Confederate Statues and ‘Our’ History
This is the tradition that the Southern Confederacy embodied and sought to preserve and
that Mr. Trump, inadvertently or not, identifies with by equating the Confederacy with “our history and culture.”
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The great waves of Confederate monument building took place in the 1890s, as the Confederacy was coming to be idealized as the so-called Lost Cause
and the Jim Crow system was being fastened upon the South, and in the 1920s, the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching.
President Trump’s Thursday morning tweet lamenting
that the removal of Confederate statues tears apart “the history and culture of our great country” raises numerous questions, among them: Who is encompassed in that “our”?
Should American nationality be based on shared values, regardless of race, ethnicity
and national origin, or should it rest on “blood and soil,” to quote the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., whom Trump has at least partly embraced?
But the advent of multiracial democracy in the Southern states inspired a wave of terrorist opposition by the Ku Klux Klan
and kindred groups, antecedents of the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.
The very first naturalization law, enacted in 1790 to establish guidelines for how
immigrants could become American citizens, limited the process to “white” persons.
When Mr. Trump identifies statues commemorating Confederate leaders as essential parts of “our” history and culture, he is honoring that dark period.
