The Lost Cause, Trumped

I tin remember of only i positive affair to say close the coming out political party for white nationalists that all of us are directly witnessing, in addition to it is this: inwards their ain uniquely nasty way, these people create appear to hold upwards inadvertently helping many Americans gain a clearer-eyed agreement of what the Civil War was about.

Growing upwards inwards Texas—even inwards liberal Austin, inwards the 1980s in addition to 90s—I had to a greater extent than than a few conversations amongst people who argued i or some other of the constellation of revisionist positions that lucifer that the Civil War itself, in addition to the confederate iconography that lingers today, are close something other than a struggle to defend slavery in addition to white supremacy. These arguments were wrong, but they were non necessarily disingenuous. Most people came past times them honestly. Sometimes they learned them inwards school.  Sometimes they picked them upwards from the many conservative politicians inwards this business office of the the world for whom such propositions convey been articles of faith. In 2010, when the Texas board of education, which wields notoriously outsized influence over the entire nation’s textbook market, adopted novel social studies standards, i board fellow member explained that slavery was a “side lawsuit to the Civil War” (which was actually, of course of study he said, close “states’ rights”).  The standards the board adopted that twelvemonth did not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow. It is non terribly surprising that many students got through schoolhouse without gaining whatsoever item agreement of why just nosotros convey confederate monuments across the South, in addition to inwards particular, why so many of them were built inwards the early on twentieth century at Jim Crow’s nativity in addition to the Klan’s zenith.

And so, quite frankly I never expected that the confederate statues that job the principal mall inwards the centre of the academy where I learn (UT Austin) would come upwards down. But a few years ago, the the world underneath them began to shift.  It was, inwards pregnant part, members of the white nationalist fringe who inadvertently caused the shift. After the church building massacre inwards Charleston inwards 2015, the president of UT Austin ordered the removal of the statute of Jefferson Davis that occupied an of import perch inwards front end of the iconic UT Tower. Many at the time, including a committee he had develop to study the question, had urged him to acquire farther in addition to also gild the removal of the other 4 confederate statutes that framed the mall.  He didn’t.  But this week, inwards the wake of the white nationalist horror exhibit inwards Charlottesville, he did.  This morning time the statutes were gone.  (I write close these statutes, in addition to an extremely problematic inscription on a outpouring that directly also seems to hold upwards gone, at the destination of this essay.)

With every horrific nonetheless implausible chant of “blood in addition to soil” (implausible because it is such an obvious European import, similar these marchers’ ancestors—do these people genuinely desire to supply American set down to the people whose ancestors lived on it?), the white nationalist fringe does i useful thing, which is to acquire inwards only a lilliputian harder to deny the racist centre of what the Confederacy was, in addition to is, about.  And so, today I walked through our mall in addition to its now-empty plinths amongst a mixture of surprise, relief, in addition to joy. 

After the jump: photos!


Here are ii of the now-empty plinths on which statutes of confederate leaders stood until this morning.  The inscriptions convey been covered over.

H5N1 tv set reporter came upwards to me every bit I took these pictures. She asked my thought of what had happened.  When I told her, she was disappointed, in addition to said so. “I can’t detect anyone to struggle the other side!” she said. I gently suggested that maybe that was her story. I mean, this is a college campus. If yous desire arguments for keeping the statues, caput a few blocks southward to the province capitol.

Meanwhile, every bit literally the terminal homo standing from this foreign parade of century-old reconciliation iconography, George Washington directly presides over the UT mall alone.