What to commemorate

Now what about this whole history question, eh? Is Trump right that removing statues is an attack on history? No, of course not. It’s just as much “history” that a statue is removed as it is “history” that a statue is standing there or put up in the first place. We’re allowed to second-guess our ancestors about what we want to commemorate and glorify with a statue and what we don’t. Statues of Confederate generals send a message that we glorify people who left the United States in order to keep millions of people enslaved. Why the hell would we want to commemorate and glorify that now? Why shouldn’t we say oh hey Lee was defending the ability of white people to keep black people enslaved, not as individuals but as a people, so that their children and grandchildren and so on forever would also be enslaved. That’s a gruesome and shameful aspect of our history, something to remember keenly but not to commemorate and glorify. There’s nothing more to it than that. Those people in Charlottesville that Trump has so much sympathy for were there to defend the right of white people to enslave black people. Get out of here with that shit.

Jennifer Schuessler at the Times looks at the ongoing discussion:

Mr. Trump’s comments drew strongly negative reactions on Twitter from many historians, who condemned his “false equivalence” between the white nationalists and the counterprotesters.

But “where does it stop?” — and just what counts as erasing history — is a question that scholars and others have found themselves asking, in much more nuanced ways, as calls have come to remove monuments not just to the Confederacy, but to erstwhile liberal heroes and pillars of the Democratic Party like Andrew Jackson (a slave owner who, as president, signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans) and Woodrow Wilson (who as president oversaw the segregation of the federal bureaucracy).

Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard who is credited with breaking down the wall of resistance among historians to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, said that the answer to Mr. Trump’s hypothetical question about whether getting rid of Lee and Jackson also meant junking Washington and Jefferson was a simple “no.”

There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it. The comparison, she added, also “misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy.”

“This is not about the personality of an individual and his or her flaws,” she said. “This is about men who organized a system of government to maintain a system of slavery and to destroy the American union.”

They’re not heroes.

As for the idea of erasing history, it’s a possibility that most scholars do not take lightly. But James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said that Mr. Trump’s comments failed to recognize the difference between history and memory, which is always shifting.

When you alter monuments, “you’re not changing history,” he said. “You’re changing how we remember history.”

Some critics of Confederate monuments have called for them to be moved to museums, rather than destroyed, or even left in place and reinterpreted, to explain the context in which they were created. Mr. Grossman noted that most Confederate monuments were constructed in two periods: the 1890s, as Jim Crow was being established, and in the 1950s, during a period of mass Southern resistance to the civil rights movement.

Almost as if they were put up to send a message, eh?

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