Confederate Statues Consolidation Thread

[JackRiddler]

People are products of their time.

This was the first line in an apologia for Robert E. Lee. I consider this saying to be among the laziest possible dumbshit platitudes on earth. It is almost exclusively used to make excuses for alpha-male assholes and their atrocities, usually by people who have little reason to maintain an emotional stake in some past conflict, and yet do for some irrational reason.

No one who happens to be identifiable as "white" and who lives in the states of the southeast U.S. today has any reason to see Lee or the Confederacy as a past on which they need to build an identity. If they do, it's on them. It's their fucking choice, but obviously a problem for everyone who doesn't want that past representing the place where they live. It needs to be said in addition that the past of Lee and the Confederacy does not belong to the people who identify with it more than it does to anyone else. They don't get to claim it as their "own" or to speak about it with greater authority solely by virtue of happening to be identifiable as "white" and happening to live in states of the southeast or other parts of the U.S.

Every "time" seems to "produce" a lot of different people, and even people of similar stations produced at the same time seem capable of disagreement and conflict. Abolitionists were a product of the same time as Lee. Nat Turner was a product of his time (okay, a bit earlier). A few slaveholders by inheritance who chose to manumit their slaves were a product of this time.

Also a product of 1860-61 were the state governments who voted to secede from the Union, and who then started a war with it -- because they wished to preserve and expand the institution of chattel slavery, because they saw this institution as threatened by the election of the Republicans, and because they wished to continue profiting from this institution for many generations to come. I acknowledge their agency. They made their choices. So did a United States military man, Robert E. Lee. He chose to serve this Slave Power against the U.S.

Most of the white people in the seceding states went along with that decision. But many of these whites chose to oppose secession, to oppose the war. Some of them refused to serve, evaded the draft, deserted the Slave Power army, even fought guerilla actions against it. They make better figures for me personally to identify with or give a statue to than Lee, but I guess some of you and I disagree, even though we are products of the same time.

Even blue's dirt farmers (who in his fantasy version were somehow magically unaware that they were supposed to fight a war started by and for the Slave Power, but merely reacted to so-called "Northern" "invaders") did things like secede from Virginia, so as to avoid joining the Slave Power secession. Apparently most of the West Virginians didn't see the United States as the invader! Imagine that. They saw the lower Virginian ruling class, the slave-owning planters, as the strangers for whom they would not fight and die. Products of their time!

Thus the time being 1861 is no excuse for Lee, who was a very smart and capable and indeed free man, someone who knew about all of the above and the various choices available to him a lot better than we do. No one made Lee serve in his position. He was not subject to a draft. He could have refused to lead the army of the Slave Power.

The time being 2017 is no excuse for those who choose to build their identity on the symbols of the Slave Power today. It is no excuse for their ignorance, or for the fact that some of them march with the KKK and out-and-out Nazis in a declared movement of white supremacy. It being 2017 is no excuse for the likes of other alt-right and/or nazi-lite and/or just conventional MRA morons who have nested as unbanned trolls here on RI. It is no excuse to deploy sophistry and construct reasons for why the terrorism practiced by the Nazi/KKK marchers against people in Charlotesville was somehow okay, or understandable, or acceptable because it's equivalent to something one fantasizes applies to something one projects as "the left" or to some lie of the "liberal" (corporate) media.

Nazis are marching in the streets of the United States, murdering counter-protestors and publishing justifications for it, beating random black people; and while this is not altogether new, today the President of the United States (a product of his time!) is providing cover fire for them (while simultaneously threatening to start a nuclear war, a separate fact that I consider relevant). I consider this important, strangely enough. And some of you lot think this is a fucking Internet game, something to win here on some board. You want to trivialize the reality by changing the subject, creating false binaries, either I am with the fantasy apologetics for the Nazis or I am with CNN. No. CNN doesn't get to be your fig-leaf in your chosen role as a sophist apologizing for the Nazis. Oh, you are definitely a product of your time. Product more than person, apparently. Product, like a tool.

