What do you do with a thousand pounds of ugly, ugly history? Cities across the country have been facing this question with a new sense of urgency since the August 12 white nationalist march in Charlottesville, where the planned removal of a public statue of Robert E. Lee incited hate groups to rally and terrorize. That statue, like many of the hundreds of Confederate monuments across the country, was commissioned in the early 20th century.1 At this time, the Ku Klux Klan had found a second life after suppression by federal law enforcement in the 1870s, and was a huge political force aiming to consolidate white power and to establish a reign of terror over nonwhite communities.2 During this time of Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist terror, monuments were erected to glorify the Confederate fight to maintain black slavery as the law of the land.
In the weeks following the Charlottesville march, Confederate monuments have come down in more than twenty U.S. cities.3 Some have fallen quietly; mayor Catherine Pugh of Baltimore ordered four monuments to be removed in the middle of the night, and taken to an undisclosed location. The city has reached out to Confederate cemeteries to inquire about relocating the statues there; a city councilman suggested the statues be melted down and reformed into a likeness of the city’s first black mayor.4 Elsewhere, monuments have fallen to cheers and fanfare. In Durham, protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier that had been erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1924. The statue was disfigured by its 15 foot fall; eight protesters were arrested, some facing felony charges.5
These Confederate monuments — and the discourse and actions surrounding their presence and removal — are symbolic in a country where the evidence of white supremacy is ubiquitous in the physical landscape. The fight to remove these glaringly obvious symbols of oppression provides a metaphor for much larger and more difficult tasks ahead. An economy built on white supremacist ideology has created a landscape where the material difference between rich and poor neighborhoods is drastic. In our dehumanizing system, resources and labor are continually extracted from disenfranchised communities, to create oases of comfort and wealth amidst a landscape of overwhelming rural and urban poverty. White supremacist ideology has enabled corporate greed to devalue human life in general, not just the lives of people of color. Still, neighborhoods of color are disproportionately impacted with polluted air and water and the dumping of toxic wastes; these are the byproducts of processes that have enriched a small fraction of the population. The borders between our rich and poor neighborhoods are heavily policed; these borders are generally unofficial, but are obvious to observe by the dramatic material differences that flank them.6
These physical manifestations of oppression go much deeper than a few hundred Confederate monuments reigning over public spaces, and working to change this landscape is infinitely more complicated than the straightforward process of removing said monuments. Still, how we deal with the relatively superficial problem of these monuments is revealing of our country’s attitudes toward white supremacy past, present, and future. Do we treat white supremacy as a quaint relic of the past, resurfacing in uncomfortable ways, but now largely irrelevant and innocuous? Or, do we recognize it as a tenacious organizing principle of our politics and society, one that is evolving and progressing, and working to devalue human life in general? With white supremacy alive and strong, driving our society towards its future, there is no right way to dispose of a thousand pounds of ugly history. Taking down Confederate monuments is a small step in an ultra-marathon, because we do not need to hide evidence of white supremacy, we need to seek justice for its crimes.
1 How the U.S. Got So Many Confederate Monuments by Becky Little.
2 A short history of the Ku Klux Klan by the Souther Poverty Law Center.
3 New York Times article on Confederate monuments accross the country.
4 Washington Post article on Baltimore monument removal by Fennit Nirappil.
5 Washington Post article on Durham monument removal by Janell Ross.
6 Police Power and Particulate Matters by Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze, offers perspective on the geography of racism in our physical landscape.