so vigorously. And the burden of proof should not fall on me anymore than it would if I was asked to prove that the sky is blue or the Earth is round. 

But if you’ve read this far and are still unsure, check out Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion. The book came out in 2001, a year before I was born, meaning that it isn’t quite a revelation anymore. But here is what one of many state-appointed commissioners had to say to fellow Southern lawmakers, encouraging them to join the Confederacy:

“Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality…

“[Mississippi] had rather see the last of her race, men, women and children, immolated in one common funeral pile, than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.”

The quote speaks for itself, as do countless others. And for good reason, portraits of Mr. William L. Harris of Mississippi, the voice behind that speech, do not grace the walls of public institutions. Should Lee be any different? What about Jefferson Davis or the infamous Alexander Stephens?

I don’t intend to answer that in a brief op-ed, but is it not worth further discussion? I am sure people who read this will come to different conclusions, far more than the two options an anti-racist framework expects. 

Unfortunately, these discussions are few and far between. Even the recent campus lecture about the renaming of nine military bases spent disappointingly little time weighing the merits of their original Confederate namesakes.

I was happy that W&L initiated a conversation on the subject. The speaker, Professor Connor Williams, gave a thoughtful presentation that credited Lee for his humble willingness to admit defeat and focus on rebuilding Washington College. 

But despite the talk’s title, “Making Treason Odious Again,” Williams did not explore whether Lee and other confederates committed treason. He simply framed them as enemies to the United States of America, without a glimpse of the reconciliatory understanding General Grant had so strongly urged. Robert E. Lee, he said, “truly led to the deaths of I think more American soldiers than any enemy we have faced.” It was almost as if the strife from four years of bloody conflict was ongoing.

He further stated that “the political thinking of a cabal of elite white men … and their poorly led, poorly formed four year insurrection … does not necessarily need to be half of our history.”

I agree that the war does not need to be our entire focus, but its events, characters, and consequences are significant enough to merit a nuanced discussion of it today. Declaring, as Williams did, that “you can’t draw inspiration from [Confederate General] Leonidas Polk” is both conceited and diminishes the individuality of the nearly one million people who served in the Confederate Army.

Williams himself agreed that “we need to move from a but to an and” when looking at past figures. Leonidas Polk was a popular leader among his troops, important enough to have a camp named after him in 1941, and he was a horrible general. 

Robert E. Lee was a slaveholder who fought for the Confederacy, and he was a distinguished Union officer before 1861, and he was one of the ablest generals of his time, and his Civil War decisions cost many American lives, and he died while working to reconcile the South. 

Different groups will place a greater weight on certain clauses, and that’s okay. We should not expect a multicultural society to agree on everything, especially from one generation to the next. But we cannot hunker down in our own perception of the world, because in doing so you will never understand the people with whom you disagree. 

For many, it seems like Robert E. Lee is the only person worth discussing and lionizing. For many others, he is like gum on a shoe, an inconvenience that you want to scrape away. And even after laboriously removing it, you can’t help but notice the sticky residue. Can there not be an in-between? Can we stop framing history as “good or bad,” “important or unimportant,”  and “racist or anti-racist”? Those binaries only get so far, and it seems they hit a stonewall long ago.

[The opinions expressed in this magazine are the author's own and do not reflect the official policy or position of The Spectator, or any students or other contributors associated with the magazine. It is the intention of The Spectator to promote student thought and civil discourse, and it is our hope to maintain that civility in all discussions.]