Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 3: Yes, Confederate monuments are about politics and white racism

For today's entry, I want to call attention to this piece by Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Essler, The Costs of the Confederacy Smithsonian Magazine Dec 2018:

To address [the issue of Confederate monuments] issue in a new way, we spent months investigating the history and financing of Confederate monuments and sites. Our findings directly contradict the most common justifications for continuing to preserve and sustain these memorials.

First, far from simply being markers of historic events and people, as proponents argue, these memorials were created and funded by Jim Crow governments to pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African-Americans.

Second, contrary to the claim that today’s objections to the monuments are merely the product of contemporary political correctness, they were actively opposed at the time, often by African-Americans, as instruments of white power.

Finally, Confederate monuments aren’t just heirlooms, the artifacts of a bygone era. Instead, American taxpayers are still heavily investing in these tributes today. We have found that, over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments—statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries and cemeteries—and to Confederate heritage organizations. [my emphasis]

The article discussing the Beauvoir memorial site in Biloxi, Mississippi, a site paying tribute to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America.

The last visit I made to Beauvoir was probably around 1980. At any rate before digital cameras were common, and long before iPhones. My father took a photo of me there, and I was wearing a blue shirt that day. When I had the picture developed, the shirt came out gray.

That was creepy. (Blue, of course, was the color of the Union uniforms, gray the color of the Confederates.)