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This thread has been hugely educational about how non-idiots see race relations in America. Thank you to KMC and rallycar-jepsen for having an incredibly polite conversation about an incredibly fraught topic, and to everyone on the Motte for creating a community where they feel safe to have it.
@KMC did indeed come in hot, but to be fair, when confronted with someone who didn't just slot into his preconceived idea of black people, he cooled off and engaged civilly and a good conversation followed. That is the purpose of the Motte: mission accomplished. You seem like you are just trying to go back and reignite things.
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The word is so overused (mostly, it must be said, by the left) that I now treat it as a fnord. I realise I managed to read the OP without noticing it, and had to go back to check that it was there after reading your post.
FWIW, my own opinion is that melting down the statue is a good start, but I would prefer if it was publically blown up on the 4th July with red, white and blue pyrotechnics while a military band played Battle Hymn of the Republic. But I'm not American, so it doesn't matter.
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He admittedly could have done better, but you're probably being just as if not more inflammatory with your description. KMC managed to find his footing and have a civil and productive conversation, you seem to be determine to derail it again.
I'm talking about "a statute glorifying a war over the right to own people "
That's what most of the Confederacy was fighting over. Most of the Union was only fighting over preventing secession. Evidence includes the presence of slave states in the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly excluding those states, and that quote where Lincoln literally said "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it".
It's awesome that the Civil War ended up abolishing chattel slavery in the US anyway, but that seems to have been a final "screw you" aimed at the Confederate slave states and John Wilkes Booth fans, combined with a "we really need to make sure this doesn't get out of hand again" aimed at the Union slave states, not a foreordained victory of steady principles.
That said, there were many awesome people in the Union who were in the fight specifically because of their opposition to slavery ... but admitting that, I have to admit that there were probably people in the Confederacy, and far more people in the South afterward, for whom "Southern pride" was about something other than "the right to own people". Even clearly-not-pro-Southern "The Onion", when trying to speculate about modern root motives of "The South Shall Rise Again" pride, imagined an end state that would "build us a bunch of big, fancy buildins and pave us up a whole mess of roads", not "resume slavery". We had the "General Lee" car in a movie as late as 2005. Was everyone upset because this was an obvious dog whistle from the populous pro-slavery faction of the Hollywood community? Of course not! They were just upset because the movie sucked.
Today we're well down a vicious signaling spiral, and maybe it's too late to stop or unwind that. If your favorite color is blue, and a crazy person says "but only racists like blue!", you're going to laugh and ignore them. But if that goes viral and the most sensitive half of the population decide they don't want to risk any association with racists so they disavow blue ... well, now blue-lovers really do have twice the rate of racism as the rest of the world, don't they? Maybe the 25th through 50th percentile are kind of creeped out by a real correlation, and learn to love green ... and now racism among the holdouts is 4x overrepresented and still rising! Eventually the last remaining people who admit they like blue are either unrepentant racists, stubborn fools, or confused autists. Maybe the remainder are all pathetic by this point, but the last two at least deserve more pity than disdain.
This feels like another doing it exactly backwards moment.
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Your comment made me face the truth that while I don't have objections on principle to people calling for public monuments of general Lee to be torn down and removed, the mere thought of someone vandalizing or destroying a General Lee for political reasons pierces right into my classic-American-car-respecting soul.
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Cool, that's not necessarily what the statue glorifies though.
That's not actually what he said. He said it was glorifying the war fought in an effort to go on owning people, which it is surely is.
I disagree with the sentence as he has written it (so to be clear I likewise disagree that the statue necessarily glorifies the war itself), he's the one that said "Yes, that is what the Civil War was fought over" like it's supposed to be an argument in the conversation.
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