Jun 28, 2004

The Dangerous Fallacies of Confederate Multiculturalism

by Liberty and Power

A comment by Glen Whitman on the"Liberty and Diversity" conference we both recently attended prompted me to think about the implications of a conversation I had a couple of years ago over coffee. It was with a white professor who belonged to the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusiveness. The Coalition is a group of faculty and staff at the University of Alabama that advocates such"multicultural" crusades as mandatory diversity training. When she discussed the extent of cultural awareness on campus, she was despondent. She was particularly upset that local blacks on campus and in the community showed little to no interest in celebrating Kwanzaa.

I tried to keep a straight face but it wasn’t easy. I noted that local blacks, like whites, were Christians of a traditional sort and thus Kwanzaa was foreign to their outlook. I also said something to the effect that blacks in Alabama had too much good sense to take any stock in a holiday which was founded during the 1960s by an American college professor of dubious character. She did not deny this but it did not dampen her desire to promote Kwanzaa.

At the time, this incident struck me as a textbook illustration of the artificiality and meaninglessness of “multiculturalism.” Here was a person who was so enamored with promoting differences between blacks and whites that that she was willing to take action to create a cultural trait through top down methods if necessary.

Most recently, I have come away with similar feelings after several conversations with local whites who advocate the advancement of"Southern Heritage." Their version of southern heritage often includes promotion of Confederate symbols and an occasional fascination with the"Scots-Irish" roots of many Southerners.

If I changed a few words here and there in their arguments, the professor from the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusiveness could have easily used the same justifications for her worldview. Like her, the Confederate multiculturalists desperately wanted not only to emphasize cultural distinctions (and if necessary create them out of thin air) but to deploy these distinctions to serve a broader political cause. They, like her, seemed more interested in viewing the world (or at least controversies on campus) through the lens of group rights rather than individual rights.

The Confederate multiculturalists almost always gave the same answers to my questions and objections. When I point to the association between the CSA and slavery, they proclaimed that the"war wasn't about slavery." When I raised some objections against this view and stressed the statism of the CSA (including nationalization of industries and conscription), they answered that"the Yankees" had dirty hands too (as if that excused any Southern sin). Instead, they traced the causes of the war to “states rights" and the tariff. Most of these Confederate multiculturalists impressed me as sincere and often had sensible views on other issues. I do not think they were racists.

Having said this, I found their analysis of the details of the history slavery, secession, and the Civil War to be overly simplistic or just plain wrong. The primary documents from the period clearly show that the protection of slavery was a central motivation of the founders of the CSA. They resented the effort of the federal government to block expansion of their cherished institution into the territories and its alleged failure to enforce Fugitive Slave law. The declarations of"immediate causes" of secession of South Carolina and Mississippi, for example, said nary a word about the tariff or, for that matter, states rights and quite a bit about the need to protect slavery. Of course, it would have been laughable if they had emphasized states rights since during the 1850s many of these same Southern politicians had fought to overrule the Northern states when they enacted personal liberty laws to protect the rights of runaways.

Instead, the early declarations of seceding states stressed a compact theory. Under the compact view, the federal government had failed to live up to its end of the Constitutional bargain by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act or to allow slavery to expand into the territories. As any cursory reading of the Mississippi and South Carolina documents will show, slavery was nearly always front and center.

I am not an apologist for Lincoln or the Union or the"Yankees." Much like historian Jeff Hummel, I do not believe that Lincoln should have violently prevented secession. I apply the same view to such illiberal places as Uzbekistan or Kosovo. As Hummel points out, had the Confederacy been limited to the states that left before Fort Sumner, it would have probably collapsed eventually in isolation, slave revolts, and runaways to the North. At the same time, as an individual, I not only would have"allowed" but applauded the efforts of John Brown to promote slave rebellions in the South.

To me, the most heroic figure was not Lincoln or Davis but Lysander Spooner. Before the war, Spooner's antislavery interpretation of the Constitution inspired Frederick Douglass and he supported the Brown rebellion. During the war, he criticized the Union's war on the seceding states. All the while, Spooner (like Garrison before 1861) remained consistent in his defense of the inalienable rights of all individuals.

If the Confederate multiculturalists really believe in individual freedom, as many of them assert, they will put away their Confederate flags, abandon the cause of a nation state that went to war to protect the most unforgivable violation of inalienable rights in American history, and embrace the rich American heritage of individualism.

---

---

More Comments:

---

---

---

---

---

---

---