This issue of taking down Confederate monuments has been brewing for several years, since the tragic murder of nine African-Americans by white supremacist Dylann Roof, in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015.
This act was so revolting to even conservative white southerners as to prompt the Republican governor and legislature to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse.
It then served as the impetus for a larger, regional dialogue about the sanctity of memorials to the Confederacy that are signature monuments in cities and towns all over the South just as, in the North, in our tiny town there are memorials to veterans of the Civil War that are precious to the legacies of local residents.
I grew up with these Confederate monuments in New Orleans. Of the four monuments just removed by the city, two are fairly inconsequential and two can justly be described as iconic.
The statue at Liberty Place, a statue dedicated to a rebellion by certain elements of the white citizenry against an integrated, Reconstruction Era police force, was entirely forgettable and deservedly disdained by most of the citizenry of New Orleans, both white and black.
The statue of Jefferson Davis, while perfectly admirable as a municipal work of art, had no real weight as an iconic landmark in New Orleans and could have been removed with a minimum of controversy among the local citizenry.
On the other hand, the statues of Robert E. Lee, at Lee Circle, and the statue of General P.G.T. Beauregard, at the foot of Esplanade Avenue, are really powerful and iconic works of art. In terms of feng shui, they are strategically placed at locations of indispensable significance.
They're powerful, and they can't be ignored, which is in fact the heart of the problem for many residents of New Orleans.
I have quite a few friends and relatives in New Orleans who are saying that the removal of these monuments is tantamount to the desecration or the rewriting of history. Even my wife, who's an artist, recognizes their artistic significance, and their iconic place in the geography of the city.
Aesthetic merit is one thing. The argument about the desecration of history is another.
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The removal of these monuments from the landscape of New Orleans is not tantamount to the denial of history.
History is not static. History is always being rewritten. In this respect, history is like science. It's always subject to revision.
Unlike science, however, history is also subjective. There are the facts of history. And then, there's our interpretation of the facts and the meaning that we ascribe to it.
The history that I was raised on, popularly known as the Lost Cause, posited that the Civil War was a tragic mistake and that slavery itself was a tragic mistake, but that regardless of the mistake, those who fought the Civil War - from the lowest infantry soldier to the highest generals and leaders of the Confederacy - were men of honor and worthy of veneration.
(Set aside, for the moment, the fact that there is still a whole class of people, such as Dylann Roof, who don't accept that either the Civil War or slavery were mistakes, but believe that they were and still are just causes.)
Honorable or dishonorable. Maybe so, or maybe no.
I'm not a historian, and truth be told, I'm not that interested in passing judgment on the moral rectitude of a Robert E. Lee, or a Jefferson Davis, or a P.G.T. Beauregard.
But I will say plainly that there is no cause for nostalgia for the the system of slavery that was the driving force of the Civil War.
And you can spare me the defense of so called “states' rights,” which consist of nothing other than the right to maintain a system of slavery, wherein an entire class of human beings are considered to be nothing more than beasts of burden.
These statues were, in fact, themselves part of a well-documented revisionist narrative on the part of the post-war South, and a good part of the post-war North as well, unwilling to put the rights of African-Americans above the needs of national reconciliation.
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And thus, we wind up with the tragedy of reconstruction, a narrative that has been brutally butchered in the telling of United States history, in which the aspirations of African- Americans were sacrificed to the cause of Jim Crow segregation, in the late 1800s and for more than half of the 20th century - arguably continuing to the present day.
I suppose that the most lasting impression on me about the removal of these Confederate monuments was that, notwithstanding the protestations of white New Orleanians, most of whom don't actually live in New Orleans anymore, most of the actual residents of the city approved of this action by the mayor and city council.
For sure, the so-called defenders of these monuments do enjoyed a lot of sympathy from expatriates in the surrounding parishes. But many of them came from neighboring states to protest the removal of these statues: Texas, Florida, Mississippi.
There was even one prominent person of color among this cohort, who was notably charged after the fact with possessing an automatic weapon within however many yards of a school zone.
Oops! Sorry.
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If you say that you love this city of New Orleans, you cannot be oblivious to the feelings of Black people in regards to Confederate Monuments.
The city as we know it today was largely created by Black people. The food you love is almost all Black people food, cooked for you, and served to you by Black people. The music you love... it's virtually all Black-people music. The architecture that you admire, all that beautiful ironwork in the French Quarter, was mostly forged by African-Americans.
All of that - it's all due to the love and labors of the descendents of slaves.
If you really want to understand the history of New Orleans, you should take the trouble to see that history through the eyes of those who created this city that you profess to love.
Those Confederate monuments that my white friends and family have venerated all their lifes, that iconic landscape that's like a mother to you, is not like a mother to them. If you have Black friends, as you might say, take the trouble to ask them, “What do those statues mean to you?”
If you are a white person, you should not be surprised that for the Black majority of New Orleanians, this history does not mean to them what it means for you.
You need to realize this: History is subjective. History is not static. History is not simply the past. It's not irrevocable.
You can't change the past.
But you can rewrite history.