NOVEMBER 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
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THE GREAT CANCEL CULTURE DEBATE! TEN MILITARY BASES TO BE RENAMED by Dr. John Ellis, Ed.D. MILITARY BASE QUANDARY There was quite a brouhaha when then President Donald Trump refused to consider renaming military bases named after Confederate leaders. He argued that these “monumental and very powerful bases have become part of a great American heritage and a history of winning, victory and freedom.” However, effective January 1, 2021, Congress voted to override Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, appropriating 2 million dollars and appointing an 8member commission with the task of rebranding 10 Army bases along with a number of Naval ships considered “racial relics”. The legislation mandates the “removal of Confederate identities, symbols, monuments and other honors from Defense Department property - including bases, building, streets, ships, aircraft, weapons and equipment - within three years.” Those bases are: Ft. Benning and Ft. Gordon in GA; Ft. Polk
Camp Beauregard in LA; Ft. Lee, Ft. A.P. Hill and Ft. Pickett in VA; Ft. Hood, TX; Ft. Bragg, NC; and Ft. Rucker, AL.
Confederate General Braxton Bragg
Naval ships included are the guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville, oceanographic survey ship the USNS Maury and two aircraft carriers that are also being called into question - the John C. Stennis and USS Carl Vinson (both named after late Southern lawmakers who were segregationists). The rationale for this task runs fairly deep. Fort Bragg, home of the Airborne and Special Operations Operations Forces, for instance, was named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg who is noted as having claimed that “the only mode of making the Black race work is to hold them in conditions of involuntary servitude.” And, Fort Benning is named after Confederate Brigadier General
Henry Benning, a slave owner who warned that if slavery ended, the nation would see “Black governors, Black legislatures, Black jurors, Black everything.” But how did these ten bases get named in the rst place? At the time (between WWI and WWII), the federal government needed large swaths of southeast land for its sprawling military reservations. One tactic to get the local leaders to “buy in” was to basically give them free rein to name the bases after their own hometown “military heroes” who just happened to be Confederate leaders. Plus, since a large number of wartime draftees would also be coming out of the South, it just might appeal to the young, able-bodied warrior types they needed to ll the ranks if these new installations were connected to the “Stars & Bars” of their Confederate heritage.
5 Editor: John Ellis, Ed.D. . Proofreader: Cristy Perez Legion Post: 44-200 Sun Gold St., Indio, CA 92201
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Further justification also came from the “Lost Cause” ideology, the basic tenant of which was that the Confederacy’s rebellion was an honorable struggle for the Southern way of life and that the “War of Northern Aggression” was over states rights and not slavery. It simply made Southerners feel better about losing the war and, in turn, made designating military bases after Confederate Generals (who were viewed more as tragic heroes than treasonable racists) seem more like an act of reconciliation rather than an act of divisiveness.
NOVEMBER 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
featuring the Confederate flag due to such public pressure, calling it a “contemporary symbol of divisiveness and racism”. And, in June of 2020, NASCAR banned it from its events as well because “it runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all our fans, our competitors and our industry.”
Retired Army General David Patraeus, however, put the whole issue in perspective when he wrote, “These are federal installations, home to soldiers who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
The irony of training at bases named for those who took up arms against the United States, and for the right to enslave others, is inescapable to anyone paying attention. Now, belatedly, is the moment for us to pay such attention!” CANCEL CULTURE Renaming military bases is just one side of the “cancel culture” debate, which involves forcing public accountability for a perceived injustice through “mob” action. There has been a push throughout the U.S., for instance, to tear down anything Confederate. As early as 2015, eBay, Amazon and other retailers banned the sale of items
state capital of Richmond), was removed from its pedestal following a 7-0 decision by that state’s Supreme Court who said, “values change and public policy changes too.”
It was a major victory for protestors who had defaced its base with graffiti and demanded it be torn down because it represented racism.
