Silent Sam Confederate Memorial on UNC Campus, Pulled Down
Protests turned to destruction on the campus of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as the much fought over “Silent Sam” confederate memorial fell from its pedestal on the campus grounds.
More than 200 protesters first gathered at the Peace and Justice Plaza at about 7 p.m., before marching to the base of the statue, calling for its removal. By 9:30 p.m., the statue was on the ground and the crowd erupted in cheers.
Chancellor Folt released a statement about the toppling:
A message from Chancellor Folt on the Confederate Monument: https://t.co/Qp42b6410P pic.twitter.com/T3HoBCEfXw
— UNC-Chapel Hill (@UNC) August 21, 2018
“Silent Sam” had been standing on the UNC campus since 1913.
Gov. Roy Cooper issued a statement Monday night, saying that he “understands that many people are frustrated by the pace of change and he shares their frustration, but violent destruction of public property has no place in our communities.”
Protesters first sectioned off the area around the controversial statue with large banners, blocking it from view. Throughout the course of the evening, people in the crowd speculated about what might be going on behind the banners, but no one confessed to knowing the plan.
People chanted “stand up, fight back” and “hey, hey, ho, ho, this racist statue has got to go.” Many also held signs.
WRAL’s Candace Sweat said she saw a rope that was connected to something behind the banners, and that she heard a creak before the statue came down.At one point, there were tense moments between protesters and police officers. Protesters deployed smoke canisters.
One person was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and for concealing one’s face during a public rally.Around 9 p.m., protesters left the base of “Silent Sam” and marched to Franklin Street, where they formed a large circle in the street, briefly blocking the intersection of Franklin and Columbia.
The moment #SilentSam came down. #UNC #wral pic.twitter.com/wR3PW2ZRkd
— Candace Sweat (@WRALCandace) August 21, 2018
Protests had been touchy with the police and campus officials all day leading up to the statue’s fall.
Brief altercation. Police asked protesters to remove bandanas from their faces. After a handful refused, this is how it escalated. #wral pic.twitter.com/obhxi6Ez6B
— Candace Sweat (@WRALCandace) August 21, 2018
Clearly, the debate and protests over monuments isn’t going away anytime soon.
Louisville is in the process of removing our last two Confederate-linked statues. They are (probably) going to be moved to the Confederate section of our largest cemetery. Seems like the best option at this point.Report
Seems about right. NC passed a law making the decisions the pervue of a Governor’s commission to try and get it out of municipalities and cool things off. Obviously wasn’t fast enough for these folks on what was the first day of class at Chapel Hill.Report
I can’t help but wonder what will be next after the Civil War statues. There are a lot of other bastards out there that have statues.Report
I think one way of drawing the line would be, “Is your statue here because of something great you did while also being a bastard on the side, or is it primarily because of something awful you did?”
So, for example, every POTUS gets a pass even though most of them have their fingerprints on terrible things.Report
Yeah I think this is a good way of drawing the line.
I also think when we get down to it, the way we decide to allocate public property and money to monuments, statues, and the like, is always going to be a political decision. And the pro-Confederate monument case is absolute garbage.Report
I’m not sure how that was supposed to “cool things off”.
Like, weren’t the municipalities trying to take the statues down, and the NC lege was trying to stop it?Report
Exactly. Its the same interference of conservative state legislatures perform when liberal cities try to do anything liberal. This can be anything from trying to pull down Confederate statutes to increasing funding on public transportation. While municipalities are creations of the state, many conservative legislatures have a tendency to impose colonial rule when they want to.Report
Good.Report
Cosign.Report
I can’t approve of the vandalism, but I also can’t fail to see the foot-dragging that’s going on concerning removal.
I just don’t understand the love that some people devote to these statues, to this vision of the Confederacy as somehow pure and noble, worthy nostalgia — and thus, its warriors worthy of honor and remembrance.
The explanation “they love white supremacy” doesn’t feel right or adequate to me. When I talk about this with statue-supporters, there’s obviously much more to it than that, and ready enough acknowledgement that slavery was a smudge on the honor of the Confederacy. I can respond that it was quite a bit more than a smudge, but then I wind up with slogans about “not erasing history.”
