Sunday Reflection - Statue Symbolism

Some musings on statue symbolism this morning. As always, these are snippets; please go to the links for the full essays.

First, if you aren't already aware of the origins and true meaning of Confederate statues, Prof. Karen Cox is here to enlighten:

Almost none of the monuments were put up right after the Civil War. Some were erected during the civil rights era of the early 1960s, which coincided with the war’s centennial, but the vast majority of monuments date to between 1895 and World War I. They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution, and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy.

(If you're familiar with the KKK- glorifying 1915 D.W. Griffith movie, "The Birth of a Nation," think of these statues as static representations of the same era and racial perspective.)

Infidel 753 on the claim that the Confederate statues represent Southern "heritage:"

To really see how bizarre this is, imagine if some Germans insisted on displaying Nazis flags and statues of Nazi leaders, but claimed that this was out of pride in their German heritage and nothing to do with anti-Semitism or fascism.  Germany as a culturally-distinct region is more than a thousand years old and can boast world-class achievements in science, technology, music, literature, architecture, and on and on.  To ignore all that, and choose symbols representing solely Germany's twelve-year lurch into the darkest depths of evil, would strongly suggest that what they were really commemorating was not German heritage at all, but rather that very evil.

So it is with the Confederate flag and statues.  To treat these as if they were the epitome of the Southern heritage, the symbols best suited to express it, actually demeans that heritage by presenting only its worst face as if that represented the whole. 

Christine Emba on why she's tired of explaining why she and other racial and religious minorities matter in the "debate" over Jim Crow- era monuments:

There are the appeals to reason, grown tedious for having been so often repeated: No, taking down a monument is not an “erasure of history.” No, it is not a slippery slope from removing mutinously erected statues of Lee to dynamiting monuments to George Washington. No, even if all the Confederate monuments disappeared overnight, we would not as a country forget that the Civil War ever happened or what it meant. After all, we still have books and museums and cemeteries and preserved battlefields and structural inequality. 

Then there are the analogies, the individual stories, all the more painful for being constantly retold: No — I can’t just “get over it,” because I can’t just take off my dark skin, which permanently marks me as the other. No, they aren’t “just statues”: They bring up personal, painful memories of current racism and marginalization — shall I recount those for you, again? [snip]

...Why would so many Americans rather undergo one million mental contortions than admit that someone else's safety matters? Why is it so hard for you to care? 

The answer, I think, is not one that I'll like. But perhaps you can take up the burden of explaining that to me.

Sadly, the majority of Americans (!) still believe the statues should remain, though at the same time they claim to oppose white supremacy and the KKK by large percentages. We have a lot of explaining to do, don't we?

(Photo: The Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, VA)