Looking through my systemic injustice entries, I’ve settled on a topic that personally connects with me. Now that I’m nineteen and can vote, I’m more mature and aware of past and present racism and discrimination more than ever before. Richmond Virginia (my city) made national headlines in the past four months. There has been a lot of noise around the confederate statues that stand tall in the city streets. After the death of George Floyd, the city of Richmond demanded the confederate soldier statues to be removed immediately from Monument Avenue. My question was “Why celebrate and honor these soldiers if they wanted to protect slavery?”. The statues were invaded with paint, profanity, trash, graffiti, and more in hopes of destroying the statues. A statue was even dumped in a river nearby by angry civilians. Now that I’ve grown older, it’s painful to realize that these statues have been up for over 100 years because of it’s symbolism. After previous research, Virginia had more than 220 memorials to the confederacy. The Governor, Ralph Northam, stated “These monuments tell a particular version of history that doesn’t include everyone. In Virginia, that version of history has been given prominence and authority for far too long”. I couldn’t agree more. After days of angry mobs overruling the ones who were resistant, some of the statues were removed. I hope that as a state and nation we can bring awareness to the issue and racism as a whole. By fighting for what’s right shouldn’t start a problem, it should unravel the problem that’s been suppressed for years. There can be no peace without justice and we need to come together as a city and country. The removal of the confederate soldiers is a stepping stone to equality in the future. This connects back to the concept of being the “other”. Being a minority myself, I felt that it was only right to eliminate the face of people that purposefully left out the “other” groups in past decades. Not to mention, these statues were located on public property that uses tax payers dollars to maintain them. Praising these confederate soldiers not only is a reminder of a brutal part of our history, but it slows down the progression of our country.
Here’s a picture that I captured back in June of 2020:
June 2020
Works cited and Referenced article:
-Ortiz, Aimee. “Richmond Removes Confederate Statues From Monument Avenue.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 July 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/us/stonewall-jackson-statue-richmond.html