Get rid of ALL of it. Yeah, ALL of it.

Shit is going to get worse before it gets better. And that’s actually a good thing. See, as a whole, Americans have romanticized our history. We like to think of ourselves as a nation that was formed in opposition to oppression. That our forefathers dreamed a dream of freedom and prosperity for all. That those first settlers banded together out of moral outrage.

Hogwash.

When settlers arrived, the land wasn’t “discovered”. It was stolen. There were already “Indians” living on the land. We stole it from them, slaughtered the tribes… many of which have been completely decimated. We brought disease and death to the indigenous people already here, and called it “settling unknown territory”.

We sent ships to Africa to capture, kidnap and steal African men and women, followed by their transportation under inhumane conditions to a land where they were auctioned, bought, sold, beaten, raped, and tortured, as if they were animals. On their backs, with their blood and sweat and tears and lives, “we” built this country.

We celebrate George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays as national holidays. We have etched the faces of these two men, along with Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson into the side of a mountain as a homage to their greatness. The faces of past leaders are on our currency, and more so than perhaps any other nation, money is king in this country.

George Washington was a slave owner. Many of neighbors found him to be one of the harshest slave owners in all of Virginia. It wasn’t until the Revolutionary War, when his life was on the line, that his views on slavery changed and he developed a belief/support for abolition. Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. His “relationship” with Sally Hemings is now public knowledge, and it is romanticized as one of the first “forbidden loves”. But please. Sally did not have any rights or choice as to her involvement in that union. Abraham Lincoln is touted as this heroic figure in American history but the truth is that he was not an abolitionist and did not believe that Black people should have the same rights as Whites. He’s credited for a lot of ideals and actions that he has no right to receive credit for. And Theodore Roosevelt? He was, himself, a White supremacist.

That’s not to say that there are/were no redeeming qualities in these men, nor that they don’t play a significant role in the history of this country. But it spotlights the dilemma that we continue to dance around but never actually address.

If the statues and other commemorations of Confederate leaders are removed, to be perfectly honest, no one with any moral character is going to care. The removal does NOT remove them from our history. As was brilliantly illustrated in a meme I saw on Facebook, Germany doesn’t have any statues or commemorations to Hitler. It doesn’t erase him from their history. This isn’t hard. Seems like common sense, right?

But it’s actually not that simple. If the monuments to the Confederacy are removed, as they should be, it does open up the door to the examination of all of our monuments to our historical leaders. Why is a statue of Robert E. Lee any more or less offensive than monuments and statues dedicated to Washington or Jefferson or Roosevelt? I mean, with respect to slavery, Lincoln will probably always get a pass because he was the POTUS who “freed” the slaves. But the point is that given how this nation was actually created, how do we justify the continued homage to people who were every bit as racist as the Confederates?

And that, my friends, is the problem. We have to finally put our collective big-girl and big-boy underpants on and examine our real history. Not the version that we’ve allowed to be written into history books and cling to like our lives depend on it. The real story… the good, the bad and the ugly. We’re going to need to throw away all those lies we’ve been teaching and lay all of our shit bare.

There’s actually a lot of “stuff” out there regarding this issue. The thing I don’t get… well, to be fair I don’t want to get…is why this is an argument for KEEPING the Confederate shit, instead of it being used as a starting point for the hard conversations that are literally hundreds of years overdue.