Amidst Nazi's openly marching in the USA in 2017 there has also been a record number of Confederate statues coming down this past month. All kinds of opinions have been expressed about this. Some people say "what's the fuss? It's just our history. Leave them because we cannot deny our history". Others have called for the removal of even more statues as symbols of racism and hatred. Various people have focused with intensity upon the fact that most were not put up immediately after the war, but much later as a way to glorify white supremacy. People have pointed out that Robert E. Lee himself said he wanted no statues of himself and thought we should not have Confederate statutes as it would impede the healing of the nation. Others have written articles calling Lee a traitor. In this beautifully written piece by African American writer Lisa Richardson, she points out that for many African Americans these white confederate soldiers are their ancestors as well...and suggests the statues be moved to museums.
This national dialogue about the statues, has been accompanied by a certain amount of not very skillful rehashing of the civil war. Some declare it was a war fought to end slavery (and that confederate soldiers fought to defend slavery.) Others argue it was a war over states rights, or over regional domination. I cringed at the article that called Robert E Lee a traitor for this is exactly the problem with this whole approach. Generally speaking many white southerners have ancestors that fought in the war, and as Lisa Richardson above points out, so too do many African American southerners. People don't want to think of their ancestors as bad people doing evil things. So it is exactly this kind of attitude that then drives people to defend the statues.
I have yet to see anyone say the war was a national tragedy that occurred because of our failure as a nation to come to grips with the deeply imbedded racism upon which are nations was founded. When you total the number all of the causalities on both sides 750,000 Americans died in the civil war - a number that equals the deaths, of WWII, WWI and the Vietnam war, the next 3 largest war casualties. Literally families and neighbors fought and killed each other. During the war 420 died each day, a reality that haunted President Lincoln. And this wartime figure, which does not begin to take into account the carnage, slow maiming, suffering and humiliation of 246 years of slavery or the countless genocide of the people native to this country by white "settlers".
People have pointed out that Germany has no war statues glorifying the Nazi's that fought in WWII. Michael Moore has pointed out in his movie "The Next Place To Invade" (which is not a movie about war) that the Germans educate their children about the full truth of what happened in WWII and have made public apologies to Israel and the worldwide Jewish population for the Holocaust that took place during WWII. We have yet to reach a point where we can have history books in our schools that tell the truth about the massive crimes against people of color upon which this country is built. So when people say "it is our history" I would say "yes it is, but it is our unexamined and undigested history." Why do we have more statues of confederate soldiers than of yankee soldiers? It does not make sense to deny the loss and suffering of the South who lost their sons and fathers, as if the similar loss of the North is all that matters. And yet as a Nation we have yet to publicly mourn the suffering and grinding deaths of slavery.
Recently I was at an event where people talked about the important role of rituals the Jewish people practice in order to remember their losses and their suffering - keeping memories alive and maintaining a sense of joy in the face of tremendous oppression across centuries. It made me begin to think about the importance it does play in society what we memorialize and how. A friend of mine wrote this post about her trip to Budapest where they were figuring out how to recycle the statues that were left from the legacy of Soviet domination. As she shares the statues were scrambled together sideways, backward, in a jumble so they no longer were reverent - they were a park to play upon, and to remember. And as Barb adds in an after comment, they were kept behind a gate that locked at night, no flashpoint for demonstrations and counter demonstrations. In the Ukraine a statue of Stalin was left standing but is now surrounded by new monuments commemorating his many victims.
I have also been reminded of how some veterans objected to the Vietnam War Memorial on the DC Mall. They felt its message too grimly spoke to death and not the comradeship and heroism of those who served. So rather than the monument being torn down they added to it a statue of 3 soldiers together. Likewise many museums are having to rethink the commentary they have along side of Native American artifacts, and artifacts of slavery, etc to tell more honestly these stories. Recently I visited the park that marks the end of the journey of Lewis and Clark. They acknowledged by name the tribe whose land Lewis and Clark claimed. This is a small baby step of beginning to tell the story of the dispossession of Native tribes.
So as we contemplate what to do with these statues to me the far more important question to be asking is how do we begin to commemorate publicly the death and destruction in all directions that the institutional and unexamined racism of the US has caused? How do we begin to mourn the losses and the destruction? How do we begin to tell that the unresolved issues of the Civil War lead to the death and suffering of Reconstruction, of Jim Crow, of the poverty in northern city slums and to the police violence against people of color everyday right now? How can the pieces of these statues be joined by new pieces that as a montage begin to tell the truth about racism in the US?
I, like many many white Americans, have ancestors who fought in the Confederate Army. I have no need to try to lionize their actions of which I feel only mortified. But I also have no need to vilify them. I realize some of them died painfully. I realize some fought for things they did not believe in. I believe many fought as in any other war ever because they were conscripted, and they felt no other choice. And I do not kid myself that some were hateful people who tortured their slaves and fought to protect their "property" rights. And for me all of this, the whole way of life it represents, is part of the tragedy of institutional racism in many eras - that it is "normalized" to the point that people do not see its moral bankruptcy and feel called to defend it.
If we tear down these statues -as if a symbol can represent the attitudes that created them- we will still fail to do the real work of confronting racism. I find it far more challenging and valuable to ask how can we create new monuments, in part out of the pieces of old, that will more accurately tell the story of racism in America? What do we tell? How do we explain it? What would be a narrative that includes all of us?
