People like his cigarettes?
See, here’s the thing.
I don’t hear every single day, in every single place, about white privilege. I hear about it sometimes here at SDMB, and more often at another message board, but that’s about it. Oh, and from one crazy Trump-loving brother who’s convinced that there’s a war on white men and all that. But I only see him once every couple of weeks.
In the real world, I pretty much never hear about it.
I’m not stupid. I know there is such a thing as white privilege. But it’s not like everyone is out there talking about it all the time, and it’s not like everyone I know who isn’t a white middle-aged man is pointing it out to me and telling me to check my privilege all the time.
And nobody in the world in which I live is all that worked up about statues one way or the other. They’ve all got more important things going on.
Maybe you’re just hanging around with the wrong people.
By this standard, the Admiral Dewey monumentin San Francisco is just as questionable.
In general, though, I don’t agree with the taking down of monuments to people because their views didn’t agree with ours on every point. By today’s standards, for instance, most if not all of the Founding Fathers were racist, as was even Abraham Lincoln. But all of those men contributed substantially to the evolution of our ethical standards. We still have far to go, but race relations would not have advanced even this far if it hadn’t been fo them.
Reddy Mercury is the cabin boy of his soul.
I concur. However, I don’t see anything wrong with considering the option of taking down monuments that a significant chunk of people have stated significant concerns about. Let’s have the discussion(s) and see what we, as the modern inheritors and maintainers of those monuments, think about the pros and cons of what they symbolize. If most of us think the pros of a particular memorial outweigh the cons, we’re not actually required to take it down.
What I don’t get is the pants-shitting hysteria displayed by so many conservatives nowadays at the mere fact that people are even daring to question the continued memorialization of some dead white guy or other. AFAIK there’s no principle that says we’re obligated to continue showing deference to an existing public monument whose symbolism is now widely seen as offensive and/or unethical.
(Or if there is such a principle, as I’ve pointed out before, why weren’t all these history-loving conservatives jumping up to defend it back when various populaces were pulling down statues of, say, Lenin and Saddam Hussein?)
George Washingtons wife?
Not a white-male historical figure as specified by the OP. And thanks for ruining my elegant last-word-of-the-thread there, blogflogdog. 