charlottesville antics

[fat lesbian]

statues and monuments will always be portrayed as a positive thing, that's the nature of them. i don't think they need to be kept even in museums or galleries. i DO think that history books and public education needs a serious overhaul with how it handles the atrocities of american history, it needs to portray them as atrocities and not just products of their time, and then we have no need to preserve it in the form of monuments to terrible men whose names, for the most part, do need to be lost to history.

I disagree heavily. These men should be remembered, to learn from their mistakes. To erase them from history would be to assume that the horrible things they did, did not exist in the first place. 

Can you tell me exactly what you mean as "portray them as atrocities" part? I remember the trail of tears, slavery, (japanese-internment camps were talked about for a day in middle school, I thought I should note that too) and the holocaust taking up a major part of what was taught about history in my school.

i think that for the same reason we shouldn't publicize the names of mass murderers and terrorists, we shouldn't publicize the names of evil historical figures. it causes people to focus in on the men themselves and not what they did and not their victims. their mistakes should be taught but their names and their lives? not so much 

in my experience and a few other people that i know (idk how common this is) things are glossed over. kind of a "the natives sold the english the land and everyone got along but the natives got sick and died :(", the narrative that slaves were treated well and were grateful to work, and the holocaust was targeting people with brown hair and brown eyes. 

BUT to be fair i went to a very poor district and our materials were all severely outdated