Hate Before Heritage: Decoding the Backlash
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Hate Before Heritage: Decoding the Backlash

The reaction to the removal of Confederate monuments has been far from a benign push for historical preservation.

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Hate Before Heritage: Decoding the Backlash
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“"If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, 'leadership' of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in our State."

This is a quote from Mississippi lawmaker Karl Oliver. Not in 1870. Not in 1917.

This rant that very explicitly encouraged lynching took place in 2017.

Oliver apologized after an uproar. However, as with certain historical events, you cannot go back and pretend they were less horrible than they were.

What made this state representative so mad that he yelled for the return of an extremely violent form of social control that is responsible for the murder of thousands? It was the long debated removal of four Confederate war monuments in New Orleans. The removal is part of a larger movement to take away some of the public mementos that cast the antebellum South in a positive light and ignore slavery and white supremacy. A catalyst for this movement was the murder of nine African American parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina by white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof.

Attacks like the one in Charleston made many Southerners realize that it felt a little empty to condemn Roof’s act of terror when advocates for racism and slavery were still being honored with statues and battle flags. The removal of such relics was not an attempt to rewrite history, but an attempt to acknowledge a more honest account of American history.The extreme brutality and oppression of early America must also be recognized.

The social media outrage I saw after this story broke was mixed. A lot of people were raging over what they saw as erasure of history. They were afraid that the contributions of their Southern ancestors, who may not have owned slaves, were being obliterated. They seemed convinced that their lives were becoming 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. Curiously, many of these people applauding Oliver's racially charged rant were relatively silent about events like the Charleston shooting, almost as if the toppling of statues was more egregious to them than African American lives lost.

Here’s the thing. The figures whose monuments were removed were not poor, plucky soldiers interested only in liberty. The removed statues were of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, men who most definitely owned human beings (or at the very least wholeheartedly supported slavery in no uncertain terms). The fourth monument honors the Battle of Liberty Place, where a white supremacist group fought the city’s new police force with African American officers. People claim “heritage not hate”, but these monuments seem to be all about hate.

We residents of the South had better get our priorities straight. Known white supremacist Richard Spencer led protests against the removal of the Lee statue, with other protesters explicitly championing white supremacy in their reasoning. How can anyone claim the defense of these monuments is anything but racist when an influential politician literally called for lynching at the thought of their removal?

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