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Yes because I wanted to shit on them before they got toppled.
But hey, while we're on the topic, I wanna give you some perspective on one of the types of people who defends confederate statues. Buckle up, it's a long personal read.
Growing up a white Jew in Texas, we were taught about the civil war and about how it started over lots of things, but our teachers were pretty open that it was about slavery. We got taught about brother fighting brother and that we lost and that slavery is bad, yadda yadda (I say it so blasé because that's kinda how it was treated). As young students, we'd be really upset by these concepts and the teachers would reassure us that all this was a long time ago and everything's all better now and that racism is dead. Then they'd take us to see a fun little Civil War reenactment.
This Civil War reenactment was this cute thing where we elementary school students would go to a fair and get either an American flag or a Confederate flag and you're told that you have to cheer for your side. You're told not to worry if you're on the winning side or the losing side cuz we're all here to have a good time! I got a Confederate flag. Of course, I was sad, my side was gonna lose! Overall, it was a pretty fun day, though.
I went home with my losing-side flag, and I used some thumb tacks to put it up on my wall. My Dad said I probably shouldn't do that and I said that I know they lost but it was a lot of fun. Why wouldn't my parents want me to have a souvenir from my fun day? So, there it remained on my wall. Just like the posters on the walls of my classrooms. Posters of General Lee, the Confederate flag, the Declaration of Independence... You know, American history things.
You see? It's ok to have a Confederate flag on my wall, cuz I'm not racist. Racism is dead. Sure, our side lost, but it's just part of history: things from long ago. That's why we need to have posters and statues to remind us of these things that happened a long time ago. Statues help you remember things. Like great people, such as George Washington, Davey Crockett, the Minutemen..., Confederate soldiers..., Sam Houston. Obviously, all great people, cuz they had statues and statues are made of great people...
Fast forward to high school and I'm now in a Jewish youth group. We're a bunch of silly guys and we open every meeting with the pledge of allegiance. The meeting guide we follow, which is nearly a century old, says to honor the colors of America—being such silly guys, we would have everyone check their underwear and would say the pledge to up to three guys with red, white, and blue underwear. When I became the chapter vice president, I decided that our practices were disrespectful and decided to put a flag inside our mobile podium.
So, I took my souvenir Confederate flag, now left hanging for nearly a decade, and I pinned it inside the podium. At our next meeting, we said the pledge to the Confederate flag. The youth group advisors said nothing cuz we were such silly young guys and boys will be boys. Plus, it was just a Confederate flag, exactly like the ones on classroom walls, on our statues, at our theme park.
Not long after this, one of our black Jewish friends joined our youth group. Really, his family were just about the only black people that most of us knew. When he attended our first meeting after I'd added the Confederate flag, he grew livid seeing us say the pledge to such an artifact of hatred. Her lectured us and told us to remove it, but everyone defended our use of the Confederate flag.
Surely, he was joking when he said that it made him uncomfortable, it was no different than the dozens of other Confederate flags around town and in classrooms. We all played along with his, what we thought was pretend, anger. I jokingly said something about the flag being there to represent the colors of the United States; someone else made a joke about our black friends being part of the colors of the United States. I laughed loudly and senselessly repeated this awful and offensive joke to the treasurer to make sure he put it in the meeting minutes so we could laugh again at our next meeting.
Our now revictimized friend shouted at us and then loudly and passionately explained how offensive we were being and why, which was honestly more than we deserved and more patient than I think I could ever be if I were in his position. A number of the guys didn't get it at all, and I only understood that I'd hurt my friend's feelings, but I didn't understand how or why he was hurt so badly. All that I knew was that I did something bad starting with that flag and that I needed to make things right, so I offered to let him burn my flag.