That same month, a group of Arizona Veterans demanded that the Governor remove a monument to Confederate soldiers at the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza in front of the State Capitol. Javis Reddick, Commander of historically Black American Legion Post 65, echoed what Patraeus had said, “Why are we claiming Confederate soldiers as veterans? They fought against the United States.” In the end, Governor Doug Ducey caved to the pressure from the American Legion and other veteran groups and the monument was removed. The ripple effect has been felt across the U.S. where statue after monument (the majority of which were erected during the “Jim Crow” era of Black repression between 1890 and 1950 by white Southern politicians) have been similarly dismantled due to increasing social and political sensitivity exacerbated by the cancel culture movement. Just this past September, Virginia’s largest monument to the Confederacy, the Robert E. Lee statue (erected 131 years ago in the
Others across the country, however, took matters into their own hands as ill-informed mob rule took over the streets: In Portland, OR, protestors toppled statues of former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
Vandals in Dunn, NC, showed their ignorance of history when they set fire to a statue of General Lee. However, it wasn’t Robert E. Lee. It was WWII Major General William C. Lee, who championed the creation of the U.S. Army Airborne and who helped plan the Normandy invasion.
HERMAN GRANADOS POST 739 In Madison, WI, protestors tore down the statue of Colonel Hans Christian Heg, who campaigned against slavery and was killed leading his regiment against Confederate troops at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. In Minneapolis, MN, a statue of President George Washington was splattered with paint and toppled because he was a slave holder. The New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson (the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the Untied States,) from the New York City Council chambers at the urging of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus who claimed that the statue “symbolizes the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded,” because Jefferson owned slaves. In Chicago, IL, the statue of U.S. President William McKinley was attacked by those accusing him of being a racist for his westward expansion policies that displaced indigenous people. San Francisco, CA, saw activists even topple a statue of former President Ulysses S. Grant who led the Civil War because he was at one point a slave holder. Indeed, he most likely was gifted one through marriage to his wife, Julia. However, he very shortly made the
NOVEMEBER 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
slave a freeman before the onset of hostilities. President, Grant advocated civil rights for the former slaves, helped ratify the 15th Amendment giving Blacks the right to vote and clamped down on the Ku Klux Klan who were terrorizing them. Even the statue of St. Junipero Serra (canonized by Pope John Paul II) was recently targeted in San Francisco as well, because Fr. Serra was reputed to be unkind to the indigenous people he was seeking to convert.
As unfathomable as it may seem… such unlawful vandalism to non-confederate statues is being perpetrated by those who skew justification in their favor without giving weight to all the historical facts. In the case of Washington and Jefferson… yes, they owned slaves. There’s no question that’s a blemish on any otherwise stellar life, but any monument to them has nothing to do with their more positive achievements such as Jefferson’s authoring the Declaration of Independence and Washington’s subsequent leading Colonial troops in the fight for our right to be a free and independent nation.
Statues of Confederate leaders, on the other hand, not only glorify their fight for succession from the United States, but also their fight to maintain the southern way of life replete with slavery. Therefore, those who point out flaws in such historical luminaries as Washington and desecrate their statues do little in the way of advancing their cause while doing much in the way of showing off their ignorance of history. If they were to set their sights on everyone who didn’t meet their “righteous” standards, who’d be left… Mr. Rogers?
In 1969, when Black Americans were still prevented from swimming alongside whites, popular PBS television personality, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons to join him and cool his feet in a pool, breaking a color barrier.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Noted author and historian Dr. Victor Davis Hanson asks, “where did all of this rage and hatred for American history come from? Those who exhibit it don’t have a lot of knowledge, so they don’t know who Braxton Bragg was. They have no idea about who Columbus met when he went to the New World. They don’t have any idea of Montezuma or genocidal practices by the Aztecs.
sure of their moral superiority because they’re arrogant and at the same time, ignorant. As a result, they have no self-doubt just like most revolutionaries who become cannibalistic in their zeal for perfection, perfection, perfection. But when we wipe away history at a whim, we’d better make sure that our targets are uniquely and melodramatically evil rather than tragically misguided. And before we get out our ropes and sandblasters, we should be certain that we are clearly the moral superiors of those we condemn to oblivion.”
