Alternative Affirmative Defense

Last Saturday night, someone vandalized a memorial to Confederate soldiers on the grounds of the Alabama State Capitol. The vandals or activists painted black-face on one of the soldiers and scrawled “N.T. 11 11 31” on the statute. That is an apparent reference to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in November, 1831, in which he and his colleagues killed 57 white people and for which he was executed.

The Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans are demanding that the incident be considered a hate crime, as opposed to plain vandalism, because it is an affront and attack on “all white people” as the class of white people. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a white man, disagrees, while condemning the crime as illegal and offensive, arguing that the crime cannot be considered a threat or message to the whole of white people as a race.

The SCV says that because of the reference to Nat Turner, who killed white people, that this celebrates the murders and is an offense against us as a race. I suggest, perhaps, that this was an objection to slavery and racism, perhaps a radical objection by harking to the violent Turner, not against white people. If Turner is at the heart of this crime or statement, we might just consider that his motives had something to do with the “peculiar institution” perpetuated by white people, not white people qua white people.

I am struggling to understand the imagery. If the crime were committed by a black person, then how does painting the soldier’s face black cause an insult to the statue? Defacing the statute itself is an affront to its imagery and symbolism, but does blackness itself imply an insult? Is the speaker/vandal raising or lowering the status of a black face in relationship to a white Confederate soldier? Perhaps the message is that the South owes itself to black people and their labor and contributions, so this symbol of the South, iconoclastically white, should be every bit black as well.

Maybe the speaker/vandal is suggesting that the Confederate soldier himself was a “slave” to the system that caused his death by secession. Perhaps the reference to Turner is a call to rebel against all forms of racism, because the symbolism of the vandalism is ambiguous.

Of course, as we should remind the Sons and Daughters, this crime might have been perpetrated by a white person. Let us not jump to conclusions. If the vandal/speaker is white, what possibly could be the message? It could be any of the ideas above, but it might also be a message of shame and judgment or repentance. It might be an insult to black faces by clothing a black face in the trappings of their once oppressors.

This act was a crime, but it is a poetic and artistic statement of something. I do hope we learn who committed this speech (and why), and while they should be held accountable for defacing the property, I agree with Mr. Potok that it is not a hate-crime, because the Confederacy is not co-equal or co-extensive with the white race, because Nat Turner's rebellion is not co-equal or co-extensive with the black race and because the message is muddled.

If this vandalism is an act of aggression toward all white people, perhaps the presence of the Confederate Memorial on the Capitol grounds is an act of aggression toward all black people. That may be the clearest statement of all.

(I do not suggest that you read or heed the comments to the Advertiser article. These commenters are sad, belligerent and blind. They are not representative of the whole. Please, dear Lord, do not let them be representative of us even mostly.)