When it comes to Confederate statues and monuments, we all agree on something: History is not to be destroyed. And if he were still around to weigh in, George Santayana would surely agree. Something about remembering the past–at the risk of repeating it.
And context, as always, matters.
We can acknowledge history without honoring it. Some things belong in the public square, some in a museum. Common sense and common decency, even if not common enough, should dictate.
Visit Berlin, for example, and see how modern Germany has handled the Holocaust. There are museums and there are high-profile public reminders. The message is the same: “This is what we as an unconscionably culpable society allowed to happen. Never again.” It is as moving as it is necessary.
However, statuary harkening back to the Confederacy–“Gone With the Wind” and apocryphal family histories notwithstanding–is inherently inappropriate for America’s public places. There’s a reason why so many of them were erected during the height of Jim Crow. There are no publicly-acceptable rationales for referencing a cause steeped in racism. This isn’t cathartic, Holocaustesque therapy. This is a visceral affront to African-Americans.
Too bad these controversial Confederate monuments haven’t had inscriptions that contained more truth than allegiance to a revisionist “cause.” Maybe something like: “This memorial ‘commemorates,’ as it were, the South’s treasonous war of secession from the United States and the concomitant effort to retain a way of life that relied on a slave-labor economy. The maintenance of such an economy was also dependent on a conscience-free rationale that defined non-white slaves as inferior human beings.”
Had that been the case, the truth may have set us free of all this angst and political posturing we still experience today.