![]() ![]() Democrats were nearly five times more likely than Republicans (52 percent, compared to 11 percent) to approve of removing the Lee statue. There are also strong partisan divisions in support for the removal of Confederate symbols from public spaces. You can’t erase a history that’s never fully and honestly been told ![]() While there is no doubt that black people disagree with the glorification of Confederate figures as heroes, there is the desire to preserve these monuments as reminders of the US’s stained history of state-sanctioned racial violence - a past that has yet to be reconciled. Interestingly, 40 percent of black people were ambivalent about the statue removal - signaling a complexity of this issue for many. ![]() Lee from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia, compared to only 25 percent of white people. For example, 49 percent of black people polled support removing the statue of Robert E. Not surprisingly, then, one of the strongest predictors of support for Confederate symbol removal is race. Federally enforced desegregation became such a sticking point in the South - which at the time was dominated by the Democratic Party - that it eventually led to the demise of the New Deal coalition. It was under the guise of “states’ rights” that the South sought to preserve institutionalized segregation post-slavery and throughout the civil rights movement. When asked their views of statues of Confederate war heroes, 54 percent of respondents believed they were symbols of Southern pride, compared to just 26 percent of those who believed they were symbols of racism.īut as I discuss in my recent book, ideas and rhetoric surrounding the notion of Southern pride and heritage are not so easily disentangled from race. Take, for instance, a recent Economist/YouGov poll finding that a majority of Americans do not recognize Confederate statues as racist. They have been met with opposition from those who argue that Confederate symbols serve as sources of Southern heritage, devoid of any racial connotation. In an effort to reclaim these spaces, civil rights activists have long pursued the removal of Confederate statues and monuments from public areas, but with relatively little success. These statues serve as reminders that even though the Civil War ended in the Confederacy’s defeat, the societal norms that governed antebellum (and later Jim Crow) race relations still prevail. They provide an ominous reminder that their surrounding space is proprietary to the ideology of white supremacy and racial oppression that led to the Confederate states’ secession from the Union. The bevy of monuments throughout the US that pay homage to the sons and daughters of the Confederacy do much more than celebrate the figures cast in bronze. ![]()
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