Since Dylan Rooffs’ Charleston massacre and with gathering force since the Charlottesville violence, there has been a crescendo of efforts to erase history. In Baltimore all Confederate monuments were ripped out in the middle of the night. In New York City Bill Deblasio, the “mayor” is even talking about removing Columbus’ statue and name from Columbus circle. Even non-symbols are threatened. An Asian-American sports announcer was pulled from announcing a University of Virginia game because his name is “Robert Lee” and there is fear that his name may offend some people. See ESPN removes Robert Lee from calling Virginia game in Charlottesville due to his name,
Somehow, I think that monuments of Confederate heroes, sports announcers with similar names, and memorializations of history are not the reason that certain minority students wind up punching out their teachers rather than learning in school. I.e. Milwaukee student caught on video punching teacher several times.
I think that the umbilical ties to nursing ancient hatreds are part of the problem. See A Racist World, Described by Those Who Knew It.[“And Angelou was, in a way, just as furious about the sheriff’s condescension, the blithe evil of warning the innocent to “lay low.”]. Why not focus on real current barriers to learning and achievement rather than the evils of long-dead white losers such as Southern sheriffs, governors using police dogs, and Klansmen? There are serious needs to be addressed, serious current problems.
Shrug. It’s symbolism, and that’s something that people can actually do something about. Addressing the real root causes and current instances of racism is a lot harder.
Yes, we need to do the hard work of removing real racism from our society. No, removing a few statues won’t go very far toward that goal.
But imagine if the Federal Government were to put up a statue of General Sherman in front of the Federal Office Building in Atlanta, GA. The locals would go utterly ape-shit.
Symbols have that kind of power…and that kind of power shouldn’t be used to antagonize people.
I’m not aware of “a crescendo of efforts to erase history.”
I’m aware of a crescendo of efforts to remove statues from this or that town square. Exactly why you think that equals an effort to “erase history” is, perhaps, a mystery for the ages. I learned history from books, and in school, and at museums, and in all sorts of different ways – websites, archives, documentary films, you name it – but, to the best of my recollection, never once from a statue.
Were someone in fact out to erase historical records, ‘removing statues’ would seem to be as misguided as ‘slapping seashells’. It’s just the wrong move, is all.
That’s an excellent point. The opposition that would surely be made to a hypothetical Sherman statue in Atlanta wouldn’t be seen as ‘erasing history,’ but as entirely reasonable.
The power of the publicly-displayed symbols of the Confederacy certainly was used to antagonize people, rather than to ‘commemorate history.’ The facts of the timing of the installation of those symbols admit of few other explanations. (I think many people were surprised to learn that most Confederate statuary was raised decades after the Civil War instead of immediately following it. Now that we know, it’s impossible to ignore the links between the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and the installations.)
If a Sherman statue were placed there I would not expect a riot except for some itinerant losers such as Klansmen or Nazis. I think the average white Southerner would go about his business. There is a plaque in NYC of Field Marshal Petain of France that has been there without an y notable problems until Deblasio mentioned it. Despite New York’s rather large population of Jewish people. My area is dotted with country clubs that exclude Jewish people, even a few towns like Pelham and Bronxville that effectively exclude Jewish people. My attitude and the attitude of most of my Jewish friends? Their lose.
The statues were put in place in an effort to deny history, and to let black people know that segregation was going to be there then and tomorrow.
The continuous denial of history is one of the main reasons why defenses like the one you are using there are not only wrong, but just helpful to the racists that do not want to see their denial go into the dustbin of history.
Removing statues is neither erasing history nor an attempt to solve the problems related to race. It’s merely local officials and local populations deciding that they no longer want to publicly honor those who fought for slavery and white supremacy in monuments that were, for the most part, erected to symbolize resistance to black civil rights and desegregation.
Roof murdered nine people. He walked into a church prayer meeting and shot them. He purposely targeted black people after immersing himself in Klan bullshit and even did a little tour of what he felt were sites important to his nonsensical beliefs.
In Charleston a bunch of idiots purporting to be Nazis and various other flavors of bigotry decided to march around with shields and weapons. That eventually incited one of their morons to drive a car into a crowd and kill a person, and injure many more.
And the reaction to this, pulling down some inanimate symbols of bigotry is what bothers you. There’s been no organized book burning, no looting of museums. There has been a massive surge of people going out to show they disapprove of Nazi idiots. And they got rid of some ugly statues. Complaining about that is how you occupy your time. Good god.
Somebody pit this sorry twit. Or don’t - he seems to have mistaken us for people who are concerned with his opinion.
Well, running coach beat me to it, but I’m genuinely curious: what the heck do you think words like “erase” and “erased” mean?
Because in the first post, and the one I’m now replying to, I genuinely don’t get what you think is happening: you say that it’s an effort to “erase history”, and you say someone is “erasing a sports announcer” – and for the life of me it’s as if you’re using a word that means “using a teleportation device invented by Lex Luthor to change the location of people or objects”. Which is to say: it’s like you’re not only wrong, but like you’re wrong in such an odd way that I can’t figure out how you came by it.
Please do not impugn the motives of other posters in this fashion.
If you would like to use the Pit, you are free to do so. What you are not permitted to do is insult other posters in this forum. Don’t do that.
I’m not following how this thread is supposed to be different than the last two threads you started on the same topic. I’m closing this one. Please don’t start the same basic thread over and over again in such a short period of time.