Fortunately, he accepted and we all watched him burn this silly little souvenir. As I watched my childhood memory burn and considered what an extreme measure it took to help my friend feel better, I started to understand that part of the problem for our friend was how casually we were willing to accept offensive imagery. And that our ideas which hurt him because of his race and the jokes that we made as part of it proves that racism was alive and well as living among us. That day, I began to recognize that my entire life since being young to that moment, we'd been surrounded by propaganda which convinced us that the Civil War was not that bad, that the villains were cool guys, and that racism was dead.
So to everyone who says that statues should be left alone and aren't hurting anyone, you tell them about how they're such powerful propaganda that it was able to guide a group of Jewish boys to innocently pledge allegiance to a Confederate flag and mercilessly harass a beloved friend as a joke. Those "harmles" mementos are propaganda and they only confuse the young masses who study them in school.
Crush and burn all of the statues and flags and teach the kids the fucking truth. This shit isn't a game and we need to stop letting people act like it is. Burn them all. Not another child should be indoctrinated by these atrocious symbols. It happened to me and it needs to never happen again.
I believe that we should take the statues and move them into museums dedicated to history. We can’t change what happened before we got here, but we can clean up leftover shit and make the future a better place to live.
In my town there is a huge confederate statue on the courthouse stairs. We had the opportunity to vote to remove it recently and the yes vote made up around 4% of the total.
People were pretty passionate about it. I personally like the statue. I don’t know anything about the man depicted by the statue, but he was a handsome and cool looking fella. The statue is a testament to the time that has passed in this little town that I live in. The earliest photographs of my town feature that statue prominently. I feel like I can connect with all of those people who built my town down through the years when I look at it.
I’m not black. The fact that I find the statue aesthetically pleasing is a minor and tiny little thing. I was among the 4% of people who voted to have it removed because when I put myself in the shoes of a black man entering that courtroom, I can hear that statue say, “Hey boy! Reckon you’ll get a fair trial?”
I enjoyed your story. Thank you.
Let me share 2 practical real reasons why that's a bad idea.
there are a LOT of these statues and these things are HEAVY. A responsible museum won't accept this stuff because there's simply not the room for it.
The people that will accept it end up being the last people that should. Like stone mountain Park, which enshrines and worships these racist assholes.
The very real problem is by having and concentrating this "artwork", you create meeting spaces for white supremacists. Because ask yourself, WHO is going to and wants to experience the confederacy memorials?
"Stop turning museums into the attic for your aunt's racist junk"
Man, we all just suck. We really do (humanity, that is). I sat here and tried to refute your point (the one about creating shrines for racists) and I just couldn’t do it.
I don’t want to see them destroyed. Whether we like it or not, the civil war was a huge part of our history. I just wish we could get to a point where we all agree that symbols are symbols of their time and no one hurts because of them. I wish we could solve the leftover systemic issues and move forward as a species.
Wish in one hand…
As for the museum thing, their whole point is the preservation of history.
I know that my little local museum would be more than happy to dedicate a corner to the statue and have a guy dressed in grey talking to visitors about Robert E. Lee. They offered to take it if the vote went the other way.
Also, it would look fine at the local confederate cemetery.
Racists are gonna racist. I wish they’d stop, but burning all the swastikas in the world wouldn’t stop them from making a new swastika and gathering over on Nazi hill to talk about racist things.
If you're interested, here's a pretty good podcast episode that sat down with Dr. Janale Schmidt, a history professor who ultimately got the Robert e Lee statue melted down.
[It Could Happen Here] Melting Charlottesville’s Robert E Lee Statue #itCouldHappenHere https://podcastaddict.com/it-could-happen-here/episode/171742565 via @PodcastAddict
What I find fascinating about the whole story is she did not start with the goal of melting down the statue. In fact, this whole controversy was kicked off because the city of Charlottesville wanted to move the statue to a less prominent park, rather than having it in the center of the city.
She talks about the journey of the statue and why ultimately they came to the conclusion that destruction was the right decision (including the fact that they observed these statues turning into racist shrines after the initial incident).
