Believe what you will...
"Why does America suddenly care so much about these old pieces of metal and stone?
The current battle actually goes back to a mass shooting in 2015, when self-described white supremacist
Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people in a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof drew a lot of attention for posing with the Confederate flag in images that came out after the shooting — and that helped spur a fight within South Carolina about whether it should take down a Confederate flag that had flown at the state capitol for years. The state
eventually agreed to officially take down the flag (after it was unofficially taken down by activist Bree Newsome).
Since then, many cities and states, particularly in the South, have been questioning their own Confederate symbols.
The argument is simple: The Confederacy fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy in the United States, and that isn’t something that the country should honor or commemorate in any way.
Critics argue, however, that these monuments are really about Southern pride, not commemorating a pro-slavery rebellion movement.
They argue that trying to take down the Confederate symbols works to erase part of American history.
President Donald Trump invoked such an argument on Tuesday: “This week, it is Robert E. Lee and, this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” He later reiterated these arguments on Twitter, calling it
“foolish” to take down Confederate monuments.
(excuse me but that is a moronic argument)
This is where the debate gets complicated, raising important questions about the US and its history: What exactly did the Confederacy stand for? And if it stood for slavery, does honoring it in effect commemorate white supremacy?
The historical record is actually pretty clear: The Confederacy was always about white supremacy, and so are the monuments dedicated to it. Much of America is now coming to terms with that — but not without a passionate, sometimes violent reaction from those who argue the statues are necessary symbols of white heritage and culture.
Of course, many people disagree that this is about erasing white history. They argue that these monuments were built originally to honor the Confederacy and the racism and white supremacy that it stood for.
One of the statues in New Orleans, for example, literally celebrated a white supremacist insurgency in the city against a racially integrated police force and state militia.
In fact, most of these Confederate monuments were built during the Jim Crow era and in response to the civil rights movement — a sign that they were meant to explicitly represent white supremacy in the South.
At the center of this debate is what the Civil War was really about. The people who defend these Confederate monuments frequently argue it was really about states’ rights, while those on the other side argue that the Civil War was about slavery.
But the historical record makes it very clear that the Civil War was about slavery.
And to the extent it was about states’ rights at all, it was about a state’s right to
maintain slavery.
As
Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in the Atlantic, South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, said in its
official statement that it saw any attempts to abolish slavery and grant rights to black Americans as “hostile to the South” and “destructive of its beliefs and safety”:
"A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety."
In
a letter encouraging Texas to secede and join the Confederate States, Louisiana Commissioner George Williamson was even more explicit.
He argued that the Confederacy was needed
“to preserve the blessings of African slavery” and that the Confederate states
“are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.”
Many other states made similar arguments, consistently pointing to slavery and white supremacy, in their cases for secession.
These statements leave no doubt that the South fought in the Civil War to protect the institutions of white supremacy and, in particular, slavery.
In fact, Confederate symbolism, particularly the flag, only reemerged in US culture as a backlash to the rise of the civil rights movement.”
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/16/16151252/confederate-statues-white-supremacists
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You can try and make this about history and heritage, but it isn’t.
Put the statues in a museum, if you want see them and revel in the old Glory days, be my guest.