Of course, while tearing down, destroying or even legally removing statues makes protestors (like the Legionnaires in Phoenix), feel like they’re winning… the question thereafter is… “then what?” It won’t undo history and it doesn’t make the underlying problem of what’s been called “systemic racism” vaporize. In retrospect, we’re left with the same social malady that afflicted us to begin with. As a result, by removing such reminders from the public eye, we’re recreating our own of version of history which (like so many other things that irritate us) are simply swept under the proverbial rug where they’re out of sign and out of mind.
place since 1882. It makes one wonder what’s next? Movies like 1939’s Gone with the Wind have been pulled from televised viewing because of its depiction depiction of slavery in the South. Disney pulled its 1946 movie Song of the South from its line up which shows Uncle Remus as a happy worker for Southern whites.
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Statues and monuments traditionally are erected to honor some person for their deeds in life. Certainly, as Hanson points out, while we’re not all perfect, some are inherently evil or just happen to be on the losing side of the moral question as in the case of the Confederacy. Would we, for instance, see statues of such sadistic madmen as Adolf Hitler in Berlin, Joseph Stalin in Moscow or Saddam Hussein in Baghdad? The resounding answer is “NO!” So? Why should we see a statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Nashville, who was the first head of theKu Klux Klan?
Professor Lawrence Kuzmar of Indiana University agrees, “People effectively act as though destruction of a monument exorcises its power and its removal banishes the power from their midst. But these pieces of metal and stone only have the meaning we assign to them, and that meaning can take any form we like. They can be revered or reviled; honored or ridiculed; or co-opted for a new purpose. Destroying or removing monuments is the easy way out of our obligation to understand our past and improve our future. Monuments to our nation’s racism can be as much a tool to counter it as they can be a tool to foment it. The choice and obligation is ours.” But when “protestors”, like those in Portland, block four lanes of traffic, are dressed head to toe in black, wear body armor, carry shields and wield cudgels, then it’s all a charade where mob rule turns into rioting, looting and property destruction. As a result, many states and municipalities are being proactive by taking down not just Confederate statues (in avoidance of the “huffand-puffers”) but others as well, like that of Christopher Columbus which was removed for the sake of “political correctness” and “racial sensitivity” from the California State Capitol rotunda where it had been in
Michigan University terminated a professor for showing the “outdated and racially insensitive” 1965 film Othello in which lead actor Laurence Oliver played the role wearing black face.
And even Dr. Seuss has now had six books pulled from circulation over racially insensitive imagery.
HERMAN GRANADOS POST 739 Black singer Macy Gray has called for the American flag to be redesigned because, as she claims, “it no longer represents democracy and freedom”. And, the National Football League this season has endorsed the “Black National Anthem” to be played prior to every kickoff. What would happen if we had a White National Anthem? A Hispanic National Anthem? A White Miss America Pageant, White History Month or White Entertainment Television? Would there be an outcry? Are we so overly sensitive to the divisions in this country that we have no choice but to blatantly put them on display rather than beginning a meaningful dialogue? There’s a time and a place for everything. The question we have to ask ourselves… is what do we hope to achieve and how do we go about getting there while building a consensus? “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) and “Wokeness” have bubbled to the forefront as one answer. Critical Race Theory is the in-depth study of racism and inequality inherently part of our social, educational, legal and political systems, while being “woke” supposedly reflects a greater awareness and understanding, on an individual’s part, of the racial prejudice and discrimination that is prevalent in their everyday existence. The problem with these definitions is that they seem to accentuate the racial divide even more due to the perceived and real disparities that tend to label the white race “oppressor” of the “oppressed.” THE GREAT RACIAL DIVIDE Western Washington University created waves by reserving a dormitory floor specifically for black students to “better explore and
NOVEMBER 2021 SPECIAL EDITION celebrate the diversity ofBlack and African American people and culture, within a historical and contemporary context.” A UCLA professor has filed a lawsuit against the University alleging he was threatened with suspension for refusing to grade Black student’s more leniently than their peers. In Oregon, there’s a new law on the books that suspends the basic-skills test requirement in math, reading and writing for graduation because, as one observer notes, “children of color, special ed students, low income students and early language learners don’t all test that well. ”California is now the first state in the nation to introduce an Ethnic Studies course as a high school graduation requirement to… “help students understand the past and present struggles and contributions of Black, Asian, Latino, Native/Indigenous Americans and other groups that have experienced racism and marginalization in America.”
