The Washington Post, August 27, 2018: Why some white Americans see racial equality as oppression
Protesters may have toppled “Silent Sam,” a Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week, but the university has vowed to reinstall it. Two hundred miles north, the figure of Gen. Robert E. Lee still stands tall in Charlottesville, even after its potential removal inspired a deadly march by white nationalists last summer. Debates continue to rage over the Confederate memorials littering the nation’s landscape. Shall we topple, relocate, repurpose or reinterpret them — or leave them unchanged?
Protesters know that the vast majority of these statues were Jim Crow-era monuments, intended to celebrate the triumph of white supremacy and to remind African Americans of that triumph decades after the Civil War.
But the roots of these memorials reach even deeper, back to the very moment that a bloody, four-year war ended the legal institution of racial slavery. Vanquished Confederates chose to see the end of black slavery as the beginning of white persecution and victimization. A similar equation animates white-nationalist movements today. Indeed, the problem of Confederate monuments points to a larger, persistent conviction among some white Americans that racial equality brings white oppression in its wake.
