Tearing down these statues will be history, too. Let's make it one we're proud of.

[Zorro]

An image of George Floyd is projected on the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia. (Jay Paul/Reuters)

HONORING IS different from remembering. Reevaluating our country’s landscape of statues doesn’t have to mean erasing history — if that reevaluation is done lawfully, carefully and with an eye toward honestly preserving the past and forging a better future.

Recent weeks have seen protesters dismantling monuments across the country, yanking figures from their pedestals, setting them aflame and even tossing them into lakes. It is easy to understand why people racked by pain and anger at this nation’s endemic racism should want to cast out the iron and bronze glorifications of men who fought to keep men, women and children enslaved. Yet the questions these removals ask of us are often more complicated than whether Robert E. Lee should get to stand proudly outside courthouses and capitols.

Many of the memorials besieged today — tributes to Lee, or Stonewall Jackson, or Jefferson Davis — were erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the turn of the 20th century as civil rights for minorities advanced too far for the majority’s comfort. This was itself a rewriting of history: an attempt to compose a new mythology of the “lost cause” and vindicate the rebels.

Yet the traitors hailed as heroes of times gone by aren’t the only ones getting toppled. Ulysses S. Grant — the commanding general of the Union Army — has been torn down; protesters have aimed for Andrew Jackson; Thomas Jefferson and George Washington have been pulled to the ground. The pain and anger born of years of oppression, it seems, extend beyond the most obvious icons of the Confederacy to our Founding Fathers — who espoused freedom and equality even as they held human beings in chains.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/tearing-down-these-statues-will-be-history-too-lets-make-it-one-were-proud-of/2020/06/25/316b1aaa-b647-11ea-a510-55bf26485c93_story.html

[Hoyt]

1. I like that. I'm good with tearing this crud down, but I like the image above too.

Atlanta started a year ago placing “contextual markers” next to some confederate statues. I like that too.

I’m waiting for doing something about Stone Mountain, like sandblasting that crud carved with support of Klansmen and sympathizers.

[Igel]

2. We want humiliating statues torn down.

Because they intimidate and humiliate.

We can then show that we're better or just like the racists--the choice is to be made.

Do you honor for the sake of honoring people that everybody agrees should be honored, or "honor" for the sake of intimidating, say by honoring those who kicked in the racists' teeth?

Do we want to heal or do we just want to inflict humiliation because of our "righteous" hate?


I mention the insistence that old Southern plantations make sure to properly teach how inhumanely whites treated their slaves. Does that honor the dead enslaved people or just serve to humiliate? Use timber to build bridges or use timber to bludgeon the enemy?

We saw how bludgeoning worked in the decades after the Civil War, to inflict humiliation and coercion instead of reasoning and listening and healing. We saw how bludgeoning worked in the decades after that, to inflict even more humiliation and coercion instead of reasoning and listening and healing. Things mostly died down--demagogues tend to say nothing changed, but it did--and now we have a choice. We can do, as on activist insisted we do, the heavy lifting of dragging the past into the present in order to inflict humiliation and coercion ... Or we can choose reasoning and listening and healing.

People being people, it's clear what the choice would be. Sadly. Because the only way out of that is total victory and crushing the enemy in humiliation and venom (but always in the name of love) ... otherwise the newly oppressed will rise up to become the new oppressors. Again. Kto kogo.