Let the Statues Fall

The long debate about what to do with Confederate Monuments has heated up recently, and it always amazes me the number of liberals who argue we should keep the statues up. What’s worse, they do it with the same lazy logic and false equivalencies as the Right. So let’s break down the arguments and try to come to some reasonable conclusions.

Let’s start by getting this out of the way: the Civil War was about slavery, not state’s rights. This one really only comes up from southerners in denial or die-hard racists, so don’t even go there. It’s ridiculous on its face and I’ll let the preponderance of evidence speak for itself: Declarations of Cause of Seceding States (https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states)

But most people know the war was about slavery. Most people know that slavery was wrong. But they argue we can’t erase our history, even the bad parts of it. Here’s the thing, statues aren’t history. They aren’t even how we remember history. We have these things called books and museums, which are used to teach our history to children all over the country. The statues we are talking about were erected to honor the Confederacy (or someone who represented it). They were mostly erected fifty years after the war during a period of segregation and put up in public spaces as a reminder of who controlled those spaces, as well as our government. And the facts and information listed on most of the statues aren’t even historically accurate or particularly germane to the truth of that history. There is a difference between remembering something and honoring it, between stating the record and romanticizing a horror. We don’t need statues celebrating Benedict Arnold to remember the Revolutionary War. If the statues themselves are historically important, then we can certainly keep them in a space where memorials are appropriate without giving them a place of honor in our society, because we should have no pride in what the Confederacy stood for.

But some of the Confederate soldiers were good men, they say. Of course they were. But you haven’t put up a statue commemorating their good deeds; the statues commemorate their worst failing: fighting to maintain the abomination of slavery. Maybe Robert E. Lee was a good university president, but the statues of him are always of a white man in a regal uniform looking brave and determined on his trusty steed as he heads into battle. It’s quite clear the honor is for his leadership and courage, but in the service of an evil cause. He hunted down slaves. He executed them. He fought and killed fellow Americans to maintain his right to own black people. Those are not good deeds.

But if we take down the statues of anyone who wasn’t perfect, where will it end? The old slippery slope argument. First, let me reiterate that it’s not just about the man of the statue, but what particularly deed or philosophy the statue is commemorating. George Washington might not have been a better man than Robert E. Lee, but a statue to Washington is there to remind people of his leadership and courage in fighting for our freedom from British rule and the establishment of a country founded on principles of equality and fairness. Neither the man nor the country entirely lived up to those ideals, but the concepts themselves are clearly worth honoring.

Second, taking down one statue doesn’t require we take down every statue any more than putting up a statue for one person requires we put up statues for everyone. We have a process for both that revolves around our democracy and the ability of our elected leaders to not only respond to the will of the people but also to make considered judgments for the good of all. Sure, I expect they’ll screw that up sometimes like they always do, but it’s not an argument to do nothing. If we can’t be trusted with the decision to take certain statues down then we shouldn’t have been trusted with putting any statues up, which is indeed an argument to get rid of all statues.

An argument that I’ll only hear from liberals is that we should let them have this one - meaning we shouldn’t worry about small things like statues, and it’s counterproductive to piss off the people who want to keep them up. The argument goes that if you want to win over the racists to our side, or to make them less racist, let them keep their trinkets to make them happy and start a dialogue. This is bad on many levels, the first being that these statues have been up for a hundred years, so if keeping them was going to work we should have solved racism long ago. Letting someone hang onto their racist artifacts, letting them honor an atrocity, saying it’s okay for them to distort history and deny the pain and suffering that slavery inflicted on so many in this country is not a path towards healing and reconciliation. But perhaps most importantly, it’s fundamentally wrong to look at the issue of slavery and say: let’s let the white people have this one. If any group deserves the right to decide what is done with these statues it is the descendants of the slaves and those living with the still all too prevalent acceptance of the hateful discrimination that followed.

One of the weakest arguments but still out there, is that we should respect the art. But most of these statues are nowhere near artistic masterpieces. Most were mass-produced on the cheap to satisfy the urgent need of southern whites to find a way to assert their dominance without breaking the bank. And if you want to preserve art, once again that’s what museums are for.

If you’re a Southerner and proud of it, that’s fine. The South has produced many a fine human being and has many noble virtues. If you think the Confederacy and those who fought to maintain slavery fit that description, you have a fundamental problem with your morality and no sense of history. If you need a statue of the Confederacy to remember your heritage, it shouldn’t be one of a noble white man on a horse, but one of a black man beaten and in chains. That’s what the Confederacy stood for, and we the people of this United States should never forget we all started there, but we should not honor it. We cannot erase the past but we can grow beyond it, but only if everyone is ready to let go.