RichmondPhilsFan wrote:pacino wrote:several people on my FB are VERY UPSET about confederate statues being removed.
Bye Felicia
I've been lukewarm about the monument removal movement until now. I fell more into the same camp as Mayor Stoney here in Richmond--provide context (although I made exceptions for certain statues such as the Jefferson Davis statute on Monument Avenue here in Richmond, which is just so brazenly Confederate porn). Maybe it's the fact that I grew up in Virginia, where I was surrounded by Civil War history and immersed myself in history books from a young age. I even grew up next door to a history professor who specialized in the Antebellum South.
But the Charlottesville City Council member who first raised the question of removing the Lee statue was on the NYT "Daily" podcast on Tuesday. I thought she made an excellent point, which was that statues aren't how we teach history--we do that through books, newspapers, museums, the internet, movies/documentaries, etc. Statues are intended to honor people and proclaim a society's key values.
I'd honestly never thought of it that way, and it took me wholly off the bit of fence-sitting I was still doing regarding Confederate statues and firmly into the "remove" camp. She's absolutely right. We don't need a statue glorifying Robert E. Lee in cities where he never lived, or Jefferson Davis at all. (The question is more complicated when you're talking about a place like Lexington, Virginia, where Stonewall Jackson lived and taught at VMI, and Lee lived out the remainder of his life running a now-excellent small university and is buried.) At the end of the day, these men were traitors to the United States who fought to preserve an evil institution. Was the situation more complex than that? Hell yes it was, but complexity isn't conveyed in a statute, and 98% of those people defending the statues don't know a damn thing about Civil War history.
And it is not complex in the slightest that most of these statues were erected between 1920 and 1960, at the height of the KKK and Jim Crow.
stole some of this for FB. I have no shame
