Every time a statue comes down I hear @EmbryEthan’s voice in my head from Sweet Home Alabama saying “oh you know us southerners, the minute the confederacy died it became memorial”. A rom com understood the idiocy of these things better than the average person in the south.

I never understood the love affair with wealthy racist, physically violent (because racism is violence period), traitors to the United States while somehow conflating it with patriotism. And I grew up with the monuments of it everywhere. We took school field trips to them.

I didn’t learn that the vast majority of them were erected to intimidate and oppress Black people during the civil rights movement until I was in the 4th grade and my Black teacher taught us about this on a school mandated trip to the cyclorama here.

And let’s be clear, I truly believe the only reason we even learned that was because we were in a public school in the city of Atlanta where we had school visits from Andrew Young and @repjohnlewis. If we’d been ANYWHERE else, we wouldn’t have learned that.

A great example of this theory in practice was when I went to see the Butler with two white friends from LA. They both went to public schools there and when the movie opened in the post war south and there were Black people working on a plantation one leaned over and said:

“But I thought Lincoln freed the slaves during the civil war - why are they there?” Which led to a whole conversation afterward about the post war south, reparations never happening, and what sharecropping was. He didn’t learn ANY of it in school. None of it.

By the way - when I moved over to a private school called Woodward Academy the following year I was taught the civil war was more about states rights than anything. This is racist propaganda and shouldn’t be taught to young children.

We have to completely overhaul the way children in America are taught about slavery, the civil war, and the Civil Rights Movement. It should not be relied on having a Black teacher in the cradle of the movement in a public school.