"White" Heritage

A couple days ago Baltimore removed four statues honoring Confederates in the middle of the night. Last night a statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger "Dred Scott Decision" Taney was removed from its perch on the State House lawn.

As a student of History, as a teacher of History, I sympathize with those who say that removing these statues is white-washing or scrubbing History from the public sphere. We should be cautious in deciding which historical figures to celebrate on our public lands, and should be judicious when it comes to removing those previously honored. But while I might sympathize with them, I totally disagree with their conclusion. These statues SHOULD be removed and placed in museums or in Confederate cemeteries or on private lands where individuals so inclined can maintain them for posterity.

We don't have statues celebrating John Wilkes Booth all over the place for a reason, after all. And if you celebrate Jackson and Lee and their ilk--men who fought valiantly for a racist, cruel, and feudal society--you might as well celebrate John Wilkes Booth, who fired the final shot of the Civil War, and who was just as virulent a racist and traitor as the others.

As a "white" man, I can choose which representatives of my "heritage" to honor, or who represents my idea or ideal "heritage" as a "white" man. I can honor John Brown, who yanked a family of slavers out of their beds and had his sons and other members of his Free Soil militia dismember them with broadswords. I can honor Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy or Charles Manson. I can honor Hitler or Stalin as part of my "white" heritage. I can honor racists who were on the wrong side of History and claim them as my "heritage." Or, I can honor those who fought against racism and for justice and equality. Or, as a "white" man, I can choose to honor and have as personal heroes members of ALL races--and I can say all races are human and therefore my humanity is no different from theirs, and my heritage is shared with those who are Black, Red, Yellow, Brown, etc.

Mayor Landrieu explains the history of these statues well--these were not monuments "honoring" brave men who were part of "white" heritage. They were propaganda designed to create a false past, part of a white-washing campaign to make bigotry and vile racism into "states' rights," to make the North the aggressors and the South heroic defenders of an honorable tradition. If you read the reasons for secession as announced by the Southern States, and if you read the documents created by the founders of the Confederacy, this bullshit falls apart right quick. But this propaganda was also directed at African Americans: we might have lost the conflict, but things ain't changed for y'all, and don't forget it!

Stop pretending otherwise. If you celebrate these "heroes," then you believe what they stood for, which is a hateful, violent, racist ideology. And yes, it's hard to accept that you are a hateful racist, or that you were taught something that is hateful and racist was honorable and just. But facts are facts. Removing these statues does not scrub our History, it stops celebrating criminality and treason. As a citizen you have the right to celebrate whomever you choose, and on your private property you can fly the stars and bars or a swastika or whatever other emblem you believe represents your heritage or ideology--but you can't force the rest of us to celebrate it.

And I write this as someone who can see why Lee and Jackson are regarded as heroes--it's hard not to admire the way they were able to defeat much larger and better-equipped Union forces again and again through pluck and ingenuity. And I understand that their ties were to their home State more than to the Union, and that each man had complexities and ambiguities as all do. But the side they fought for was morally repugnant, and remains so.

Stonewall Jackson's great-great grandsons agree: Video.

A final note: White Pride is often a code word for White Supremacy.