Originally Posted by
bigbill
I'm taking a short break from writing my MA capstone. I'm writing on the Lost Cause myth including Confederate monuments. Racism, what do we do now? We elected a black President, racism persisted, Trump was defeated, racism is unchanged. We elected an old white guy who has taken racist stances and made racist comments in the past, but was he any different than other politicians at the time? Biden declared he would pick a black female VP, will that change the nation's systemic racism? In the past decade, it seems like we want to pat ourselves on the back for choosing the right candidates, changing the background on our facebook profile, posting outrage at racism, but what have we really done? A friend told me he was raised to believe that there was no difference between white and black people, and he still feels that way. I really don't care how we feel as a nation, I want to know what we'll do. If you ask someone if they are racist, unless they're currently sporting a white robe and hood, they'll say no, but actions tell a different story.
Around 1870 when Robert E Lee died, the retelling of Southern history began in earnest. The South lost because the North waged open warfare, the South lost because Lee had imcompetent generals, the war wasn't about slavery, blacks were better off when they were slaves, slavery was going to end anyway, and the war was the fault of the North. To reinforce this false narrative, we erected Confederate monuments. If the event had a monument, it had to be true. We put monuments on courthouse lawns to reinforce Jim Crow. We segregated everything from trains to neighborhoods to schools. Entire generations were raised believing the lie, and not just in the South, it was in our textbooks. Anyway, I'm being preachy, we need to teach people the roots of racism and white supremacy or it will never make sense. Ryan A. Newsome wrote Cut in Stone: Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption. My favorite quote from his work, "Better to confront such a past...than to wait for its resurgence."
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