People are calling for the removal of a memorial on the UNC campus--in my town, Chapel Hill. "Silent Sam" is an anonymous depiction of a Confederate soldier, an emblem of sorrow and sadness and more likely to be regarded by neo-Nazis as defeatist.
Sam should stand. This push for removal is puritanical and utopian in its thinking--a kind of left-brain lunacy--and is unproductive. Leave it to Democrats to focus on lesser battles, lose all the wars and wring their hands as the world crumbles around us.
It would make more sense to regard the old parts of the UNC campus, the walks, walls and buildings, as a memorial to the black laborers, some of them slaves, who made them. I already do. And let's make it more official in other ways around campus.
I will bet that black people built Sam's pedestal, by the way. How fitting. The South, as an economic whole, stood atop black people forever. Let it be acknowledged. Sam would be on his ass otherwise, as would have been the entire antebellum South.
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