You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

[Zorro]

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html

[Cirque du So-What]

1. A delicate subject that doesn't get nearly enough attention

Richard Pryor alluded to it as part of his stand-up, but it deserves serious discussion.

[yankee87]

2. Wow

To the writer of this piece, I have never read a more powerful piece.

[NCjack]

5. +1

[randr]

3. I have B neg blood, introduced to Eastern Europeans

by the invading Huns. I have many times thought of my existence as a result of rape. Many generations ago but still a piece of my personal history.
As you point out, Black Americans have a much closer connection to this and the need to resolve the pain is a current reality.

[Pantagruel]

4. Terrific piece

Wake up call to the goobers still celebrating the Confederacy.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

6. K&R