You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

By Caroline Randall Williams



Ms. Williams is a poet.

June 26, 2020

NASHVILLE — <snip> A tough, tough snip.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

<snip>

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

<snip>

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

<snip>



This is an important piece. Its almost rendered to a fraction of what it is by snipping. I've tried to give it justice.