
Where the Bodies Are Buried - laurex
https://www.texasobserver.org/where-the-bodies-are-buried/
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mnm1
People don't want to acknowledge such events because they are not simply
artifacts of the past. Racism and racist violence is going on right now.
Slavery is happening to millions of people in our prisons right now. People
don't want to be reminded of our ugly, despicable history and they especially
don't want to be reminded of our ugly, despicable present. That would make it
harder to continue doing these ugly, despicable things. The people doing these
things and supporting these things do not want to stop. Ever. This is the
heritage that the South (and the country in general) wants to preserve when
they preserve Confederate monuments, a heritage of hate and violence that
continues to this day. More importantly they want to preserve the ability to
continue these atrocities in the present and future. Unlike Germany after the
nazis, Confederate Americans after the civil war did not see their actions,
and later the actions of their ancestors, as the despicable, horrific events
they were. They were just sad they lost the war. That's still the case with
enough of the South now that we have these monuments. If they could bring back
slavery, (outside of prisons where it has been preserved) now, I have no doubt
that would. By vote or by force.

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arcticbull
You're right but it's also much more nuanced than you're making it out to be.
Let me start by saying I don't like confederate statues or flags, because,
well, they were objectively fighting to preserve slavery -- that's what the
whole war was about -- and celebrating that isn't something I think we should
do. The problem is it's personal for so many people who had family on the
wrong side of history. Nobody wants to feel ashamed of their ancestors and
this creates a difficult animosity and almost serves to re-create the hatreds
that started the war in the first place. The pain of removing statues is that
the people on the wrong side of the war would have to admit their ancestors
were bad people, and ask themselves the difficult questions of what that means
about them. There's a reason Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are used
after atrocities: you can either have blame, or have truth, but not both.
Truth is more important if you want something not to happen again. That's
hard, of course. [0]

Regarding slavery in the US, yeah, prison farms are slavery. The constitution
permits slavery explicitly as a punishment for crimes. That's not something I
agree with either but that's just straight-up facts. When you use prison labor
for private company benefit that's beyond the pail and the US gets criticism
for this behavior regularly from the UN ILO. There's no better way to undercut
the wages of hard-working Americans than forcing people to work for free. [1]

Where you run off the rails the the idea that people want slavery back. Nobody
wants that. The establishment has much more nuanced and effective ways of
keeping themselves well-off. IMO they've probably always been after the ends,
not the means.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_\(South_Africa\))

[1] [https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/subjects-covered-by-
int...](https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/subjects-covered-by-
international-labour-standards/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm)

~~~
NotSammyHagar
I'm also from the south and my family probably owned slaves. It is something
we should talk about and acknowledge. I am sure I knew people when I lived
there who would be angry at "making trouble by talking about that time". But
we need to do that, own up that our ancestors did that.

Even if one's ancestors believed in it, it does not mean that you can't have
different views and see the wrongness of historical actions. And of course
there is plenty of racism around today.

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cjohnson318
Thank you for posting this. I grew up in the area and I'd never heard about
this.

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muramira
Thank you so much for posting this.

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bediger4000
This is an interesting, if hard to read, article.