However, for all this brouhaha about the benefits of CRT, there’s a ground swell of revolt. South Dakota Governor Kristi Norm introduced a bill that would ban CRT in public K-2 Schools stating that CRT is “not what America’s about” and “not our history”… the “politicizing” of education. Vi r g i n i a G o v e r n o r G l e n n Youngkin signed an executive order ending CRT in the state’s public Schools. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt banned CRT from state classrooms earlier this year, stating that “outlawing the
controversial curriculum was a no-brainer. We’re not going to teach in Oklahoma that any one race is superior to another race. And we’re not going to teach a first grader in Oklahoma that they’re somehow responsible for something that happened 100 years ago. It’s really a commonsense approach to us. We’ll teach Oklahoma academic standards. We’ll teach history. We’re just not going to get into the racebaiting stuff.” Texas Governor Greg Abbot also followed suit passing a law banning the promotion of CRT and action civics in public K-12 schools. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, herself a black woman, joined the naysayers in denouncing the teaching of critical race theory in schools, stating that Black children could be completely “empowered without making White children feel that they now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.
“I have no problem with letting people know what happened, but let’s remember… history is complex. Human beings aren’t agents now and they weren’t angels in the past. And so how we teach about our history is also important. We teach the good and we teach the bad. But what we don’t do is make 7 and 10
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year olds feel that they are somehow bad people because of the color of their skin. We’ve been through that, and we don’t need to do that again for anyone.” So there you have it… the great racial divide. On the one hand you have the surrender of this country’s educational standard to extreme “woke-ism” and its polarization of the races where “us” versus “them” is increasingly more evident in civil disobedience such as the defacing and toppling of statues.
NOVEMBER 2021 SPECIAL EDITION
As more and more malcontents continue to drop out, fall out and lash out, their ill-informed actions will continue to do little to address the underlying causes of the great social divide. Yet, changing the names of military bases is, as Patraeus noted, a reconciliatory step where “now is the moment for us to, belatedly, pay such attention”. But… until we begin to seriously address what’s causing the chasm between blacks and whites, the have and have nots, the educated and uneducated, there will continue to be winds of change blowing… and sometimes that wind is so strong… that the rebuilding process may seem like an insurmountable obstacle. Yet, we have to keep working at it.
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Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Robert Johnson, however, looks at it this way: “People who are basically tearing down statues trying to make a statement are essentially borderline anarchists.
They really have no agenda other than the idea - we’re going to topple a statue. It’s not going to give a kid who the opportunity to go to college whose parents can’t afford the tuition. It’s not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it’s not going to take people off welfare or food stamps.”
Marine Corps veteran Dr. John Ellis earned his doctorate Curriculum & Instruction from Oklahoma State University and has taught at CalState San Bernardino and Chapman Universities. He is past President of the California American Legion Press Association, a first place National Legion Media Alliance winner in both editorial writing and graphic design and is a member of American Legion Post 739 in Indio. Aside from writing, he also creates event flyers for American Legion posts and non-profit organizations as well as commercial graphic design. He can be reached at:
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