How You Erase History
/As more Confederate statuary comes tumbling down across the South, the most fevered objection I hear is that the activists who want them gone “want to erase our history.”
Where to begin with this.
First, the basic impulse behind removal is precisely the opposite: It’s to restore some balance to our remembered history, to make it complete by correcting a distorted, partial understanding of what came before.
This charge of “erasing history” flatly ignores much of our actual U.S. history and elevates only one aspect of it – the part that isn’t noble and never was. The legacy of enslavement of other peoples, being America’s original sin, has caused the greatest disruptions to our law and civil order and has oppressed the most people.
That’s why maintaining a skewed, one-sided symbolism in our public squares, courthouses, and capitols offends not only the Black Lives Matter activists. It offends me.
The other tired objection to removal rises from the alleged permanence of our public art: That once these physical tributes to Lee, Davis, Forrest, and the rest go up, they must never come down, as if it were sacrilege.
Yes, the bitter-enders say, it’s true that Jeff Davis and General Lee worked hard to overthrow the U.S. government, but they were otherwise fine men. Take Forrest, whose likeness still sits this morning in its bitterly argued place of honor on the vaulted second floor our Tennessee capitol; he was after all a brilliant tactician, they insist, and they believe he was actually kind to the human chattel he owned. (Don’t worry yourself then about all that Ku Klux Klan business, nor with what really happened at Fort Pillow.) So goes their recollection.
The people who believe all that are usually the same folks who insist the Civil War was not about slavery but about the South defending “states’ rights” with its bullets and blood.
Wrong. The Civil War was a war to set humans free, with the South on the wrong side of it. The failed rebellion’s true purpose was to preserve an economic system based on forced farm labor, ignoring the bondage, trafficking, and brutality that sustained it but also blew apart families and ripped up lives.
So remind me, who is trying to erase history? I cannot abide this selective memory that wishes the past were different and less brutal than it was.
If your goal is to erase history, there are more efficient ways to do it than toppling statues. For real instruction in this, look to some current governments. Here are five sure-fire ways to make history go away:
1. Start by cutting school budgets, withholding teachers’ raises to the point they don’t have proper salaries and enough supplies. Make it all but impossible for trained educators to teach our history in full. Make it more likely, in fact, that our best of them will leave the profession.
2. Discard any sustained commitment to the arts and humanities. Ignore how these are the preservers of our history and culture. They will save us, whereas selective memory will not, so be sure to treat arts and humanities education as cost-savings opportunities of first resort, not last.
3. Elect a governor and legislature who will defend the narrowest view, and will move fast to enact dubious priorities of a screwball national administration. Do not be distracted by the views of people who have no power.
4. Divert as much school funding as possible from public to private schools. And when that won’t fly, target the urban school districts with the most to lose – Memphis and Nashville – then try to defy any court that says you cannot.
5. And refuse to have full discussion with open public hearings on hair-brained bills. Don’t answer inconvenient, impertinent questions. This is how narrow-gauged laws get passed, bills that please only the special interests.
At our state capitol today, the powers-that-be have taken much of this anti-history work to a new level of daily practice. Most of the ruling majority get along with each other, dressed in their handsome suits, enjoying the jocularity, never causing commotion for the comfortable. It’s easier that way.
This is how you erase history, not by shoving over a few statues (or even a few hundred) that revere dead generals of a misbegotten, lost cause. They are artifacts and the symbolic reminders of an unbalanced history, not the full one.
They don’t help anybody anymore, and are truthfully the least of our worries now.
© Keel Hunt, 2020
