Donald Trump has a point when he asks, with respect to the tearing down of Confederate statues: ‘Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?’.
The reason he has a point is the rationale being advanced by many advocates for removing such monuments: that the individuals depicted were racist or, in some cases, slaveholders. ‘Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the CUNY hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism,’ New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted. ‘Confederate statues are all about racism,’ declares Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, insists that, ‘The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy.’
Well, not the whole point. For it’s more than anti-black racism that inspired the erection of so many statues and monuments memorialising the Confederacy, the vast majority of which were built many decades after slavery was outlawed.
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