First things first: Yes, it’s a good thing whenever any statue to Robert E. Lee comes down.
So too with any memorial for traitors who made war on the U.S. to uphold white supremacy — the thing Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, said was the “cornerstone” of their government.
I mean, if the U.S. itself wasn’t racist enough for you, such that you had to make war with it to really maximize the evil, then fuck you and the horse you rode in on, be that horse real or made of bronze.
And you can miss me with your apologist bullshit about how Lee didn’t fight for ideological reasons but just went along because, as a Virginian, he felt compelled to defend his state. Funny, there were a whole bunch of Virginians in the Western portion of that state who felt compelled to break away, form an entirely different one, and remain in the Union.
So too, Lee’s professional colleague at West Point, George Henry Thomas, was from Virginia. Yet, Thomas — who went on to be one of the war’s most brilliant (and forgotten) generals — remained in the Union Army.
The point being, Lee had choices, and the one he made renders him irredeemable in history and unworthy of a single kind word, let alone a public worship altar.
Removing the statues — as was done with Lee’s in Richmond last week — is the least we can do. That activists pushed for this outcome there, and have done so elsewhere with similar results in recent years, is worthy of our respect and admiration.
But here’s the thing (and those activists know this, by the way):
To take a victory lap or presume that the statue’s removal signifies some major defeat of white supremacy and racism defies the imagination.
Even on its own terms, it’s pretty thin gruel.
Remember, that statue had been up for 131 years. And it’s been 156 since Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.
It would be like Germans getting overly self-congratulatory at the removal of a statue to General Rommel — the infamous military leader under the Nazi regime, 80 years from now — in 2101.
Literally, 2101. That’s the same distance from the end of World War II as is represented between 1865 and the present.
Would anyone think that especially brave?
“Hooray, we finally stopped celebrating the Nazis — in 2101! We’re really turning the corner here in Hamburg, wouldn’t you say, Fritz?”
Yeah, nein.
Of course, I realize the image is absurd because the Germans would never have erected a statue to Rommel or any other leader — political or military — from the Nazi era. Unlike Americans, Germans are at least somewhat ashamed of their racist past.
We, on the other hand, have weddings at plantations — which were really concentration camps — because of course we do.
It is one thing to remove the statues but quite another to remove the stain left by the cause for which they fought. And that stain is neither confined to Virginia or the South — it is a national mark of dishonor.
The issue is less the 130-year history of a statue to white supremacy, or one of its principal martial representatives, and more the 400-year history of damage left by white supremacy throughout this land.
It’s about ongoing inequities between whites and Blacks — and whites and Indigenous persons — that have been part of the soil and soul of the nation from the beginning and even before the country was a country.
Only a nation and people marinated in white supremacy and a nostalgic reverence for the days of white hegemony would have erected such totems and left them up for so long.
The fact it took six generations for the Lee statue to come down is a vindication of the truth critical race theorists have been trying to tell us, and for which they are now being pilloried.
When the crits say racism and white supremacy are ingrained in the structures of society, they mean that these forces have been central to America’s political, ideological, and cultural underpinnings from the start.
And there they live on.
Racism remains embedded in the structural and institutional outcomes of everyday life in the United States. Research demonstrates the ongoing salience of racism in every facet of American society — from the workplace to schools to housing access to health care delivery to shootings by police to law enforcement harassment of Black motorists and the larger justice system.
So while we should celebrate the removal of the symbols of white supremacy from our national life, far better would be to remove its substance from the same.
Otherwise, the only Confederacy we will have defeated is the one of statuary, while the real one manages to continue winning the war we swear they lost so many generations ago.
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This post was previously published on Tim Wise’s blog.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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