"THE COSTS OF THE CONFEDERACY"

"we spent months investigating the history and financing of Confederate monuments and sites. Our findings directly contradict the most common justifications for continuing to preserve and sustain these memorials.

First, far from simply being markers of historic events and people, as proponents argue, these memorials were created and funded by Jim Crow governments to pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African-Americans.

Second, contrary to the claim that today’s objections to the monuments are merely the product of contemporary political correctness, they were actively opposed at the time, often by African-Americans, as instruments of white power.

Finally, Confederate monuments aren’t just heirlooms, the artifacts of a bygone era. Instead, American taxpayers are still heavily investing in these tributes today. We have found that, over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments—statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries and cemeteries—and to Confederate heritage organizations."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/costs-confederacy-special-report-180970731/?fbclid=IwAR2VDxpd7P5v_Wms-Ulkw_LWxoPlwD_6D9JzZrg9pabv6ISU3yo6U4ctoTI#oADIdDIAFzjr82Lk.01

The little baby boy in the cover photo. 

I just had this weird cognitive dissonance, like I can't call him a small child, small children don't experience these kinds of psychological assaults. I guess that's the subconscious reasoning that leads people to look at a black child and conclude that they are adult-like. 

But anyway. This nation. Our country is behaving in contradictory and self-defeating ways and should really be seeing a therapist to sort them out. 

FB:  "It’s difficult to imagine that all the Confederate monuments and historic sites dotting the landscape today would have been established if African-Americans had had a say in the matter... In today’s debates about the public display of Confederate symbols, the strong objections of early African-American critics are seldom remembered, perhaps because they had no impact on (white) officeholders at the time. But the urgent black protests of the past now have the ring of prophecy."