The SMEAR Is On in Edenton Thanks to WaPo and the splc
“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…