First, I’m a white male, so I don’t think my opinion on this will be in the majority or even be correct. There are no easy answers in all this. Still, here’s what I’ve been thinking.
I don’t support taking down the statue and here’s why:
First, as a musician, I can’t get past the fact that all the lady did was sing a couple of songs; in 1939! We didn’t find out that she was a member of the Klan, or that she had attended a lynching in her early years, she just sang some songs. Now, 33 years after her death, she gets retroactively labeled “Kate Smith, the racist”. I just don’t think that’s fair.
The definition of what is or is not racist has been in constant evolution for a very long time and that change has greatly accelerated in the last 20 years. Things that didn’t used to be racist before, are absolutely racist now. They just are. It’s how we manage over time to reduce our society’s ills as best we can. The problem comes when we try to apply our current definition of what is racist to events that happened and people that lived before our lifetimes. By our 2019 definition, most everything was racist in 1939.
But then the real problem starts. If we are going to apply the current definition of “racist” to history, then gee, how many statues are there in Philadelphia? How many of them are of people that we consider to be our “Founding Fathers”? How many of them, ya know, OWNED SLAVES!?
It was George Carlin who observed that America was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. He referred that as “stunningly full of shit”. Do we get rid of all those statues too? Maybe we should, but we ain’t gonna.
Racism offends me, but no more so than hypocrisy.