![]() And all of this is very fresh in my mind because I had the great pleasure of reading this incredibly masterful biography. A Mount Rushmore towards multi-racial multi-ethnic gender equitable, and there's a complicated story there, American democracy, you would put Frederick Douglass on that Mount Rushmore. If you were to choose one, if you were to choose one to start a new Mount Rushmore. If you could think about a founding father for the nation, that was a founding father who truly captured intellectually and in their life, the vision for a full and equitable just American democracy, Frederick Douglass probably comes closest. But he is a figure of, I think, of singular towering influence and importance in the America we want to be. There should be statutes to him everywhere. And he is one of the greatest American heroes we have. And he saw it clearly 25 years before the civil war. In fact, arguably the greatest American ever, top three, saw very clearly that this must be, that it was the only just at appropriate destiny for the nation to be a true multiracial democracy. I mean, we think here in 2020, we're working towards genuine multiracial democracy and we want a full and equal shared democratic polity across lines of gender, across lines of race and religion and also sexual identity. And so was it with the central conceit of genuine multiracial democracy. In fact, the debate on the floor of the house during the Trail of Tears was about the human rights, they didn't use that term, abomination that Andrew Jackson wanted ordered. It wasn't like Andrew Jackson didn't know he was committing ethnic cleansing. Same thing with Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears. You know, he didn't really realize the indigenous people were human beings who shouldn't have their hands chopped off and shouldn't have 14 year old girls requisitioned in sexual slavery." But the fact of the matter is they're actual contemporary critics of Christopher Columbus is to say that what he's doing on the Island of Hispaniola is an abomination against God. It's the way that we cast back into history and say, "Well, you can't really criticize Christopher Columbus. And often because those statues and monuments reflect who's in power and who's in power often is a lot of people who have not great records on many of the things that we care deeply about.īut one of the great lies that we are told and tell ourselves as Americans is a kind of like, they didn't know better lie. ![]() And all of that has sort of had me thinking about, well, who should we be building more statues to, right? Like all this has been kind of a weirdly negative conversation about the statues and monuments we have. ![]() ![]() But then there's a question of Christopher Columbus, question of Teddy Roosevelt or Washington and Jefferson who of course are founding fathers and also owned slaves and partook in this irredeemable and unforgivable evil system. It seems very clear to me that every Confederate monument in the country should be torn down. And so what we seen in these battles is that these sort of totems and the statues and symbols have real political power and they are often erected as moments of political expression.Īnd there's also been this kind of debate that they have occasioned about which figures should be on which side of the line. as essentially contemporaneous statements of white supremacy and domination over free black citizens. They tend to be erected in the late 19th century into the 1920s and thirties, even sometimes in the wake of Brown v. I mean, it would be a weird thing to do right after you lost. Many of which, if not most of which are actually not erected in the period of the Confederacy or after the civil war. We've seen these protesters in city to city tearing down Confederate monuments. ![]() And there's been a lot of discussion about reckoning with our past, reckoning with our history. Once again, we are here in the quarantine closet, however many weeks we are into the COVID-19 quarantine. Hello and welcome to "Why Is This Happening" with me, your host, Chris Hayes. ![]()
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