Confederate monuments are hardly ‘art’
While it is interesting to frame removing pro-slavery monuments as efforts to destroy “art,” as Michael Bowen argued in a recent commentary, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu put these statues in a more accurate historical context. Landrieu reminds us that public monuments are symbols of people and causes we are supposed to look up to (literally).
They are not “art.”
C. Vann Woodward’s book, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” powerfully explains the historical context of decisions to erect such public symbols. White politicians in the 1890s decided to use racism as a tool to unite white voters behind them, and the slow but real post-Civil War progress between whites and blacks was promptly reversed. Black voters were erased from voting lists, white-only and colored-only signs were hung, and law and culture made sure black Americans were kept in their place.
Jim Crow’s disease passed from generation to generation, becoming part of our national DNA. Among the many heartstopping interviews in “The Vietnam War,” a new documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is one that occurs in the 72nd minute of Episode 6, when a black Marine named Roger Harris describes standing in his uniform outside the Boston airport upon his return from Vietnam as taxis rolled by refusing to pick him up. After a patrolman finally stopped a cab and told the driver he had to carry Harris home and the cabbie objected, Harris realized that he wasn’t seen as a Marine who had just spent 13 months in a war zone serving his country, but rather simply as a “nigger.”
Think of Roger Harris when someone declines to stand and sing along to, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
We can and must continue our work to move beyond racism. Making America great does not mean recreating a world where people of color were kept in their places. Rather, we, the people, would benefit from a national discussion over erecting the Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorials in all the places where 6,000 were murdered while the justice system looked the other way. Just as Germany puts up
memorials to the Holocaust as part of its efforts to acknowledge and move beyond its past, our support of these lynching memorials will acknowledge and help to heal the scars of slavery.
Those of us who have not experienced the lash of racism must try to see the world through other’s eyes. Imagine you are Roger Harris, returning from the horrors of a war to save democracy, and you can’t get a ride home because your skin is black. With insights drawn from empathy, perhaps in some future generation, we can finally cleanse our nation of the stains of slavery. In the meantime, let’s see those monuments for what they are.