The controversy surrounding Doug Wilson’s “Black and Tan,” his polished-up, more-nuanced reworking of “Southern Slavery As It Was,” in which he defended Antebellum American slavery — and opined that the result was a “mutually harmonious” society the likes of which the world has never seen — continues as numerous bloggers and theologians continue to slam his views on race, which he appears to find as surprising as it is vexing.
One of them, as quoted on Blog and Mablog last week, says that “the hammer ought to be dropped hard on any defense of slavery.” And Wilson says he agrees. The perniciously pedantic, parsing purveyor of all that’s profound continues, bearded patrician head nodding vigorously in agreement:
“The problem with that is that I don’t want to defend slavery. This whole thing has to do with what the most scriptural way of resisting slavery would have been, not whether slavery ought to have been resisted.”
Go ahead. Ask why such a harmonious, mutually affectionate, Biblical system ought to be resisted at all. I’ve waited years for the answer. You can, too.
Discussing the Biblically-appropriate ways that slaves, slaveholders, and the Church in the Confederate States could have “resisted” — overturned, abolished, condemned — chattel slavery would have been, I suppose, a less disgusting, disturbing argument than the one he actually made. Certainly Wilson’s Black and Tan commendation of William Wilberforce’s efforts in Great Britain to defeat the institution of slavery is laudable, as is his assurance that he’s personally glad there is no slavery in the U.S. anymore. After all, his vicious condemnation of Christian abolitionists would give the discerning reader pause as they attempt to understand what it is about “Christian abolitionist” that he found so objectionable, particularly when compared to the Christian slave-kidnapping, slave-beating, and slave-raping patriarchs he insists were noble men merely misunderstood by a sexually confused, baby-killing 21st-century culture.
Of course, these “how best to resist slavery?” points were buried among his insistence that a true Christian man could, in the Antebellum South, buy human beings, including toddlers, who were kidnapped and sold to him entirely on the basis of their race and his. “Resistance” was hardly prominent in his defense of the secessionist Confederates and the economy they profited from by their abuse and exploitation of the Black women and men they owned. In fact, his insistence now that what he really focused on was how to best analyze the institution whose existence, flourishing, and continuance he defended was a bit murky in his writings.
And it’s probably not just me.
But that’s the fun of reading Wilson; he gilds a rotting lily with excrement, takes issue with the observer for noticing the stench, and then professes his profound love for and expertise in gardening. My expectations of Wilson are regrettably low, but in those two points — Wilberforce then good, slavery today bad — he cleared the bar. It’s 2013, and the Gospel has been spread throughout the world. I suppose, therefore, that my heart is gladdened that a minister thereof would be OK with the contemporary cessation of human ownership of other humans, no matter how “harmonious” he believes its former incarnation to have been.
But the amateur paleo-Confederate historian, who accused the liberal, “professional historian” world of rank revisionism in its condemning analysis of chattel slavery, has dived into and is flailing about in the murky depths of revisionism of his own. Decency and respectability, as well as a minimal degree of self-preservation, require that Wilson insist that his defense of slavery wasn’t, actually, a defense of slavery, no matter how clearly he stated it and no matter how clearly you read it. That works with the fan base, who would believe Black and Tan and SSAIW to be treatises on medieval footwear if he told them it was.
It’s not going to work with independent, discerning thinkers who, having sailed past a fourth-grade reading level, know exactly what Wilson said and expect him to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, Wilson is a master of wriggling rhetoric, a man whose reputation is built on his contention that your ideas have consequences, while his own words have shape-shifting characteristics just shiny and novel enough to dazzle you in your post-modern, liberal, sentimentalist haze.
I pray that his online correspondents are wise to him.