Last sunday, in Brantley, Alabama at Confederate Veterans Memorial Park, hundreds of people decked in Confederate clothing and waving the Confederate flag gathered before the raising of a Confederate soldier monument: A small grave dedicated to an unknown Confederate soldier. This action comes right on the heels of the Charlottesville rally, where scores of white supremacist terrorists protested against the fall of Robert E. Lee’s statue.
If you’ve lived your entire life steeped within the traditional Southern narrative that the Civil War was about States rights and the glory of fighting the Union to preserve the Confederacy, then it will be difficult to understand the tremendous impact that leaving said statues up carries. After all, the Civil War was about a certain kind of States rights: The right to own the bodies of black people. It isn’t often that a country will proudly display monuments of the losing side, of the side that committed atrocious acts of human rights abuse, but it seems like America is one of the great exceptions.
Germany, whose history is much like ours, took a different path in dealing with its own genocide. You won’t find a swastika, Nazi statue or an openly Nazi-sympathizing president, but instead, a set of rigid countermeasures in place to protect the people who have historically been the most in danger. It is a crime to wear a swastika or to say anti-Semitic remarks in public — a far more effective form of what we treasure the most: freedom of speech. By ensuring that criminal charges are applied to extreme racism, it helps to stop people from doing this more often, thus making everyday life, and speaking out, a little easier for minorities. America does not have that system in place. Groups like the Westboro Baptist Church are free to protest at funerals as they please, and Nazis can parade the streets, swastikas and all. The core American values set in place with freedom of speech and freedom of the press ensure that the government will never control the thoughts and opinions of the people, but it comes at a great cost. It is acceptable to display extreme racism and strike fear into the hearts of minority communities. And without much political, social or economic power, people of color are left to carry the burden of ‘growing a thick skin’, to simply ignore racism while simultaneously supporting the first amendment, which historically has been unfairly biased toward privileged white men. Freedom of speech then becomes one-sided and empowers hate groups, instead of dismantling them. It is then our duty to acknowledge that freedom of speech is both vital and complicated, needing reform let it falls into extremes based solely on patriotic and nationalistic pride.
Monuments of human abuse are not freedom of speech nor the grand memories of cherished war glory. They stand to serve as a reminder to African Americans that they have always been treated as second-class citizens in a country that proudly displays it without consequence.
To keep a statue of Robert E. Lee up is to keep that legacy alive. In an era where the president of the United States is unwilling to rebuke those who resort to violent means of furthering their racial agenda, it’s time to acknowledge that we have not yet left the past. If we are so quick to celebrate it, if we are so quick to defend the free speech of white terrorists over the cries of people of color, there is much progress still to be made. And after all, if formerly Nazi Germany could admit its mistakes and function normally without allowing white supremacy to exercise the right to freedom of speech in a way that is incredibly destructive to minority groups, then so can we.
Michael Dawson is a senior majoring in English. His column runs biweekly.