The problem is history is complex. Now days people want good/bad instead of the nuance. Lee wasn’t all bad. He didn’t fight for the confederacy. He fought for Virginia. Had Virginia stayed in the Union, he would have led the Union army.
The civil war has become a meme. It really was about the states. It’s why the 14th amendment took powers from the states which gave us more stability. The recent court decision talked about the 14th taking powers from states.
If you get a bit of time, I recommend the behind the bastards episode about Lee. It’s a recent episode so you won’t have to dig.
In his own letters he made it clear that it wasn’t about Virginia. He wanted to be revered in the new country on the way George Washington was to the US.
He wasn’t living in Virginia, he didn’t care about Virginia.
I mean, I could be wrong, but Robert Evans (the host) generally researches his topics thoroughly and I trust him.
As I stated previously, history is more complex than a simple answer. People rarely have one motivation for doing things.
Now, what is interesting, and I have not heard anyone dispute it, is Lee did not want a monument built for him.
I don't mind the old monuments to the Confederacy. The ones built after the 50s are the ones I find suspect, and that is the vast majority of them.
All civil rights were championed, people started building more monuments.
Every now and then I also think of some of the jokes I made as a kid, especially at the expense of certain minority groups, and I cringe. But I'm glad we can learn from those experiences and grow, unlike others who double down and say you can't joke about anything nowadays.
First of all, if this isn't copypasta, big respect for typing this out.
I sense a lot of fucked up things in your story. Like your teacher, turning war, slavery and suffering into a game. Your dad, giving up on explaining the implications of hanging the flag in the house. Your highschool encouraging a cultish behavior... The physical piece of cloth was just an artefact cought up in the middle.
While I understand the power of symbols, and their ability to subconciously influence people, by burning the symbols we don't solve the underlying problems. We just hide them.
Meanwhile, violent extremists are still among us, and are able to unite under the picture of a frog, or an italian hand gesture...
The statues shouldn't be just left alone. They should be put into a proper context, so they become a memento, instead of a shrine.
I actually did type it out. Fell asleep a many times and dropped my phone on my face a couple of times.
So I wanna clarify some things:
As for the artifact just being caught in the middle and why we should preserve these statues and such, I used to feel the same way. In fact, you'll probably find in my unhealthily extensive comment history my idea that we should put all racist American symbols into museums called "History of fucked up things white people have done," and then make admission free for minorities but charge for white people to attend. All proceeds would go to reparations.
But just one problem: just like how statues provide legitimacy, putting statues into museums provide even more legitimacy. Unfortunately, assholes are gonna asshole and they'll take their kids to these museums to teach them about their proud heritage of supporting systemic racism.
If you wanna preserve something, take pictures before you burn the statues, then pictures during. Make a short documentary about why it was such a shitty fucking thing to make these statues in the first place (most of them are shockingly new, like only 50-60 years old or so. Statues seem so eternal, so people forget that they can be made with the worst of intentions, such as protesting civil rights.), and then feature images of the people who seem most upset about the monuments being destroyed.
If someone values a statue more than exposing the racist-ass people who decided to fund making the statue, they're also unlikely to care about the harm the statue actively does to people.
Just for the sake of argument, a thought experiment: Let's say that I commission a statue of Kenneth Pinyan and have it placed in a family-friendly park or near a historical landmark.
I make sure there's a nice plaque to memorialize Kenneth: He was a Boeing engineer and a bit of a revolutionary. While he and the scores of people who supported his ideas might now be seen as taboo, he stood up for what he believed was right and it was perfectly legal to do so. Ultimately, he died in action supporting his cause, but documentaries exist showing his encounters and one even won awards for showing how misunderstood his story was. Because of his conquests, a law was made with him in mind and that law now protects scores of people.
Now, consider that Kenneth Pinyan was also known as Mr. Hands and died from injuries he sustained being filmed fucking a horse. His death brought attention to the fact that beastiality was accidentally made legal in Washington state and a law was almost immediately passed making beastiality a class c felony.