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[JackRiddler]

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/16/us/co ... index.html

Oh no, I am posting a piece from CNN because I consider it to be accurate and relevant to the discussion. The actual research is from SPLC, a group with which I do not at all times agree. In any case, does anyone question the factual accuracy of the tallies given in the above graphic, or in the below lists? If not, splendid. Then please discuss what you think these data indicate, and avoid the irrelevant matter of which platform happened to publish them. Thanks.

There are certain moments in US history when Confederate monuments go up

By Saeed Ahmed, CNN
Design: Ryan Struyk and Sean O'Key, CNN
Updated 2005 GMT (0405 HKT) August 16, 2017


(CNN)To hear their defenders say it, Confederate memorials aren't symbols of hate; they are meant to honor a heritage.

But, as this chart above from the Southern Poverty Law Center shows, whenever the country appeared to have made some racial progress, cities and states -- mostly in the South -- responded by erecting such monuments.

There are two distinct spikes: one around the turn of the 20th century, and one during the height of the civil rights movement.

The first spike

The first spike is around 1900. That's 35 years after the end of the Civil War.
When the war ended, relatively few monuments went up in the South. The economy and social order were just too devastated. But after money was raised, sponsoring groups promoted the "Lost Cause" ideology -- the belief that states' rights, not slavery, was the Confederacy's principal cause.
By 1900, many states were implementing Jim Crow laws, meant to disenfranchise newly freed African-Americans and prevent integration.
It's in this climate that cities and states ramped up their construction of Confederate symbols.

The second spike
The second, albeit smaller, spike is in the mid-1950s and 1960s. Change was in the air. Brown v. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. As the SPLC put it in its report, "The civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists."

That brings us to today

[Follow link for a map that I can't place here, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/16/us/co ... index.html]

According to the SPLC, an Alabama-based nonprofit organization that monitors civil rights and hate speech across the country, there are:
- At least 1,503 publicly sponsored Confederate symbols around the nation
- These include 700 monuments and statues in public property. Most are in the South
10 major US military bases named after Confederate military leaders
- 9 official Confederate holidays or observances in six Southern states

These are the 10 states with the most spaces dedicated to the Confederacy:

Virginia: 223
Texas: 178
Georgia: 174
North Carolina: 140
Mississippi: 131
South Carolina: 112
Alabama: 107
Louisiana: 91
Tennessee: 80
Florida: 61

CNN's Phil Gast contributed to this report.

[minime]

JackRiddler, everyone!!!!

Creating true binaries since 2008...

[seemslikeadream]

Ye shall be known by the statues ye commissions for 40 million dollars





or just add a bit to existing statues



or the statues one inspires

[cptmarginal]

I don't mean to be patronizing, but try not to take it all so personally! You make a lot of good points but I am a firm believer in laying off the nastiness and just letting people speak for themselves when I disagree. (PS - to anyone who may be wondering: I don't give a crap about that recent drama with members of this forum going elsewhere or making accusations - in fact I value the posts of every one of those people even when I disagree)

By 1900, many states were implementing Jim Crow laws, meant to disenfranchise newly freed African-Americans and prevent integration.

Extreme understatement. You know what I have been thinking about lately? The very common tendency to just glance at books or at most skim through them & still feel informed on an issue. I had "known" the information in this book for a long time before actually reading it, and now it has changed my entire perspective. The filing cabinets of facts and emotional affects of my own life story have all been shuffled around by sitting down and engaging with the narrative step by step.



Shudder to think what perspective shift will be had from finally reading this one rather than skimming through it:

[JackRiddler]

I don't mean to be patronizing, but try not to take it all so personally! You make a lot of good points but I am a firm believer in laying off the nastiness and just letting people speak for themselves when I disagree.

Could be, cpt. I'm allergic to stupid, it's involuntary. Excuse me, sorry, need to take some notes:

minime, anonymous account with an HMW-influenced mish-mash except saner, interesting until 2014ish, in decline since then, produces next to no content. Still the same person? Health problem? Sock? Who can say?

