Re: A statue- complete with banjo-pickin slave, honoring a racist songwriter was taken down and white people are calling it reverse racism
Ah. 'Fraid not. A few people pointing things out in an online forum doesn't hold a vigil's candle to a warm body in a line. Have you never been in the presence of a protest or a picket line? Really?
Albuquerque had them frequently due to the rampant police brutality and murders.
'....Whereas a statue which doesn't actively repress anyone today"
Oooooh, mistaken again. What do you think it does to, say, a kid's self-esteem to see a particularly false representation of reality that does considerably more than gesture to an 'overall beneficence of slavery' in a place of honor? History is 'living'; it doesn't tend to die with the individual despite humanity loving to pretend otherwise.
Contrivance much? A kid passing that statue wouldn't have identified with it at all. It's a caricature, and the musician is enjoying himself. It hardly implies the black man will never be anything more than a minstrel singer. Fuck. We live in an era in which blacks work in government at all levels, are represented in all media and entertainment, and admitted to every university out there. When I left teaching in 1986, I went to work on a factory production line, and was paid MORE than my teaching job, alongside blacks and whites, and they largely hadn't even finished high school with decent grades. And that was the deep south.
Poor people pull out of poverty slowly. There were plenty of poor whites working exactly the same jobs, making exactly the same wages. In that small town, people with money live in nice neighborhoods, and the poor live in lesser neighborhoods, of any race. It's economic.
Is the playing field level for blacks in the U.S.? Or Europe? Or Israel? Or the Levant? Or China? No, but it's not the only factor.
I think it’s funny that people are basically claiming that it’s no big deal about a statue but are making a big deal about people having a problem with it.
Hmm.
I did post that it can go away with no impact. It isn't any shrine to dem good ole days for anyone I can imagine. It was a tribute to music of that era.
My objection is that the removal is a tit for tat in the culture wars, and it is falsely promoted as a healing or restorative action, when it is little more than a pointless casualty in the war of words.
There won't be a black kid who goes home and doesn't cry because his world is more fair than the days when the statue was there. There won't be a black kid who believes his world is more accepting because of it.
Instead, it will just foment more friction between the small population of whites who believe blacks are just out to shove them aside, and among the small population of blacks who believe the whites are hoping to get back to the days of The Help.
Sensible people of both races know better. The debate over statues is a proxy for meaningful change. It's more like what Congress does instead of consider actual reform.
Foster's statue can be melted down. It won't affect his music's popularity a whit. It's bygone folk music, so not a part of the mainstream anyway. But it won't help race relations or justice in America, only the opposite.
Raising MLK's statue, even if a lousy likeness, was a great moment for the country. These tiffs over monuments are detours and if they spread to attack things like the Jefferson Memorial, it will be a major mistake strategically. But it won't, as this is only about skirmishes. The breeches painters don't have the temerity to defame the Jefferson Memorial.
