SOUTHERN STATUARY

                                                      TRYING TO FIND THE WORDS

Sometimes you read something that describes what you were thinking but could not quite put into words.  Here's self-described "southern white male" Rhett Mclaughlin writing about the current Confederate statuary controversy:

Revisionist and racist mindset fueled the erecting of Confederate memorials throughout the South. The vast majority of them were built between 1895 and World War I, a time of violent persecution of black people as well as the systemic and government-sanctioned oppression of Jim Crow laws. Some statues were put up during the civil rights movement. Their message was clear: the South belongs to whites.

In light of today’s controversy over these Confederate memorials, I keep hearing people say that their removal is an attempt to erase history. This misses the point entirely. The memorials themselves were an attempt to erase history. If these monuments were about history, we would see statues of slaves being whipped by their owners, black families being torn apart as they were sold to different places, and plantation owners with their black slave mistresses and children. If this was about history and not white supremacy, we’d see a statue of an innocent black man hanging from a tree and a group of happy white people posing for a picture with his lifeless body. This isn’t about history. This is about whitewashing history.

-An excerpt from his article in "Medium" .

And here's one more, from Frank Bruni's NYT column, 8-18-17:

 
Trump’s perverse response to a question that it’s hard to imagine another president being asked: 

Did he place the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., on the same “moral plane” as those who showed up to push back at them?

“I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane,” Trump answered.

Indeed he wasn’t. And if you can’t put anybody on a moral plane, you can’t put yourself on Air Force One.