Confederate Monuments in New Orleans - 20151217

The New Orleans City Council voted to take ‘em down today.  The Robert E. Lee circle statue was erected over 130 years ago in 1884.  Slave pens and over fifty human auction sites existed twenty years before that.  According to economist Thomas Piketty the Confederacy had more capital wealth than all of Europe during slavery.  The fear of losing the privilege and wealth endowed from that capital cascades through history in the pale ignorant maintenance of a status quo that was never valid and the obstinate denial and failed vulnerability in pockets of humanity to acknowledge that privilege still exists.   

A fellow New Orleans poet A Scribe Called Quess said to the council, “The symbols are the heart of the matter.  The symbols are the reason why we have a disparity fifty percent unemployment for black men – fifty percent.  They are the seed of the ideology that created the systems that keep us enslaved today.”  Another NOLA poet Kataalyst said, “Today we have come to speak about pieces of art. As an artist I have come to the realization that art is meant to push the boundaries of perception. However these particular pieces do nothing but make stagnate of a perception that has been far long outdated. That perception, human beings of a darker hue are made to be less than.”

Those still trapped in the gray-coated illusions of convenience are quick to suggest absolutism: as if this means the erasure of every cultural symbol someone might find offensive or that too often valid criticism of a cultural rampage of pompous political correctness.  This is not political correctness.  This is attempting to eradicate a visual tax-funded vestige of the greatest sin the world has ever known.  

I am proud the City Council let the people speak before voting.  I am proud of the poets burning a confederate flag on that monument before Charleston and who will continue to raise the beautiful African voice of New Orleans long after.  I flipped on the giant a.m. station to tap in on my drive home to hear what might be another sided reaction.  I heard the bewildered frustration of a receding step-stool grinding down into wood dust.  The what-is-the-point, the latent get-a-job, all-lives-matter mental plug that prevents the empathy to see from a perspective that excludes that step-stool, as if the lowering of Lee’s perch threatened a vantage point, an overlook, and harkens the fear a man like Trump stirs not-so alien to that of a revolt on a plantation when you are the one standing on the wrap-around porch.

James Baldwin wrote, “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”  Martin Luther King said, “On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”  Today was one more step in a journey about getting it right.