An analysis of the Confederate statue crisis

The American Civil War demonstrated just how clearly divided our nation was both culturally and in terms of ideology. In the North, states had a surplus of industry. In the South, farming and agriculture was the way of life. The North was "anti-slavery" while the South was "pro-slavery" and the reasons for this ranged from morals, beliefs, ethics, to economics. The war is remembered throughout history, not as a war that brought together a fractioned nation, but as a war that "finally" ended slavery. However, even more than 150 years after the surrendering of the just newly formed Confederate States of America, our beautiful country is still suffering from some of the same issues that were faced during the Civil War and post-Civil War era.

Racial and cultural tensions and violence spanning across the nation since the South surrendered and came back into the United States has yet to cease despite the Civil Rights Movement and leaders such as Martin Luther King, and President Obama. Now, a new movement has started with the banning of the confederate flag and the tearing down of confederate monuments/statues. With the violence in Virginia, followed by law makers across the south voting to tear down confederate monuments, it's important to make sure we aren't setting ourselves up for more of what we are actually trying to end.

Let's start by asking these questions:

1)These statues honor slave owners. So does that mean we should also remove the statues of our first few presidents who were also slave owners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

2)These statues now serve as a reminder of what this country has been through because of white supremacy and racism. While removing these statues seems like the ideal short term solution to eradicate racism, what happens when you "Sanitize" your history? Why don't we find a way to combining with the statues a way of reminding us that, at one point, we let an blockage of freedoms promised to every American and a violation of clear modern-day human rights cause our nation to divide?

3)Why don't we relocate the statues or make a museum around these statues the same way that Europe has done for Hitler's concentration camps? These wouldn't glorify the cause of the confederacy or slavery. These would emphasis what happens when we fall as a divided nation and when we chose to forget our core values.

4)What is the real motive for the removal of these statues? As Condoleezza Rice argued, when we become ashamed/embarrassed of our history and choose to hide it, bad things happen. We must ask ourselves are we saying that we wish to remove these statues because they possibly represent racism or are we removing them because we feel guilty for what has happened and wish to pretend racism is dead to make "white southern society" feel better? If the answer is the latter of the two, we need to find a better solution.

In conclusion, we as a society must ensure that we chose to find not only a solution, but the proper long term solution to an issue that has been relevant since our founding. The solution cannot be short term anymore. It must educate Americans about the dangers of history repeating itself and demonstrate that hatred, racism, and slavery will never win. It must do all of these without eliminating the history itself.