There has been a movement recently, in the United States and around the world, to get rid of statues that depicted figures like slave owners, Confederate generals, brutal dictators, and so on. In the U.S., for instance, statues of Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and more have come into scrutiny as the country wakes up once again to the issue of systemic racism. Let’s discuss what should be done with these statues.
Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, and more were Confederate generals, rebels against the United States who fought for a secessionist movement in the Civil War. Let’s also get one thing straight—the Civil War was started by the Confederacy to defend slavery. Some argue that it was a war fought over states’ rights. The logical response to this is, “a state’s right to do what?”
Especially in the Southern United States, which has a long history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, many white supremacist groups have enacted statues and monuments honoring the Confederacy. The largest of these is the Stone Mountain Monument in Georgia. The massive stone carving depicts Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Those who are against the removal of such statues and monuments say that such removals are “revisionist history,” and that it would be denying history and so on. Yes, it is important to learn about history. But those advocating for these monuments to be kept are, in fact, the ones participating in revisionist history themselves. Think to yourself for a moment: should a statue of a man, who believed that all Black people were inferior to white people, and thus should forever slave away at the whims of white men, be honored in such a way? Of course not.
Many people do not know of Christopher Columbus’ shameful crimes. Not only did he own slaves and treated them brutally, he also massacred tens of thousands of Native Americans and forced them into slavery or murdered. He was a brutal dictator in the colonies he set up, too. He should not be revered as “the man who discovered North America” for two reasons. One, North America had already been discovered for hundreds of years. Two, he discovered South and Central America, not North.
These monuments should be seen as a figure of shame and a symbol of our deeply racist, segregationist past. Rather than being depicted as heroes, these statues should be moved into museums or gardens with explanations about their awful deeds and crimes. It makes sense that activists are actively working to take them down. We should be ashamed of these people, not proud of them. The fact that, in the 21st century, these people are still honored as such should be seen as a massive embarrassment to the United States.
People need to be educated as to why the Confederacy was fighting for a wrong cause. Similarly to how Nazism is seen as shameful to Germany, the Confederacy should be seen as such in the U.S. as well. Stone Mountain, now seen as the largest statue for white supremacy in the entire world, should either be removed or explained as to how it depicts the shameful past of the Confederacy, and how the monument shows how racist whites were back in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Looking at these statues in a critical way is not denying or rewriting the past, but rather admitting and reckoning with the past to understand how these figures sparked a racist divide in American history. For instance, Auschwitz Concentration Camp exists today to remind us of what hateful crimes we have committed in the past, and acts as a grim reminder of Nazis’ atrocities and tells us why we must never do such things again. Putting them in museums and depicting them as shameful figures allows us to admit that what they did was wrong and should no longer be honored.
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