You can point to counter-trends. Numerous studies that show up only in the social media feeds of people who've read other similar studies have found that the U.S. media much prefers to cover killings by Muslims of whites than killings of Muslims by whites, and that the term "terrorist" is almost exclusively reserved for Muslims. But those are not the trends that some people are paying attention to. Instead they're noticing that critiques of racism are permitted to make generalizations about white people, that stand-up comedians are permitted to crack jokes about white people, and that identifying as a white person can put you into a historical storyline as part of the tribe that created, not only lots of fun and useful technology, but also environmental and military destruction and oppression on a brand new scale.
Once you're looking at the world this way, and your news sources are too, and your friends are too, you're likely to hear about things that show up on Kessler's blog that none of my acquaintances have ever heard of, such as the idea that U.S. colleges are generally teaching and promoting something called "white genocide." Believers in white genocide have found a single professor who claimed to support it and then claimed he was joking. I don't claim to know the truth of that matter and don't consider it acceptable as a joke or otherwise. But the guy wouldn't have had to claim he was joking if it was accepted standard practice. Nonetheless, if you believed your identity was tied up with the white race, and you believed people were trying to destroy it, you might have a negative reaction to giving Robert E. Lee the boot, I think, whether or not you considered black people inferior or favored slavery or thought wars were justifiable or anything of the sort.
Here's how Kessler thinks white people are treated, in his own words:
"SJWs [apparently this stands for "social justice warriors"] always say that all white people have 'privilege', a magical and immaterial substance that belittles our hardships and dismisses all of our achievements. Everything we've ever achieved is portrayed as just a byproduct of our skin color. Yet, somehow with all this 'privilege' it is white America that is suffering the most from epidemic levels of depression, prescription drug abuse, heroin abuse and suicide. It is white Americans whose birthrates are precipitously declining while the hispanic population skyrockets due to illegal immigration. By comparison blacks have a higher rate of happiness. They are taught to be confident. All of the schoolbooks, entertainment and revisionist history portray them as plucky underdogs who earn everything over enormous obstacles. The whites are the only ones who are inherently evil and racist. Our great societies, inventions and military achievements are portrayed as ill-gotten and undeservedly won on the backs of others. With so much negative propaganda twisting their minds no wonder white people have so little ethnic identity, so much self-hatred and are so willing lay down and take it when anti-white bullies like Al Sharpton or Wes Bellamy want to shake them down."
So, when people in Lee Park tell me that a statue of a soldier on a horse fighting a war on the side of slavery and put there in the 1920s in a whites-only park is not racist and not pro-war, what they are saying, I think, is that they themselves are not racist or pro-war, that those are not their motivations, that they have something else in mind, such as sticking up for the mistreated white ethnicity. What they mean by "defend history" is not so much "ignore the realities of war" or "forget what the Civil War was started over" but rather "defend this symbol of white people because we're people too, we count too, we ought to get some damn respect once in a while just like People of Color and other glorified groups that beat the odds and get credit for ordinary lives as if they were heroes."
UNDERSTANDING US TOO
All right. That's my limited attempt to begin to understand supporters of the Lee statue, or at least one aspect of their support. Some have declared that taking down any war statue insults all veterans. Some are in fact quite openly racist. Some see the statue of a guy engaged in fighting against the United States as a matter of sacred U.S. patriotism. There are as many combinations of motivations as there are people supporting the statue. My point in looking a bit into one of their motivations is that it is understandable. Nobody likes unfairness. Nobody likes double standards. Nobody likes disrespect. Perhaps politicians feel that way too, or perhaps they just exploit others who do, or perhaps a little of both. But we should continue trying to understand what people we disagree with care about, and to let them know that we understand it, or that we're trying to.
Then, and only then, can we ask them to try to understand us. And only then can we properly explain ourselves, through grasping who it is they currently think we are. I don't fully grasp this, I admit. I'm not much of a Marxist and am unsure why Kessler constantly refers to opponents of the statue as Marxists. Certainly Marx was a Union partisan, but nobody's asking for a General Grant statue, not that I've heard. It seems to me that a lot of what Kessler means by "Marxist" is "un-American," bitterly opposed to the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington and all that is sacred.
But which parts? If I applaud the separation of church and state, the limited executive, the power of impeachment, the popular vote, and limited federal power, but am not a fan of the Supreme Court, the Senate, slavery, winner-take-all elections without ranked choice voting, or the lack of protections for the environment, am I a Marxist or not? I suspect it comes down to this: am I labeling the Founders as fundamentally evil or basically good? In fact, I'm not doing either of those things, and I'm not doing either of them for the white race either. I can try to explain.
When I joined in a chant of "White supremacy's got to go" recently in Lee Park, a white man demanded of me: "Well, what are you?" To him I looked white. But I identify as human. That doesn't mean that I pretend to live in a post-racial world where I neither suffer the lack of affirmative action nor benefit from the very real privileges of looking "white" and having had parents and grandparents who benefitted from college funding and bank loans and all kinds of government programs that were denied to non-whites. Rather, it means that I think of myself as a fellow member in the group called humans. That's the group I root for. That's the group I hope survives the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the warming of the climate. That's the group I want to see overcome hunger and disease and all forms of suffering and inconvenience. And it includes every single person who calls themselves white and every single person who does not.
So, I don't feel the white guilt that Kessler thinks people are trying to impose on him. I don't feel it because I don't identify with George Washington any more than I identify with the men and women he enslaved or the soldiers he whipped or the deserters he killed or the native people he slaughtered. I don't identify with him any less than with those other people either. I don't deny all of his merits because of all of his faults, either.
On the other hand, I don't get to feel white pride. I feel human guilt and pride as a human, and that includes a great deal. "I am large," wrote Walt Whitman, as much a Charlottesville resident and influence as Robert E. Lee. "I contain multitudes."
If someone were to put up a monument in Charlottesville that white people found offensive, I would object vigorously to that monument, because white people are people, like any other people. I would demand that that monument be taken down.
Instead, we happen to have a monument that many of us humans, and people who profess other identities, including African American, find offensive. So, I object vigorously to this monument. We should not engage in what many perceive as hurtful hate-speech because others deem it to be of "ethnic significance." Pain outweighs moderate appreciation, not because of who feels is, but because it is more powerful.
If someone were to make a monument of some old hateful tweet from Wes Bellamy -- and my understanding is that he would be the last to suggest such a thing -- it wouldn't matter how many people thought it was nice. It would matter how many people thought it was painfully cruel.
A statue that symbolizes racism and war to a great many of us has an enormously negative value. To respond that it has "ethnic significance to southern whites" as if it were a traditional soup recipe misses the point.
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