All the holding back for so long attests to the lingering fantasy of the American myth of innocence. As Sarah Churchwell writes, "the fantasy of an America, once populated solely by the racially pure Nordic 'common man' was the Klan's genesis myth", the prelapsarian past to which they hoped to force America to return-by violence if necessary" is still with us today.
And the changes are made permit only if this myth is the entity that is killed. Erased from memory.
The violence of American genocide and enslavement has never been addressed in the way it the Holocaust was and still is, as an on-going way of being that everyone must be vigilant and diligent at conquering or no one is free of it's legacy. The fantasy of white supremacy as more than an ideology; it's an actual reality in the minds of Americans. It's too real, too deep to think it will go away of it's own accord. Miraculously disappear.
And so we have these insidious statues in the US, statues honoring, Americans will tell you, great heroes, of our past. Our past! As if all the people at the gate are riders.
Southern Law Poverty Conference counted them. 1503. Of that number some 718 were monuments and statues. Of that, at the original count, Virginia had 223 statues and monuments, Texas, 178, Florida 61, Mississippi 131, Alabama 107, North Carolina 140, Louisiana 91, Georgia 174. Some are down, thanks to protests. But many are still an eyesore to the victims of conquest and enslavement, a painful reminded everyday that America just doesn't see enough to give a damn.
America refuses to self-reflect on it's entanglement with violence. America wants to go on congratulating itself on the back for bobbing its heads to Black music and applauding the looks and work of Denzel Washington and capital accumulation of Oprah Winfrey while it's law enforcement has a knee on more Black necks than we can keep track of. America wants to believe it's too damn good for the likes of Canada and Europe.
When it comes to really respecting Indigenous people, Black people, Latinx people, America is still enslaved itself by a past it envisions that just chokes the life out of it's collective breathe. It's too entangled with that violent fantasy of white supremacy to even see a way beyond the same old response to anything that challenges it's imaginative ideal of what constitutes human decency.
The "bad hombres" here, terrorists members of Black Lives Matter, and the anti-fascist, anti-black mob contaminating young white American minds into joining them in the destruction of history, our history, white history, must be challenged and eliminated.
Are we back in the year 1776? Or is this the beginning, again, of the Civil War?
We are talking about manifestation of that violent fantasy, these Confederate statues. For the most part, these mainly granite monstrosities taking on more life in the imaginations of white Americans that the African Americans strung up on trees. The granite structures come into being after the Civil War between 1900-1921. In 1901, hundred and five African Americans were lynched. The following year, some eighty-five Black people were lynched, and in 1903, it was eighty four. In 1905, it was fifty seven and sixty two in 1906. In 1908 and 1910, eighty nine and sixty seven, respectively.
As the lynching continued, the massacres grew more frequent. In the East St. Louis Massacres of 1917, two hundred and eighty African Americans were killed, and in Arkansas, it was two hundred killed in 1919. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, more than 300 African Americans were murdered.
Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman, is lynched in Georgia. 1918.
Over 4,000 Black people are lynched between 1882 and 1968.
And there will be no specific date or year in which Americans will note the beginning of a war declared against Blacks. Unless the 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson's 7-1 decision serves the purpose of declaring war against the lives of Black people. Plessy vs Ferguson legalized white supremacy in which there was no room to consider the impurities of Black lives that can't possibly matter!
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