I would have been the weird guy who wanted to preserve statues of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein. Ever seen Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party purge video? That’s pure “Godfather.”

Statues are not history.
Statues are a symbol.
Statues are not history.
Statues honor and glorify a historical figure.
Statues are not history.
When you take down a statue, you do not erase history.
When you take down a statue, you reject what the statue represents in the present day.

In the 1980s, statues of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin came down throughout Eastern Europe with the end of the Cold War. In 2003, statues of Saddam Hussein came down in Iraq. Are you mad about that? Do you think history was erased and that those statues should have been preserved? “Oh no! They were bad guys, they deserved it.” You understand what those statues symbolized and you feel that taking them down was right, due to your worldview.

In this context, think about why your gut reaction is to defend statues of people who wanted to preserve the institution of enslaving and murdering black people at all costs. Why do you say, “you can’t erase history! You can’t erase southern culture!”? What do you really mean?