In any event, the fewer of these statues that stand in places of high visibility and public honor, the happier I’ll be.Report
More often than anything it’s nostalgia. Take myself for example. To my knowledge I have no ancestors that fought for the grays, and Kentucky was a border state. I don’t have any affinity for the cause, whether it be retaining the institution of slavery or a more generic ‘states’ rights’. Culturally I am much closer to being a Midwesterner. My favorite part of the country is roughly the northeast. I don’t even like the climate of the southeast. With all of that said, I still identify as a Southerner because there are many aspects of contemporary Southern culture that I love (food, hunting, etc). So I find myself wistful not for the Confederacy but using it as a surrogate for a vague ‘Southern Pride’. We really do need a new symbol, but opinions vary on what that should look like.Report
Two reactions:
1. Isn’t that the problem, though. For a certain range of skin tones, the flag has been used as a proxy for that sort of hazy southern pride. But it’s a really awful symbol for that if you’re trying to include a pretty large chunk of the people who live there. Given this, the insistence upon the hazy-pride point seems illogical in the face of some specific and meritiorious objections.
2. I thought there already was a new symbol.Report
1) It’s absolutely a problem. The best solution I have heard is a solid background with a biscuit on it. I can get on-board with that.
2) GrossReport
You can’t persuade anyone that their culture isn’t honorable, if you’re on the outside. The harder you try, the worse you look in their eyes.Report
The problem is that defining racism and white supremacy seems to always have an awfully high bar to pass. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with a broad definition of racism because it challenges their biographies and advantages. White Supremacy needs to be more than being a Nazi or a Klansmen or one of the Unite the Right types. A person can see all those types as vulgar losers but still be really uncomfortable at the idea of living next to a minority family in their suburb or admitting one to their country club.
There is still too much soft-peddling of the Civil War in our education system. We need teach it for what it is. The Civil War was treason in defense of slavery. The whole idea of Southern honor (or old-school honor in general) should probably go the way of the Dodo. I don’t care for explanations Scots-Irish leave me alone heritage or former Cavalier glory.
I do like it when Erik Loomis on LGM describes Arlington Cemetery as “Land confiscated from the Traitor Lee.”Report
Coming up with a common working definition of racism is very hard. Just as one side seeks to giving racism the most narrow and strict definition possible so that very few people or actions constitute racism, the other side wants a very broad definition so that nearly everything done by the other side can be seen as racist. This is all so that people can get the policy solutions hard.
The people calling for a broad definition of racism are not always consistent on this subject. Many on the Left might want to have racism defined against people of color to include systematic racism but they bristle at how many Jews define anti-Semitism because they believe it hinders their ability to bash Zionism and Israel as white settler colonialism rather than as Jewish self-determination. Many on the Left want anti-Semitism to only mean a White Person with a swastika tattooed in the middle of their forehead ranting about Jews. They do not want to acknowledge anti-Semitism on their side of the aisle or among people they are sympathetic to.Report
I never said it would be easy. It might be impossible. But there needs to be something more than giving in to the narrowest possible definition.Report
common working definition
“Working” seems to be the interesting thought in there.
There are 4 or 5 definitions of “racism” and I’ve noticed that conversations about racism seem to wander through the 4 or 5 different definitions without noting that, yes, they’re talking about definition 2 now and not definition 4 anymore.
(And then there’s the trick of “that’s not ‘racism’! That’s ‘bigotry’!” as if the original point is significantly weakened by the distinction being made.)
Anyway, if it becomes obvious that the point is to create a definition that only “works” when one of the sides of the debate uses it and it stops working the second someone else picks it up, the moral force of the term is severely lessened.
(See, for example, “Privilege”.)Report
Wouldn’t it make sense to hear what black and brown people themselves think it is?
Maybe it is so mysterious a concept because those of us discussing it don’t actually experience it. However well meaning we try to be, I certainly don’t know what it is like to be black in America, or what it is like to have to sit my son down and have The Talk with him.
It is always a risk, for us liberals as well, to resolve these things in ways that make us feel comfortable and unchallenged.Report
Sure. If they’re not here to give their viewpoint, who do we pick to speak on their behalf in their absence?
Personally, I think it’s of interest to look at the local make-up of the schools in which people send their children or of the demographics of their zip codes.
Usually I get told that I’m taking stuff out of context and that I’m not seeing the big picture or that zip codes don’t really correlate to anything and we should go back to listening to the loudest of the Loraxes demanding to speak on the behalf of the brown and the black people.Report
Proposing we ignore the Lorax is an… odd… rhetorical choice.
What work is the zip code analysis supposed to do? Is the idea that if an area is white enough, then any minority living there should just suck it up and not complain about Forrest High?Report
Well, if there aren’t any trees around, I suppose you need someone to be a Lorax on their behalf.
