By Malya Robenson
After the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police on May 29th, protests erupted across the globe, calling for the defunding of police departments across America, and more focus on the injustices that black Americans face as a whole. Several companies and even entire industries have been called out on the lack of representation they exhibit and on their problematic behaviours such as Vogue’s distinct lack of diversity in their staff and content and the continued use of the ‘Aunt Jemima’ character by Quaker Oats. There have also been several white actors who have decided to step down from their roles as black characters in animated productions such as Jenny Slate who played Missy Foreman-Greenwald on Netflix’s Big Mouth and Kristen Bell who played Molly Tillerman on Apple TV's new show Central Park.
There had been a lull in media coverage of the protests despite the fact that they continue to go strong, largely because of the fact that the rioting and looting have mostly stopped and the protests are now mainly peaceful demonstrations. One thing has brought the focus of the media back, however, is the renewed outrage over Confederate statues.
In the 1860s, several southern states seceded from the United States and formed the Confederacy, opposing the Union during the nation’s civil war. The values that the Confederacy stood for and the repercussions of seceding from America have been what have shaped the region into what it is today.
Across the United States, though mostly present in the south, there are well over a thousand memorials honoring those who fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. These memorials take the form of statues and U.S. military bases but now, the nation is largely split on whether or not this part of history deserves to be glorified.
The debate as to whether Confederate statues should remain standing in their positions across the United States is not a new one. The issue has arisen a myriad of times over the years, the arguments largely coming to a draw.
Those who support the continued existence of these statues claim that it would be wrong to take them down because they are an important part of American history. They believe that the statues tell a story and that removing them would be akin to pretending that that part of history did not exist.
Those who oppose the presence of the statues, however, assert that there are better ways to remember parts of history. Many remark that Germans were able to remember what happened during World War II without erecting statues of Hitler because they document their history in an appropriate way. Their issue with the states is rooted in the fact that they glorify the existence of people who went so far as to secede from the United States in order to continue enslaving black people. While the assertion that the southern states seceded in the name of preserving states’ rights is technically correct, the rights that they were protecting were largely having to do with their ability to own slaves.
There is the fact that most people who are in favour of the statues have a family history rooted in the Confederacy and view them as something to be proud of. The issue with this is that they skew the narrative in order to be comfortable with that part of their history to the point where they forget that their ancestors weren’t fighting for the United States and actively killing American soldiers on the battlefield.
Regardless of what controversy that the statues posed in the past, the fact of the matter is that currently, protesters and activists have set their sights on these statues and this time, they are leaving little room for debate on the subject.
Across the country, protestors have defaced several confederate statues across many American cities, fed up with the ongoing exaltation of people who fought for racist institutions. Protesters showed their frustrations by doing everything from spray painting the statues to completely tearing them down.
Over the past few weeks, several Confederate statues have met their end, either at the behest of local governments or at the hands of enraged protestors. On June 11th, a statue of soldier Johnny Reb holding a confederate flag which stood prominently in downtown Norfolk, Virginia was one of the first to go by the order of the city’s mayor. It was followed by countless other incidents across the nation, prominently in states like Alabama and Kentucky.
The movement to take down these offensive reminders of racism has not been limited to Confederate statues, however.
NASCAR has made the move to ban the display of the Confederate flag at its races which has sparked some serious backlash from fans of the sport. Many have claimed that the flag, like the statues, is not a symbol of racism, but of their heritage and their family history. As with the statues, others argue that the flag is representative of a dark and painful part of the history of others and should be done away with.
Other statues have also been targeted by the crusade, not necessarily because of ties to the Confederacy, but because of ties to racism in general. Several statues of George Washington, for instance, have either been defaced or outright torn down. This has been the case with a few other statues of America’s founding fathers as well due to their extensive history as slave owners. Many revere Washington as a paragon of what it means to be an American and fight for freedom, but his past as a slave owner is irrefutable. One such example of the sanitization of history is how many children learn in schools that Washington had wooden teeth as a funny anecdote. The truth behind that yarn however, was that he wore dentures made of teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves
A statue of Theodore Roosevelt which stands in front of the New York City Museum of Natural History is soon going to be taken down as well. The statue depicts the former president sitting atop a horse with a Native American man and an African-American man standing at his sides. While many view the statue as a means of exemplifying the friendship between the races. Others, however, can’t help but focus on the more problematic nature of the statue.
There has even been a statue in Bristol, England which faced the wrath of protestors. A statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was pulled from its post and was dragged and dumped into the River Avon on June 7th.
The removal of monuments glorifying the oppression of black people is only a small part of the progress that must be made in order for the nation to come even close to someday achieving true racial equality. Nonetheless, it is an important milestone and should be regarded as something to be proud of, as it serves as a symbol of positive change.
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