BY PETER ROBBINS
As I type these words, the demolition of the Vance Monument has already begun, and pretty soon we’ll all be looking for pathways to emotional closure. So it seems like as good a time as any to update my Asheville friends on my personal spiritual journey through these troubled times. It might give inspiration to those unhappy with the way things turned out.
Almost four years ago, I wrote what I hoped would be a thought-provoking commentary in Mountain Xpress on what to do with the granite obelisk celebrating the public life of Zebulon Baird Vance. Since he grew up in the place that was later renamed Marshall, I felt Madison County folks should have some say in the controversy, even though we’re not technically locals and people in Asheville can be suspicious of outsiders.
After undertaking a fair and balanced review of Gov. White Supremacy’s record, I suggested that the simplest solution would be just to tear the thing down. But then I got cold feet, fearing that so dramatic a step might be too much for popular opinion to bear.
So I settled, to my everlasting shame, for an inelegant compromise: Leave the Vance moniker on one side of the base but add three new names, including one or more African Americans, to the other sides. If we couldn’t get rid of the old racist entirely, I thought, we could at least make him spend eternity forced to keep company with people he devoted his life to segregating from his own kind.
Apart from the online heckling of a few gobshites, my proposal drew only yawns. Once in a while, someone in the Asheville media would suggest a vaguely similar way of renaming the monument, and their ideas were usually better than mine, so I didn’t pursue the matter further.
My bad …
But then the zeitgeist shifted. Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were killed. Black Lives Matter became a household phrase. Old ways of thinking were upended. Protests filled the streets. When graffiti appeared all over the once-unassailable stack of stones and a tarp went up to protect the monument from the people (or the people from the monument — I’m not sure which), suddenly everyone was calling for action.
I was smugly gratified last January when an Asheville City Council member advocated going one step further than my long-forgotten proposal: Removing Vance from all four sides of the monument and renaming the whole thing the Unity Tower. Never mind that the kind of unity for which the obelisk had theretofore stood had an ugly side: Hers was a noble sentiment, movingly (if naively) expressed, and that’s a commodity in short supply these days.
Then the entire City Council went one better still, voting 6-1 to demolish the monument altogether, and when proponents of the status quo ante unexpectedly crawled back under their rocks, I was left in the embarrassing position of standing alone on what was now the extreme right wing of the opinion spectrum.
So, OK, I admit it: I was wrong. My thinking was retrograde. Backward. Messed up. Egg on my face. I misread the community ethos entirely. If you were planning to erect a monument in honor of my pioneering leadership, well, you can just forget it. You’ll only have to tear it down later when people learn the truth.
All I ask is that you’uns view my shortcomings with some historical kindness, as you’ve done with so many others who came down from Madison County to reform your way of life. It was an innocent time back then: We were less enlightened. Many people held pro-Vance prejudices as bad as my own; some even worse. I was a product of my era.
I hope you can forgive me.
Kumbaya
The concept of forgiveness, however, evokes another word that always seems to get dredged up these days in the wake of any sort of unpleasantness: healing. Face it, friends, we still have unfinished business. And I’m not talking about changing street names or making a public investment — call it reparations or whatever you want — to promote racial equity, though those are certainly important next steps.
No, I’m referring to the need to reconcile with those fire-eaters who opposed any changes at all to the Vance Monument. To maintain civic cohesion, we must convince these souls that despite the failure of their cause, they can return to the fold as legitimate members of this community. Think of it as a kind of reconstruction.
So here, you grumbling traditionalists, is my therapeutic advice on how to adjust to the new reality: Beat the lefties at their own game, Asheville-style.
If you can’t stop the obelisk from being torn down, let it go. Practice nonattachment. Meditate. Ponder a Zen koan. Recite the Serenity Prayer. Whatever. Groove on the rubble till you’ve exorcized the racist toxins you claimed were never there in the first place. Then repurpose the newly opened space in your mind as a spirit portal through which Zeb’s purified essence has been set free to energize the cosmos with hardscrabble vibes. Who’ll have the last laugh then?
Or you can just crawl back under that rock. Even with pandemic restrictions lifted, I’m sure nobody will be offended if you don’t want to group-hug.
Peter Robbins is a retired lawyer who lives near Marshall.
Alas, another white leftist that has turned his secular beliefs and self-hatred into some sort of quasi-religion and imperial dogma combined, where any dissent gets you branded a racist.
I have an alternative suggestion for any “grumbling traditionalists” as Robbins so ineloquently put it:
For every monument terrorists and ignorant politicians tear down, to the cheering of equally ignorant citizens, erect another dozen in their stead.
Also, as someone who didn’t know much about Vance, a quick look shows he was Governor (twice) of a US state, a US Senator, and fought in a war to much acclaim (even if he was on the losing side), He was such a monumental figure that he had, well, monuments erected in his honor by people who thought he was indeed “all that.” In addition to having several towns, schools and even a county named after him. I can only wonder what Peter has accomplished in his life that makes him think he can trot out trite statements like ‘Gov White Supremacy’ and expect anything but a well deserved sneer in response? Perhaps less letters to the editor, and more “spiritual journeys” are in order.
Thanks for reading. I was hoping the phrase “Gov. White Supremacy” would catch on, but I didn’t expect it to become “trite” quite so quickly. It’s nice to reap immediate rewards for one’s labor.
Try reading C.S. Lewis’ – Screwtape Letters; perhaps then this continuing saga will make sense.
You embarrass me, Hawkins Stan. I’m only a minor imp.
The editor at Xpress is not a full-fledged member of cancel-culture. Sure, if you agree wholeheartedly with the radical-left, you’re safe. But if you’re a true liberal who refuses to be an obnoxious “Neo-liberal,” then you’re omitted, canceled, a non-entity.
A Note For Mr. Robbins and other partisans who agitate for conflict and division: The problem as I see it is that there are failures in academia which do not address so many other elements in the critical race theory arguments, one being that “slavery” itself is an African institution. Nonetheless, there are racist professors and others associated with higher education who refuse to present the whole picture about slavery and reparations. Just this week, Yale University put out a statement condemning the racist diatribe from Dr. Aruna Khilanani whose hour-long talk earlier this month condemned “all white people” as “psychopaths.” And, too, the Mayor of Chicago has instituted a racist policy regarding with a refusal to be interviewed by white journalists. Yet, none of them ever mention the fact that Africa’s haunting history of slavery continues to this day “where millions remain captive.” [see Los Angeles Times article, “Slavery still haunts Africa, where millions remain captive.”] From my view, those more radical leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement have abused their activism by using American Blacks for their extreme political positions to steal millions of dollars while agitating against White America’s sinful past without presenting the dark side of a practice that originated in Africa, a practice that goes on uncontested by Blacks in America. If these professors want to be taken more seriously, then it seems to me that they should present a view of the whole picture about slavery as it came to be the “original sin” of this nation. Why not talk about reparations from those nations in Africa today whose history of the kingdoms before them had practiced slavery for thousands of years, prior to the discovery of the “New World.” The problem as I see it today is that politicians are using the issue of “race” as a means of dividing the people for the purpose of wining elections and gaining power for greedy purposes and to prevent investigations into their own criminal strategies to hoodwink the American People for partisan purposes.