​ASCH: Why a controversial historical fixture remains relevant

Cavalier Daily

OPINIONWe can begin making amends by confronting past



by jacob asch
| Mar 02 2017 | 3 hours ago

















The Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee located in Lee Park Feb. 6. The decision to remove the statue is deeply misguided. Not only is the city spending an estimated $300,000, but it is removing a piece of our country’s past. We should not seek to remove references of our dark past from public spaces, we should instead be forced to confront them.For example, in Michael Moore’s film “Where to Invade Next,” confrontation with a dark past is explored in Germany, where remnants of the Holocaust are still kept in public spaces. Street signs and Nazi-era relics are left intact to remind the citizens of what happened and to ensure they never forget the horrors which occurred. That type of confrontation is needed in our country. The removal of the relics of inconvenient truths from our past, like the removal of references to slavery from textbooks, are akin to the whitewashing of history. By removing the statue from a public place, we are not confronting our past — we are making it so we do not have to at all. Advocating for a confrontation with our past it is not the same as advocating for interpreting these relics as they were originally intended. Rather, there needs to be a new interpretation of what these relics mean in our modern society. Every time we see these emblems of racism and slavery, we should contemplate what we have done as a nation, and think about how we can be a more compassionate country to all of our people. That does not happen when we hide from our past and attempt to change objects of history. We cannot properly address the legacy of racism in this country without reminders of the sins of ...

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