As hard as it is to believe, I’m still hearing arguments that confederate monuments are something we should keep. Sure, they say, the KKK and Nazis rioted in Charlottesville at the idea of removing a statue honoring Robert E. Lee. But despite that, they argue that the statues aren’t really white supremacist monuments. They’re about our shared heritage, they argue, and removing those statues would mean forgetting our history.
Do most people really believe these statues date back to the Civil War? Cause no, most of these freakin’ statues were put up during the civil rights era. The point was to emphasize how little the South loved integration and equal rights. It was a Message. I was looking at the Civil War statues in Birmingham, for example, when the Birmingham Mayor explained that the city didn’t even exist until much later.
More importantly, these are monuments, not memories. They’re big metal statues – literally up on pedestals – put in positions of honor, with bronze plaques describing how famous these people (usually military) are, and why we should still honor them. I don’t hear any of these sudden historians suggesting we should attach new plaques that mention ‘treason’ along with their military exploits.
I was raised in that same Southern culture. And while I was taught all the supposed justifications, I also know how much the south rankles when smarmy Northerners lecture us on our deficient morality, as if they were as pure as the driven snow. The north has just as much racism.
But the KKK and the Nazis have made it really, really clear. No matter what these Civil War statues were originally meant to say, right now, they’re monuments to white supremacy. Touch them and the white supremacists will drive across many states to object. Those weren’t historians or someone’s grandmas chanting “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville. They were violent Nazis and KKK goons, many of whom chose to drive hundreds of miles, armored up and busting for a fight.
(Which the Charlottesville and Virginia state police abetted when they boxed the groups together and then withdrew. Why isn’t the press covering how those groups were fighting so badly, and yet there wasn’t a Virginia cop in sight?)
No, we don’t get to hide behind ‘history’. The monuments are statues, not memories, and not ‘history’. They need to go.
