Treason in Defense of Slavery Monuments Are Just So Defenseless

While the national attention paid to Confederate nostalgia and its racist symbolism that helps convince people to shoot up historically black churches has faded with unfortunate rapidity, at least some activists are still targeting these sites for attention. In the case of a Raleigh cemetery, people have vandalized 9 Confederate monuments, primarily the graves of Confederate officers. While I’m not exactly approving of vandalism, I did think the outrage from the group running the cemetery over the vandalism a bit precious:

“Cowardly acts like this, under cover of darkness, late at night, aren’t perpetrated by decent and thoughtful citizens. To attack defenseless monuments is indefensible. There is no justification, no matter a person’s feelings, motivations or beliefs,” the cemetery group said in a press release.

Are monuments defenseless? Is this the proper language to describe a monument? And how does this language compare to the defenseless slaves these people fought, not as draftees but as Confederate officers, to continue working to death, raping, and murdering without consequence to themselves? Or what about to the African-Americans during the era of Jim Crow that these monuments and the larger Confederate nostalgia around them were intended to impart fear and white power. I mean, if we are talking about who is defenseless here, let’s at least try to put this in some kind of proper historical consequence. Is it so bad to identify these people as slaveholders for the public to see? Is that some horrible crime?

And given the people who usually are on the board of historical cemeteries, local and state historical societies, historic homes, and other historic sites, we can probably surmise that the people writing this press release support North Carolina’s current attempts to strip the franchise from black voters and also support Confederate nostalgia.