A Few More Thoughts About the Charlottesville Terror Attack

Note: This story originally appeared on my blog on August 17, 2017.

Earlier this week anti-racist activists in North Carolina toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier at a march held on Monday.

The demonstration was one of many held across the country in outcry against the murder of thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, an anti-racism activist, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heyer was counterprotesting a white supremacist protest that was prompted by Charlottesville’s recent decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from public view.

Charlottesville, Virginia is not the only Southern city where the removal of Confederate symbols has prompted protests from white supremacists. Earlier this year in New Orleans, city workers actually disguised themselves while they removed a Confederate statue; the disguises shielded them from attacks by the white supremacists. Now that several other states are moving to abolish Confederate statues from public, white supremacists will most definitely continue with their protests.

Trump, as usual, has once again inflamed passions by saying exactly the wrong thing. After claiming that “many sides” were responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday, Trump denounced white supremacists by name on Monday. Yesterday, however, Trump backtracked yet again and stated that removing Confederate statues was “changing history.”

This statement not only indicates that Trump is still aligned with the white supremacists who elected him into office but is also buying into their “preservation of history” argument.

White supremacists (and many others) who make that argument claim that removing symbols of the vanquished Confederacy does not change the past and the past must be remembered. They also argue that the men who fought for the Confederacy displayed valor and honor in their fight and deserve commemoration for it.

There are two problems with this argument. First, what good are valor and honor if one is using them to commit acts of treason — acts of treason designed to maintain chattel slavery? That’s exactly what those Confederates did when they seceded from the Union, seized federal property in Southern states, and killed tens of thousands of their fellow Americans in the ensuing war. The Rosenburgs were executed for a whole lot less.

Second, why are white men the only people commemorated by these statues? History tells us that African-Americans fought (some willingly, most unwillingly) for the Confederacy. Where are their statues? Slaves, all of whom were black, raised the crops that fed Confederate troops, built fortifications for Southern cities, and worked in weapons factories. Where are their statues?

For that matter, why don’t white women have statues commemorating their contributions to Confederate society? After all, they birthed all of the Confederate soldiers who fought the war. After the war broke out they were the ones who managed the family farms and estates in the absence of their fathers, husbands, and sons. They nursed the wounded and buried the dead. Belle Boyd went so far as to spy for the Confederacy. Several others, disguised as men, actually fought for the Confederacy.

If erecting monuments to heroes of the Confederacy was about history, then the African-Americans and white women who fought for or otherwise supported the Confederacy would also have statues that need to be removed.

They don’t. They never did. And the white male proponents of the Lost Cause — the movement that sought to rewrite the narrative about the South’s underlying motives for seceding from the Union — never intended for those people to have monuments, either. The Lost Cause Movement was never about history. It was nothing more than a romanticization of the antebellum South, a time and place where the rule of white men of a certain class was not even questioned, let alone challenged.

The removal of those signs is a direct slap at white male hegemony proof positive that white men don’t run the whole world anymore. And that is what those white supremacists were protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia last week.