That’s all you need to do to be one, right? Show up?Report
I’m either not understanding you, or you aren’t remembering the story.
The Lorax was there from day 1 when there was a forest. And sometimes people do benefit from help being heard.Report
Oh, well. Could *I* speak on behalf of People of Color, then?
Personally, I think it’d be presumptuous of me.
As such I tend to project and think it’s presumptuous of others.
Should I stop doing that and listen up when a Person of Pallor starts telling me that they’re speaking on behalf of People of Color?
Maybe I’ve been going about this all wrong!Report
TNC has written extensively about the black experience in America. Lots of other black writers have too. White people quote other white people all the time. Does something prevent you from quoting black people?Report
Oh, I’ve no problem doing that. Sounds good.Report
Why can’t we take their word for it?
The main thrust of black authors and commentators is that black folks experience disdain and contempt from white people.
The white community responds by trying to prove, via a blizzard of charts and graphs and statistical regression analyses that it either doesn’t happen, couldn’t happen, or if it does happen, isn’t so bad and is probably deserved.
Yet some white people complain about being treated with contempt, and it provokes a national spasm of handwringing and soul searching, with the automatic assumption we can take these people at their word.Report
What’s the old expression? America is a center-white nation.Report
For this to work you have to both be ready to stigmatize mostly powerless people well-beyond what they deserve over problems they mostly don’t have much control over. You also have to believe this will change their opinions or behavior in a positive way as opposed to just robbing the term of meaning. I see little hope in that, especially when our modern race problems are tied up in race neutral policies with disparate impact and socio-economic issues that have as much to do with poverty as skin color.Report
While I understand the argument in principle, in practice it seems to let a lot of very powerful bad actors off the hook in the name of not stigmatizing a bunch of actors who are, for the most part, not quite so powerless as all that.
This itself raises the sort of symmetric problem, where people start dismissing the charge that they’re too eager to call out racism on account of being told that in response to calling out really blatant racism.
I don’t see a way around this without something like a common definition.Report
I see it as a matter of whats constructive and what isn’t. I don’t really know that it’s possible to compromise with a committed member of the KKK or some similar movement whose adherents really believe other races are inherently inferior and the government should use force to empower white people over others. The good news is there aren’t many people like that, and those groups, while capable of some very small evil, don’t pose a meaningful threat to those they hate in any broad sense.
On the other hand, you look at things like school districting, and quality of public services, and unemployment, that disproportionately impact (some) minority groups in negative ways and deprive them from the full benefits of citizenship. These are really complicated problems with legitimate conflicting interests. Yea I think it’d be naive to believe there’s no racist biases in the mix. What I don’t see is how it helps to equate everyone who supports some policy or another with a disproportionate impact on minorities or who harbors an irrational fear of the other with dyed in the whool hate groups. If anything that approach seems more likely to be an impediment to progress.
There’s never going to be some great awakening where everyone is suddenly on exactly the same page with respect to what is and isn’t racist. We’ve done a halfway decent job of banishing the de jure and really overt stuff (I know some people disagree with this, I say read a history book). The current job is hard and messy and we operate in a political system designed to frustrate power. It’s frustrating and lacks the appeal of the righteous prevailing in total victory but thats the path forward. I don’t think hunting for klansmen and hidden agendas and parsing statements for signs of racism will ultimately serve the purpose of getting more excluded people to the table of full and equal citizenship, which to me is the goal.Report
Right, but in order for constructive things to happen, you need to have a pretty wide range of people on board. Including ones who see stuff as being pretty damn racist—even overtly racist—even when it’s being perpetrated and advanced by people who aren’t bearing Tiki torches or bearing swastika tattoos.
For instance, the majority of the people who defend keeping Confederate statuary do none of those things, but given the history of that statuary, people complaining that it’s white supremacist are IMO 100%, unambiguously right. And you don’t exactly have to closely parse the statements of a Steve King or a Tucker Carlson to detect racism.
So I’m pretty sure you need a definition of “white supremacism” that includes more things than just Klansman, while you may also need a definition that stops short of including multi-factorial public policy clusterfucks that are facially race neutral and generations in the making.
Or else the same non-constructive conversation will continue.Report
Well FWIW, while I don’t love the way this was done I do think it’s time to retire Confederate monuments from the public square to museums, and I don’t think state legislatures should impede municipalities that want to do that.Report
I don’t approve of vigilante justice, but, sometimes, the culture just isn’t getting stuff done.
