covid diary: day 93

He lost his head.

All right, let's talk about those Confederate statues.

All over the country, protesters have been tearing down statues of Confederate generals/heroes/figures. They've also been tearing down (or, in the case of Boston, beheading) statues of Christopher Columbus. Let's take Columbus first, because that one's easy: We. Should. Not. Venerate. Christopher. Columbus. He did not "discover" the Americas. They were already here. There were already people living on both continents, with fully developed cultures and societies. Who discovered what now? Also, Columbus was a complete and utter monster. He ordered the native people to each bring him a quantity of gold every three months, and then he ordered his men to cut the hands off anyone who failed to find enough gold. He was responsible for genocide and slave trades and sex trafficking and mass rape. We should not honor him with statues, or a holiday, or even by remembering his name.

Which brings me to the Confederate statues. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are some 700 (!!!) Confederate monuments in 31 states plus Washington, DC. There were 11 states in the Confederate States of America, so what's with the other 20 and DC? Easy: racism.

Yo, "the boys who wore the gray" were deliberately
perpetuating and enshrining a racist nation.

The vast majority of these monuments were built between the 1890s and the 1950s, well after the end of the Civil War but in the midst of segregation. Jim Crow laws. Black people trying to vote and work and live their lives as equal to white people. There were two huge spikes of monument building, one in the early 1900s and the other in the 1950s and 1960s. So just after Reconstruction and again during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Coincidence? I think not. These monuments to white supremacy were meant to send a clear signal to black people. To venerate the men in charge of their subjugation. To make sure that everyone knew that whites were superior and always would be. To make sure that black people understood that the laws were and always would be created and enforced by white people, and that those laws would ever be designed to advantage white people.

Truer words were never written.

These men were not heroes. They were traitors to their country and (importantly to them and to many modern-day racists) to the god they claim to worship. They were slavers. They were the perpetrators of generations of violence, rape, forced marriage, extreme physical abuse, separation of families, and the buying and selling of people. They should not be honored, just like the men who perpetrated the Holocaust in Germany should not be honored. We should understand what they did, and work to create a system that's designed to advantage the people who need it most, rather than to keep the current power structure.

According to the demonstrators, he "tripped and
fell into the river."

I applaud the protesters tearing these statues down across the country, and even around the world. In Bristol, UK, protesters tore down a statue of a slave trader and threw it in the river. The BBC reports that the statue was pulled out of the harbor and taken to a secure location, where the river mud was cleaned off of it. There are plans to eventually display it in a museum, just as it is today (but without the mud): complete with spray-paint and ropes tied around it. YES BRISTOL. (Other statues in the UK have also been removed, but this one caught my interest.)

And listen, you don't have to believe my little history lesson. Look it up for yourself. Maybe start with the History Channel. Or NPR. Read all about it. I hope you do, because then you'll understand why this MUST change. I hope they're all smashed to pieces and used to line people's driveways or something.

Nationwide cases: 2,036,429. Deaths: 114,195.