I just saw someone today make the argument that pulling down statues was a distraction from the real work of ending racism.
I’m a Southerner, and let me tell you: those aren’t just statues. They’re propaganda. Put up by master propagandists such as the upper-class plantation wives and daughters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
As Kevin Drum and the Southern Poverty Law Center explained here:
No one should think that these statues were meant to be somber postbellum reminders of a brutal war. They were built much later, and most of them were explicitly created to accompany organized and violent efforts to subdue blacks and maintain white supremacy in the South. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a lot of Southerners don’t really understand this, but they should learn. There’s a reason blacks consider these statues to be symbols of bigotry and terror. It’s because they are.
Removing the statues is a very important part of the fight against racism. Not a distraction from it.