It is long
past the time for our country to come to grips with its history. It has been
almost 400 years since the first kidnapped Africans were brought to Virginia
against their will, 152 years since the end of the Civil War and the passage of
the 13th Amendment banning slavery, and 63 years since the landmark
Brown v Board decision outlawing Jim Crow school segregation. Yet today we
still live in a society where separate and unequal define the lives of our
black citizens and where racial injustice is defended as “part of our
heritage”.
The tragic
deaths in Charlottesville and the failure of the President to condemn the white
racists and neo-Nazis responsible for the violence is a shocking reminder that
we have a long way to go in dealing with our history of systematic racial
oppression, our nation’s “original sin”. The promise of America, to affirm the
fundamental worth and dignity of ALL people, rings hollow in the ears of
millions of our fellow citizens.
To be clear,
the Civil War was not about states’ rights, just as opposition to desegregation
in the 1950s and 60s wasn’t. The former was about defending a system of chattel
slavery, where human beings were treated like property; the latter was about
maintaining Jim Crow, which continued the systematic discrimination and hatred
that is a fundamental part of our American heritage, both South AND North. That
part of our history can only be put behind us when we acknowledge the past and
present expressions and thoroughly reject them.
To combat
systematic racism, we need to accept that those who fought to maintain this
system, regardless of their justification, should not be celebrated as heroes.
Robert E. Lee may have been a brilliant general, but he put his skills to work
for an immoral cause. To honor him is to celebrate that cause and to support
the continuation of the system of racial oppression he fought to maintain.
In fact, we
must to do more than just remove those monuments honoring the Confederates who fought
to divide our country in order to preserve slavery. In their place, we need to
erect monuments to those who fought and died for freedom and equality. They fought
for the values that made our country great and are the true heroes in our
history. That’s a heritage that we should all celebrate.
LTE Submitted to the StarNews in Wilmington, NC on 8/25/17
