German students spend a part of each year studying the horrors of Nazi Germany. All students must visit at least one former concentration camp to be reminded that the stories of the Holocaust were not only real but happened nearby. [http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article29557972.html).
We do nothing like this.
Nazi symbols were outlawed in Germany. Even the use of Nazi symbols for anti-Nazi purposes has been deemed intolerable. A German judge, ruling against the use of Nazi symbols in anti-Nazi paraphernalia, stated: "
The danger of familiarization is ever present."[http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/24/germany_banned_its_ugly_historic_symbols_should_we_do_that_too.html]
We do nothing like this.
Instead, in the U.S., symbols of the Confederacy remain and serve every day as the visual rallying cry for white supremacy and racism. They are shielded by our blessed First Amendment. They are so familiar that most people accept them as
innocuous and
normal. We are the victims of that familiarization the German judge warned about. In fact, we are so brain-washed that most of us don't even recognize it.
There is more.
There was virtually no accountability for Confederate Civil War leaders. Reconstruction was short lived and followed by the rise of the KKK, Jim Crow segregation, and now mass incarceration. An alternative history was constructed, whereby the Civil War is unrelated to slavery, unrelated to treason. Confederate generals became and remain martyrs for the "lost cause." After the war, Confederate officials and generals, perpetrators of the treason, were permitted to resume their lives, and amnesty and pardon policies were issued before the 1860s ended. There were no trials for treason. Compensation was ultimately provided for the Lee family for the plantation that had been seized and converted to Arlington National Cemetery. A building at West Point bears Lee's name. Those are only a few examples.
Our history is not just about the inhumane horrors of slavery. It is also about genocide. Systematic. State-sanctioned. Genocide. A portrait of Andrew Jackson, the President most cravenly associated with the Indian Removal Act and its resultant genocide, now resides on our $20 bill and, since January 2017, hangs on the wall in the Oval Office in the White House. Manifest destiny, which robbed indigenous peoples of their lands and lives, was perpetrated under the Stars and Stripes.
We have yet to own either of the original sins of the United States: slavery (and its associated racism) or genocide. Public policies continue to support racism and generate or sustain racist outcomes; treaties with Native American tribes continue to be broken. Manifest destiny is alive and well but has extended beyond its original Atlantic-Pacific reach to encompass the world.
All these thoughts came rushing in as a result of the weekend's deadly march in Charlottesville. Let us not forget its purpose: preservation of Confederate iconography and white supremacy through terror.
Isn't it ironic that the torch-lit march ended at the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Virginia campus? Or was it irony? Can something so fitting be called irony?
In our history lessons, Thomas Jefferson is venerated as Founding Father, author of stirring words in the Declaration of Independence, father of the University of Virginia, President. But Thomas Jefferson never lived those stirring words he wrote, that "all men are created equal." He was a slaveholder. He was a rapist. In politics, he demonstrated repeatedly his willingness to win at any and all costs. He was a liar. He was a hypocrite.
Slavery, genocide, founding fathers who raped their slaves. This is not the history we are taught. We do not own our history. And we continue to pay the price for it.
