The New Jersey Star Ledger today had a brilliant front page headline “Booker: Rid D.C. of ‘painful’ statues”.
I think ‘painful statues’ frames the issue perfectly. It conveys that these statues are a source of pain to people of color. It conveys that it is sick and sadistic to wish to preserve these statues.
Anyone who wants to keep these statues on prominent display outdoors in public spaces should recognize that they are inflicting pain. If they don’t care then they are un-Christian. And if they enjoy inflicting this pain, they are flat out sadists.
Bill Moyers last night interviewed on MSNBC by Lawrence O’Donnell absolutely nailed it when he said the statues should be removed to museums. Where they should be presented as part of a shameful past that inflicted great pain on the nation, a past that caused hundreds of thousand of deaths and millions of crippling injuries in the Civil War, and a deeply immoral past enshrined by laws that treated millions of people as less than fully human.