People don't want to acknowledge such events because they are not simply artifacts of the past. Racism and racist violence is going on right now. Slavery is happening to millions of people in our prisons right now. People don't want to be reminded of our ugly, despicable history and they especially don't want to be reminded of our ugly, despicable present. That would make it harder to continue doing these ugly, despicable things. The people doing these things and supporting these things do not want to stop. Ever. This is the heritage that the South (and the country in general) wants to preserve when they preserve Confederate monuments, a heritage of hate and violence that continues to this day. More importantly they want to preserve the ability to continue these atrocities in the present and future. Unlike Germany after the nazis, Confederate Americans after the civil war did not see their actions, and later the actions of their ancestors, as the despicable, horrific events they were. They were just sad they lost the war. That's still the case with enough of the South now that we have these monuments. If they could bring back slavery, (outside of prisons where it has been preserved) now, I have no doubt that would. By vote or by force.
You're right but it's also much more nuanced than you're making it out to be. Let me start by saying I don't like confederate statues or flags, because, well, they were objectively fighting to preserve slavery -- that's what the whole war was about -- and celebrating that isn't something I think we should do. The problem is it's personal for so many people who had family on the wrong side of history. Nobody wants to feel ashamed of their ancestors and this creates a difficult animosity and almost serves to re-create the hatreds that started the war in the first place. The pain of removing statues is that the people on the wrong side of the war would have to admit their ancestors were bad people, and ask themselves the difficult questions of what that means about them. There's a reason Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are used after atrocities: you can either have blame, or have truth, but not both. Truth is more important if you want something not to happen again. That's hard, of course. [0]
Regarding slavery in the US, yeah, prison farms are slavery. The constitution permits slavery explicitly as a punishment for crimes. That's not something I agree with either but that's just straight-up facts. When you use prison labor for private company benefit that's beyond the pail and the US gets criticism for this behavior regularly from the UN ILO. There's no better way to undercut the wages of hard-working Americans than forcing people to work for free. [1]
Where you run off the rails the the idea that people want slavery back. Nobody wants that. The establishment has much more nuanced and effective ways of keeping themselves well-off. IMO they've probably always been after the ends, not the means.
I'm also from the south and my family probably owned slaves. It is something we should talk about and acknowledge. I am sure I knew people when I lived there who would be angry at "making trouble by talking about that time". But we need to do that, own up that our ancestors did that.
Even if one's ancestors believed in it, it does not mean that you can't have different views and see the wrongness of historical actions. And of course there is plenty of racism around today.
Hi there mnm1! My name is Rose Cahalan and I'm the managing editor at the Texas Observer. May I include your comment on our Dialogue (letters to the editor) page? If so, I just need your name and city/state of residence. You can reach me at cahalan@texasobserver.org. (I'm new to this site and don't see a direct message option.) Thanks so much!
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 37.6 ms ] threadhttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/world/europe/germany-murd...
Regarding slavery in the US, yeah, prison farms are slavery. The constitution permits slavery explicitly as a punishment for crimes. That's not something I agree with either but that's just straight-up facts. When you use prison labor for private company benefit that's beyond the pail and the US gets criticism for this behavior regularly from the UN ILO. There's no better way to undercut the wages of hard-working Americans than forcing people to work for free. [1]
Where you run off the rails the the idea that people want slavery back. Nobody wants that. The establishment has much more nuanced and effective ways of keeping themselves well-off. IMO they've probably always been after the ends, not the means.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commi...
[1] https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/subjects-covered-by-int...
Even if one's ancestors believed in it, it does not mean that you can't have different views and see the wrongness of historical actions. And of course there is plenty of racism around today.