Why I Agree With Removing Confederate Statues

I agree with removing statues of/monuments to Confederate generals (and others like them) from prominent public places for the following reasons:

1. I am against spending taxpayer money to put statues up in the first place. If individuals want to spend their own money to erect statues on their own property, by all means go for it. Public money should be spent on more important things than effigies.

2. Given that the taxpayer money to erect these statues has already been spent, perhaps it would seem odd that I am willing to allow more taxpayer money to be spent to take them down. But in the vast majority of cases, the decisions to remove these statues from public prominence are being at the most local municipal levels, not top down from the state or even federal levels. I'm okay with local leaders making such decisions, and in fact would even expand that to local leaders deciding to remove ANY monument, statue, plaque or whatever – in fact, those sorts of things are precisely what city councils are for, and I would much prefer they spend their time arguing about such decisions than instituting new fines, fees, ordinances or paperwork that stifles the local economy. If the local populace doesn't like it, they can vote someone else in office to put the statues back up. In the case of the recently notorious Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, the city council voted for removal after appointing an independent commission to investigate issues related to public monuments/parks and race relations (and it should be noted that the commission voted to KEEP a monument of Stonewall Jackson elsewhere in the city). Since these decisions are being made at the most local level, where individuals have the most influence, I am fine with those choices. You can see a list of the dozens of Confederate monuments being taken down around the country.

3. Taking down a statue is not the same as rewriting history. The historical facts remain unchanged; however, our interpretations of those facts and their relevance for our lives today is changing and will continue to change. We don't have statues of Hitler publicly displayed, and yet we remember the horrors of World War II readily enough. Yes, there are some Holocaust deniers, but that is a very small number of people. At any rate, to think that our remembrance of history depends on a particular statue – or even a set of statues – which most of us have never even seen, being displayed prominently in some city most of us have never even visited, is ridiculous on its face.

4. I'm as open to a good slippery slope argument as anyone, but I don't buy it in this case. People like Robert E. Lee are only famous because they led a rebellion against the United States primarily in support of slavery, not "states rights" or any other issue. (I'm happy to debate anyone on that particular issue – I did my final paper in my argumentation and debate class in undergraduate school on Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and I am well versed in the rhetoric of the pro-slavery arguments being made at the time.) Some people have argued that we will next be taking down statues/monuments to presidents like Washington and Jefferson, because they owned slaves. However, unlike the statues memorializing Confederate generals, the statues of many of our founding fathers/presidents have nothing to do with their slaveholding, but rather with the many great things they did during their civic service. While there might be a handful of people out there who call for statues of those individuals to be taken down, I don't foresee that becoming a hugely popular movement. Even so, it is possible to be more nuanced than having an "all or nothing" stance; it is not hypocritical or inconsistent to be fine with removing the statues of Confederate generals, while opposing the removal of statues of people like Washington or Jefferson. For a better formulated version of this argument, read Ilya Somin's article at the Washington Post.

5. My understanding is that many of the statues are not being disposed of or destroyed, but simply being moved to less prominent places. In the particular case of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, the city council voted to sell it – if the group of racists who protested the statue's removal had spent their time raising funds rather than hitting people with cars, they could have bought it and stuck it wherever they wanted (on their own private land). This seems to me like the most reasonable thing to have done, but of course people are often irrational, and instead they chose to throw a public hissy fit that erupted in violence.

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