Right, cpt, so you may have a point. But it's not personal, how could it be? I don't know any of these losers personally, I'm just responding online (on occasion). And I don't compromise on sophistry in apologetics for Nazis, or for the Slave Power and its modern-day advocates, or aiming at false equivalencies to defuse these as singular evils, which is worse. Those people are going to get no tolerance for me in the false name of civility. Nor would they if Jeff was still around. There are actual rules to this board not being enforced in regard to fascists and apologetics for fascism. Believe it or not, this is an anti-fascist board - using that very word!

Anyway, yeah, the Nazis were against all the liberal hypocrisy, it's true! They promised to eliminate the Jews explicitly, made the intent to go to war pretty obvious (except to the same level of idiots who don't see it in Trump's messaging), and did they deliver? They did! Straight-talkers!

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[minime]

minime, anonymous account with an HMW-influenced mish-mash except saner, interesting until 2014ish, in decline since then, produces next to no content. Still the same person? Health problem? Sock? Who can say?

Anonymous account? What does that mean? Aren't we all anonymous? Is your name really JackRiddler?

You're being too kind: Surely I have never been considered interesting at RI. That would be wrong.

There is content, and then there is content.

I'm still the same person. Health problem? No, nothing serious or chronic. Old age... you know... My highs are lower and my lows are lower; but thanks for asking.

Sock? Nope. Though I guess it would be nice to log in as someone else and agree with me. I can't remember anyone here ever agreeing with me. Not one person, not once. Don't want it, don't miss it. If I wanted agreement or reinforcement I would go elsewhere.

I will say I'm probably a short timer, but I've said that before...

[cptmarginal]

It's actually alright, I'm applying the same standard of judgment to your thread here as well. That's not snark; precisely the opposite. My response is not involuntary at all and I'm upset with literally no-one.

Here in the midwest, surrounded by judgmental man-children with Confederate flags in their yard and flying on their trucks. Hope things are well over there, too.

https://erenow.com/modern/slavery-by-an ... ame/11.php

As Reese was pressing to use the federal courts to free the thousands of slaves held in Alabama mines—and set a precedent that might have freed ten thousand or more in other states—the writer Thomas Dixon released in 1905 the follow-up to his spectacular novel The Leopard's Spots.The new book, an even more overt paean to the Ku Klux Klan violence that swept away black political participation in the 1860s and 1870s, was titled The Clansman. It sold in vast quantities in 1905 at the price of $1.50 and became perhaps the first true blockbuster in modern U.S. publishing. Its success— commercially and as revisionist history—was so complete that, in an irony of immeasurable proportion, newspaper announcements for the volume featured a letter from Abraham Lincoln's son Robert praising it as "a work that cannot be laid down."39

The author quickly fashioned the storylines of his two racist novels into a stage play to tour the United States. The production featured a cast of exquisitely attractive young white actresses, white actors in blackface playing lecherous emancipated slaves hungry to assault white women and cowering and buffoonish black elected officials, gallant former Confederate officers, and a fully outfitted contingent of white-robed Klansmen who rode across the stage mounted on horseback. The show opened in Norfolk, Virginia, in August 1905 at the Academy of Music, and an epic, record-breaking run of performances followed in theater halls across the South, Midwest, and Northeast.

It played to packed crowds everywhere, drawing in a period of ten months "more people …than any other attraction … in the theatrical history of United States theater," wrote one newspaper critic.40 Not surprisingly, a new generation of southern white leaders absorbed its account of Reconstruction and the fury of its white actors as absolute fact. Audiences roared approval almost everywhere else too—including standing-room-only audiences in New York City. In Atlanta, the city's most prominent debutantes held "box" parties for their friends in the expensive reserved seats of the Grand Opera House when the play arrived in the city. Mrs. Dixon, the author's wife, was feted by the finest ladies of Atlanta.41

[cptmarginal]

Sock? Nope. Though I guess it would be nice to log in as someone else and agree with me. I can't remember anyone here ever agreeing with me. Not one person, not once. Don't want it, don't miss it. If I wanted agreement or reinforcement I would go elsewhere.

I'll take you on your word about not caring and just say one nice thing: I like your signature every time I see it.

[American Dream]

Meet Maya Little, UNC Student Whose Protest Ignited the Movement to Topple a Racist Confederate Statue

We end today's show in North Carolina, where hundreds of student protesters in Chapel Hill toppled the Silent Sam Confederate statue at the University of North ...

