No, Actually, We Shouldn't Have Any Confederate Statues: Recontextualizing and De-Glorifying The Confederate States of America

Opinion | By: Ines Laimeche

​The rapid strengthening of the Black Lives Matter movement since the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in early 2020 has forced America to ask itself tough questions—a skill that Americans all across the political spectrum can find quite difficult. One of the most pressing issues has been how far America really has come in terms of how we treat citizens of color, especially Black citizens. When we look back on our country’s history, we must ask ourselves: how much of it has venerated racists, how long has that been glossed over, and how can we move forward?

To start, there is a surplus of monuments and statues in the United States of America that honor the Confederacy and infamous Confederates—771, to be exact. A large number of them are in the South where the Confederacy once was located, with just four Southern states harboring half of them, but monuments can still be found from California to Pennsylvania. In the wake of the nationwide protests that have been happening in 2020, at least thirty statues built to honor the Confederacy have been removed—either by protestors or by the city. While this has been a subject of controversy among those who support keeping the monuments up, this is certainly not a new phenomenon. Four statues were removed after the Charleston church shooting in 2015, and thirty-six were removed following the death of counter-protestor Heather Heyer at a far-right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And after every event, we have heard the same argument, often from conservatives, that removing the statues is removing our history.

In my opinion, that’s a load of bull. Make no mistake, in order to give Black Americans the justice they deserve for experiencing centuries of institutionalized racism, we need to remember all aspects of American history, even (and especially) the parts that don’t make white people look good. To try and remove the Confederacy from America’s history would be like pretending it never existed, and we cannot let that happen.

Because to be clear, the Confederacy was not honorable. It was not grand. It was not glorious. It was evil. It was a breakaway state from America that valued money more than it valued Black people, and was willing to create an entirely new country that would allow them to treat enslaved people as subhuman to keep their precious economy stable. The Confederacy is not something that anyone should remember with any trace of fondness.

But the thing about statues is that, at their core, they aren’t made so that people can remember history—they’re made so we can glorify it. So that we can immortalize the people that they’re made for. There is plenty of educational content out there concerning the Confederacy if one wishes to learn about it, and it should be learned about.

But removing those statues isn’t an “attack on our heritage” like Donald Trump seems to think it is, nor erasing American history. History is already there. Removing a statue of a Confederate soldier is removing a symbol of oppression, of hatred, of racism. Why that seems to be a problem with anyone—especially the president of the winning side—is truly beyond me.

--

Sources:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2020/06/mapping-hundreds-confederate-statues-200610103154036.html 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/confederate-monuments/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/02/nation/trump-warns-his-mostly-white-base-threat-heritage-confederate-statues-come-down/