In those cases, you can’t help but root for the vigilantes.Report
WAIT OH CRAP WHY IS THE OTHER SIDE USING VIGILANTESReport
Yeah we wouldn’t have nazi’s marching in the streets now if civil rights protesters hadn’t opened up that tactic in the 50’s.Report
Here’s a video of Portland Antifa beating up a Bernie Supporter because the Bernie Supporter was carrying an American Flag.
Hey. You can’t make an omelette.Report
…Which we will now be told is proof that “the Left” is violent and hates America.Report
Already done. Jaybird just did.Report
It’s not about whether a given act is right or wrong.
It’s about who gets the “WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY!” speech and who gets the “well, you have to understand…” treatment.
Kto kogo?Report
Except that whether a given act is right is key to what sort of treatment it is answered with.
As is, of course, the actual act.Report
So it’s all about who gets a bombastic speech!? Are you writing a Michael Bay movie?Report
I mean, if we’re talking about AntiFa instead of the whole left half of the political spectrum…they often are and kind of do.Report
What I object to in that sort of discussion is the nutpicking, the conflation of the radical fringe to the whole.
I don’t imagine all conservatives are Klansmen. Similarly, not all liberals are Antifa. Yet again and again I hear “The Left” described in broad sweeping terms using these radical few as the purported exemplars.Report
When you do it, it’s nutpicking.
When I do it, it’s pointing out how the most troublesome aspects of the entire philosophy, when taken to their logical conclusion, result in this sort of extremism that is representative of the group at large.Report
i.e. “nutpicking”
That’s a separate assertion that you should probably support with more than “because I said so”.Report
That’s a separate assertion that you should probably support with more than “because I said so”.
Why are you defending them?Report
Wait, who’s “them” now? I’m so confused. I thought I was attacking them and defending those other ones.Report
Whomever you wish to put at the end of your #NotAll hashtag du jour when you see an indefensible act (rather than condemning the acts in question).Report
When I do it, it’s pointing out how the most troublesome aspects of the entire philosophy, when taken to their logical conclusion, result in this sort of extremism that is representative of the group at large.
Which is just nutpicking whether you realize it or not.
Remember the Vector Theory? You just defended it.Report
Actually, when I do it, it’s a tweet from the President of these United States. Or a senator. Or the leader of the house. Or a governor. Or, if I actually veer into nutpicking, a lesser GOP elected official.
The reverse is so rarely true.Report
@burt-likko
To quote a former OTer, “they hate the left more than they love liberty.”Report
@saul-degraw I think at this point you might ask that former OTer if you can have the quote for yourself, because you’ve used it a lot more times than he ever has.Report
You have proven that some Antifa are dopes. A contention i would never have argued against.Report
I love the “some” in there.Report
But once we start with dope antifa beats someone for carrying an American flag, how do we find the clear diving line that will stop us before we reach dope Alt-Rightist runs car over someone?Report
Or what about an antifa guitar that literally *kills* fascists? Are we OK with that?
We were so innocent then.Report
I think Antifa’s mission is a lot like like Mayor Daley’s police force: they don’t create disorder, they preserve disorder.Report
The mission and reaction here seems to be “OMG we have a random incident of violence from an Antifa guy. They are huge and taking over the Democratic Party. Anyday now Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are going to make the signal. Democratic politicians will put on ski masks, reveal their AKs, take over Congress, and announce the total abolition of private property.
Meanwhile it is always the one lone alt-righter running people over with cars.
First paragraph is sarcastic obviously.Report
The only reason antifa are resorting to violence is the conservative elites have ignored their pain and anxiety, and treated their culture with dismissive contempt.
No one from Fox News has ever interviewed an antifa member at Panera Bread, or given them a guest spot on a talk show.Report
+100Report
Aside from an illustration of why I’m uneasy with self-appointed antifa groups (though this particular antifa group seems to be well above average in terms of the idiocy and excessive zeal of its members), I am delighted at this aspect of the article:
Report
Isn’t that “R. Danielle Outlaw”?Report
Yeah..that’ll work out well.
When the vigilantes come for something and the counter protesters are there and they defend themselves after being attacked and someone dies. Welp, don’t matter who died, those committing the underlying crime are charged with murder–or will they. Then folks will realize that the State may or may not have their back. Oh yes, that’ll improve things if a bunch of protesters who legally can be charged with murder ending up walking. That’ll calm down things.Report
And now the dipshits running UNC are saying they’re going to put the statue back up.Report