Read More →

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^I was surprised to learn Ms Little's focus of study was recent Chinese history. Although I can appreciate the sentiment behind the pulling down of the statue, I would hope these so-called statuary memorial tributes commemorating notable Confederate traitors could instead be removed intact to either private property or museums where those who wished to see them could, while remaining out of public sight of those who see their presence as unbearably offensive and a constant reminder (as if one was needed) of all the evils of slavery.

I don't know how many are aware that The Clansman was the original title of the DW Griffiths 1915 film, "Birth of a Nation" and was based on Dixon's book. This film is responsible for the resurgence of the Klan, which had ceased to exist in the 1870s. Check the dates of the monumental erections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3kmVgQHIEY

I've never had any interest in watching that racist film, or even a part of it.

[American Dream]

The Dramatic Fall of Silent Sam, UNC’s Confederate Monument

David A. Graham
August 21, 2018
The Atlantic




Meanwhile, protests and opposition to Silent Sam continued to grow. In April, the graduate student Maya Little was arrested after she defaced the statue with blood and red paint. Referring to suggestions that the school help mitigate the damage of Silent Sam by adding historical context, Little said she was adding her own context. “Silent Sam is violence; Silent Sam is the genocide of black people; Silent Sam is antithetical to our right to exist,” Little wrote in a letter to Folt. “You should see him the way that we do, at the forefront of our campus covered in our blood.”

The lawyer Hampton Dellinger also threatened to sue the university for Silent Sam’s removal, arguing that the statue constituted a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Legal experts I spoke with last fall said the draft lawsuit offered an intriguing but novel interpretation of the law, and might be difficult to win.)

That’s where things were Monday evening, when a march in solidarity with Little was scheduled for the day before classes began at UNC. The atmosphere was tense, with Confederate sympathizers present, according to The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper. There was also a substantial complement of police. It was not immediately clear how the protesters had managed to tear the statue down despite the security, but witnesses told The Daily Tar Heel that Silent Sam fell in mere seconds after being tugged with ropes.

This is similar to what happened in Durham, where, to demonstrators’ surprise, the statue fell quickly and crumpled. The next steps will likely echo events in Durham, too. There will be a vocal contingent that believes the statue should have been left. But there will also be a split between two factions that oppose the statue. Some will contend that mob action like what happened Monday is never appropriate, no matter how heinous the offending statue, and that the process is sacrosanct. In a statement Monday night, Cooper’s office said, “The Governor understands that many people are frustrated by the pace of change and he shares their frustration, but violent destruction of public property has no place in our communities."

Their opponents will retort that such sentiments are precious but pointless: It wouldn’t have mattered whether 100 percent of the university community, or the town of Chapel Hill, supported removal, because the legislature, made up mostly of people from elsewhere in the state and elected on a gerrymandered map, had blocked any chance at removing Silent Sam.

There will be more more mundane questions, too. Who will be punished, and how, for the statue’s toppling? (Nine people were charged in the Durham toppling; in February, all nine were acquitted or had charges dropped.) What will become of Silent Sam? His plinth remains, vandalized and empty, on campus. It’s unclear what damage was done to the statue in its fall, but it did not crumple like the cheaply made Durham monument.

Assuming the statue is not ruined, officials will face a wrenching decision about what to do with it. The state law bars removal, but it makes no provisions for replacing a damaged monument. Authorities will be loath to put back a statue that memorializes white supremacy and has already caused chaos once. Yet there will also be great pressure to restore the statue. Chapel Hill’s status as home to the flagship state university means there will likely be greater scrutiny from across the state than there was in Durham, where the plinth remains empty one year later.

Regardless of Silent Sam’s ultimate fate, his toppling represents yet another defeat for the Lost Cause that Carr celebrated. “Nowhere in all the South was the approaching conflict more keenly scented than in the universities and colleges, and the gallant boys, then pursuing their studies, lost no time in preparing themselves for the hour when the call should come,” Carr said. On Monday, students and faculty of the same school decided that the statue he had helped raise had to come down.

Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ll/568006/