Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Rev. Rye]

I suppose removing them from public property will make us feel better about ourselves, but I can't be sure if it will do much else.

I live in Columbia, SC. If you don't think removing an in-your-face symbol of oppression from the public square has enough impact on the people it's intended to intimidate to justify removing it, all I have to say is that my impression from close up is very, very different. No victim of horrendous oppression should have to waste the mental bandwidth it takes to deal with that kind of shit.

I'm sorry to have to go back into this thread, especially since I've spent a lot of time making an ass of myself here, but I have to ask: you did read the rest of that post, right? Thumpalumpacus pointed out that the continued presence of the Confederate statues undermined the ability of minorities to "buy-into" society as a whole. I agreed with the point. However, I also noted that there are also a lot of things undermining that "buy-in," including that the Republican Party does its damnedest to marginalize minorities, and, perhaps more pressingly, that the police can potentially shoot and kill them for spurious reasons, especially if they belong to a minority group; I even mentioned Min's "Fucking Cops" threads as a compilation of examples of this fact.

I even acknowledged that removing them couldn't hurt, and that at least we can have the benefit of feeling better about ourselves for removing relics of a shameful part of our past. And If a community chooses to remove them, I have no real problem. But, let's face it: in the big picture, if we did, there's still a lot of racial issues we have to reckon with; you think racist cops will think more before shooting unarmed black men? Will the Republican Party figure out that it's a shitty thing to gut laws specifically designed to help disenfranchised minorities to exercise their constitutional rights (like, say the Voting Rights Act of 1965)?

In his reply, he said the thing to understand is how insignificant those monuments really are, and he does have a point. Take them down, okay. But the prejudice that spawned them still remains, and still in a concrete form.