Melting Down

NOTE [five days later]: I wrote this post partly in response to a commenter from England who kept saying the Confederate statues are beautiful and should be preserved in a museum, for teaching purposes.

I can see the teaching angle, but I can't see statues that communicate such an ugly message as the defense of slavery as beautiful, and her insistence on that without ever saying a word against neo-nazi violence made me wonder where she was really coming from...

The commenter and I couldn't find any common ground, and she has since gone away.
[End of note]

I. Melt 'Em Down, I Say

I fear that by trying to blog in a calm and reasonable voice about race in America and the history of Confederacy monuments, I'm starting to sound like Donald Trump who says "both sides" are to blame.

So let me say clearly:

I cannot fathom putting 1 ounce of resources (money, space, staff) toward housing in a museum statues of people who owned, raped, tortured, and murdered other people––or who, at "best", treated them like valuable livestock––or who, if they didn't do any of that personally, actively supported a culture and a State that did. 
Like Robert E. Lee did.

Especially––especially––if people are carrying ACTUAL NAZI FLAGS––the red ones with the tilted black crosses––and calling for a return of this culture's values... today.

Which they are.

I don't think we Americans need a whole lot more education about how awful slavery is. Or about how Nazis are bad.
I think we need systemic change in how we fund and provide education, health care, and housing.

The vice-mayor of Charlottesville, VA, Wes Bellamy, said:

“It’s not enough to just move a damn statue. . . 
 I think symbols matter. But you move the statue, and then what else? It’s cool to, quote-unquote, move the statues. But don’t try to pacify black folks or people of color.”

The same day [Charlottesville] voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park — a move that white supremacists descended on the city to protest — the City Council did something that got much less publicity. 
It unanimously approved a $4 million spending plan [proposed by the vice-mayor Bellamy] to address racial disparities.
Over the next five years, about $2.5 million is to be used to redevelop public housing; $250,000 will go to expanding a park in a black neighborhood; and $20,000 a year will pay for G.E.D. classes for public housing residents."

Yes! Melt the statues of Confederates down, I say, and put the money toward housing, education, and health care.


[NOTE: I was hot under the collar when I wrote this four days ago. What I truly believe is that the local communities should decide the fate of the statues. If it were me, I'd vote for melting and/or reusing them (could the horses be playground equipment???), but it's really not up to me, a northerner thousands of miles and half a culture away.]

Please stop telling me the statues should be in a museum. I would never suggest to people in former Soviet-ruled nations that they save their statues of Stalin, or to Germans that they give museum space to statues of the SS.

If they choose to do so, that's their choice--but it's not for me to say.

And––I'm not saying this is exactly equivalent (history IS complicated)––I can't imagine telling English people that they should erect high on marble plinths handsome bronze statues of Irish Republican Army bombers (terrorists or freedom fighters) to be argued about in 100 years, the way the United Daughters of the Confederacy a few decades after the Civil War erected the Confederate monuments that we are arguing about now.

Let's give museum space to artists who have not been fully represented instead of more powerful, white, racist men.
Really. They're practically enshrined on every street corner already.

["At least 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy can be found in public spaces across the country."--from "Stonewall Jackson's Great-Great-Grandsons Call for Removal of Confederate Monuments"

"WARREN CHRISTIAN, descendant of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson:

I don’t feel like it should matter too much, you know, how we feel about the statues, but I do understand that it does—it is important to some folks how we feel about it.

And, for example, this statue at the University of North Carolina, when it was put up, the speaker, Julian Carr, who is a prominent local businessman, talked a lot about how the Confederate soldiers were working to save the Anglo-Saxon race.

And then, really kind of disgustingly, at the end of his speech, he bragged about having the—his quotes—"pleasant duty of horsewhipping a black woman in front of a hundred federal soldiers and leaving her clothes in tatters."
So I think the racist and white supremacist intent of these monuments is clear. And I think it’s past time that they’re all removed from the public squares of our country."

...As cities all over the South are realizing now, we are not in need of added context. We are in need of a new context—one in which the statues have been taken down."

II. Slavery Museums

 There are museums about slavery in the United States.
Here: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/01/is-the-whitney-plantation-really-americas-first-slavery-museum/431448

The United States has an excellent museum in Washington D.C., our national capitol, the National Museum of African American History & Culture, run by the Smithsonian.
One of its ten galleries is titled “Slavery and Freedom.”

Their founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch III, says, "The African American experience is the lens through which we understand what it is to be an American."

Maybe we need more?
But many African Americans say they do not want always and only to be seen in terms of slavery. Among other issues, white people can get off on a kind of tragedy porn or "I'm not racist" righteous groove around slavery.

From African American writer Kara Brown's article "I'm So Damn Tired of Slave Movies":

"It’s obvious at this point that Hollywood has a problem with only paying attention to non-white people when they’re playing a stereotype. Their love of the slave movie genre brings this issue out in the worst way. I’m tired of watching black people go through some of the worst pain in human history for entertainment, and I’m tired of white audiences falling over themselves to praise a film that has the courage and honesty to tell such a brutal story. "

III. Indigenous Americans and  News Coverage

As for indigenous people's rights, it's true, white America has screwed American Indians every which way, including giving their issues less press than African American issues and many other issues.

It's not right or fair, no, but some of this is a numbers game--the mainstream press pays more attention to bigger numbers.

6.6 million = The US population of American Indians and Alaska Natives, including those of more than one race, in 2015. 

46.3 million = The US black population, including those of more than one race, in 2015.

Anyone interested in American Indians has to take it on themselves to pay closer attention and to follow Native news specifically.
Luckily, it's online.
One could start... I don't know––here: Native News Online
https://nativenewsonline.net

Still, there's been some international press coverage of Native issues just recently that'd be hard to miss. I posted on this blog, for instance, about the protests against the Dakota Pipeline going through Native lands that mobilized Americans across the county, and which got international coverage.

It's still going on.
"Native Americans Bring Dakota Pipeline Protest To Trump’s Doorstep" March, 2017:


And this June 2017, there was a ton of press coverage of the awful, awful piece of art erected in a museum one (1) mile from where I live. It was dismantled, the New York Times reported in their article, "Dakota People Are Debating Whether to Burn ‘Scaffold’ Fragments ...after Native American groups denounced the insensitivity of the piece in recalling what they regarded as an act of genocide."

Or, you know, just google it, stuff you're curious about.
I just now googled "Charlottesville Sherman Alexie" (read his books!) and found this, A New Poem by Sherman Alexie wrote and posted on FB on August 16, 2017:

Excerpt from "Hymn: A New Poem" by Sherman Alexie

Who will you be? Who will I become
As we gather in this terrible kingdom?

My friends, I'm not quite sure what I should do.
I'm as angry and afraid and disillusioned as you.

But I do know this: I will resist hate. I will resist.
I will stand and sing my love. I will use my fist

To drum and drum my love. I will write and read poems
That offer the warmth and shelter of any good home.

I will sing for people who might not sing for me.
I will sing for people who are not my family.

I will sing honor songs for the unfamilar and new.
I will visit a different church and pray in a different pew.

I will silently sit and carefully listen to new stories
About other people’s tragedies and glories.

I will not assume my pain and joy are better.
I will not claim my people invented gravity or weather.

And, oh, I know I will still feel my rage and rage and rage
But I won’t act like I’m the only person onstage.

I am one more citizen marching against hatred.
Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.

We will march by the millions. We will tremble and grieve.
We will praise and weep and laugh. We will believe.

We will be courageous with our love. We will risk danger
As we sing and sing and sing to welcome strangers.

Read the whole poem: "A New Poem" ©2017, Sherman Alexie