This past week in UNC, a group of students toppled a statue reminiscent of the confederacy era called Silent Sam, a fictional character depicting a Confederate soldier.
While doing illegal looting and damage to public property is a problem, the national debate remains on the issue if these statues are justified in public areas.
This is one of the problems where I do not understand the other side. We as a nation need to stop thinking that only our personal history is important. The history of the southern white man is not more important than the public.
As a student interested in history, it blows my mind that people think monuments supporting the southern side of the civil war are still justified due to the fact that without them, history would be lost.
There is a fundamental and important difference between memorializing, honoring, and educating and remembering.
It is true that monuments fueled with the history of the past are kept. No one is petitioning to remove the great pyramids due to the fact that the pharaohs undoubtedly used forced labor. However, these monuments are not ancient, or even historic places. They are recent (majorly in the 20th century) expensive statues meant to change the public dialogue of the war. They are honoring an, at the very minimum, anti-American due to their want to break apart from the union in a physical, militarized way. The leaders, who are mainly the characters represented, should never be respected for leading almost an entire generation of young men to their ugly deaths, against fellow Americans, for the right to abuse humans.
This statue itself actually contains interesting history. It explains the racial sentiments of the state and the college in the early 20th century, and points to an intense need for southerners to rationalize, justify, and change the narrative of the civil war into duty and honor instead of tragic deaths supporting an inhumane system. We need to learn from our history and the stories told about it. Because of this, Silent Sam should be in a museum. There isn't need for him to be obliterated and destroyed. Preserving our history is important.
However, we as a nation need to address the true heroes of our past instead of monumenting and honoring false histories.
