"Only In America Do We Celebrate Treason"

Skylar Baker-Jordan writes: 

Only in America do we celebrate treason. 

The Confederate States of America – and those who governed and fought for it – were in open rebellion against the United States in order to preserve slavery. 

This is not a matter of debate. It is historic fact. 

What has been debated this week, though, is what to do with the memorials celebrating these white supremacist traitors. 

Neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee, leading to the death of a young woman. 

On Sunday night, a group of activists in Durham, North Carolina took it into their own hands and tore a statue down. 

On Monday, President Trump posited a rhetorical question to the country: if we tear down statues of Lee, will we next tear down statues of Presidents Washington and Jefferson? 

That seems unlikely, even though recasting the context in which we talk of Washington and Jefferson is long overdue. 

Both owned slaves and both were avowed white supremacists. 

But a general who waged open war against the United States? 

That one seems fairly straightforward. We shouldn’t commemorate him at all. 

Thousands of these statues litter the southern landscape from Virginia to Texas, reminding everyone who passes that the south once thought it was perfectly acceptable to buy and sell human beings based on the colour of their skin. 

Those who support retaining the statues insist that they are a necessary part of history, a reminder of an ugly period in our past.

Removing them, they contend, would be tantamount to ignoring or rewriting that history. 

This argument holds no water, though. 

Germany remembers everything the Nazis did without erecting statues to Erwin Rommel. 

Nazi paraphernalia and iconography, when displayed, is done so in museums where historians can provide context to the atrocities committed by Hitler’s regime.

Concentration camps are considered sacred ground, where reverence for those who perished is incumbent upon anyone who visits. 

In America we have weddings on plantations. 

We celebrate the antebellum south as though it was some chivalrous, charming, sophisticated culture instead of acknowledging it for what it was – a brutal slave-holding fiefdom where violence was all that kept its majority black population from rebelling. 

We have to grapple with this history, but statues celebrating Confederate generals or eulogising the “brave boys in grey” don’t do this. 

In fact, the majority of these statues were erected between 1920 and 1970, at a time when the freed black population was being brutally oppressed under Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement sought to change that. 

They were meant to be reminders of just whose country this was. 

That’s the history these statues truly represent, not some Gone with the Wind fantasy that never existed. 

If we want to commemorate this history accurately, then, the statues must fall. 

Put them in a museum where historians can provide context and information about what they represent, why they were erected, and what really happened. 

In their place, erect memorials to the slaves who were tortured and died throughout the south. 

Turn plantations into sacred spaces where Americans can learn about the brutality of slavery, not have a jaunty day out at a slave owner’s mansion. 

Build statues to Abigail Adams, who advocated abolition and women’s suffrage long before it was in vogue. 

Commemorate the union soldiers who died to preserve the union. 

These are the people we should memorialise in our civic religion – not a bunch of racist traitors. 

There’s a difference between celebrating history and learning from it. 

The Confederacy and slave holders generally speaking don’t deserve our reverence. 

Their world is not our world, and thank God for it, because brave women and men defeated them. 

Clinging to these statues says as much about us in 2017 as it does about the people they honour or the folks who erected them.

Those who defend these statues now must reckon with which they’re truly doing – preserving an historic record or celebrating white supremacy.