MAGA jackasses are having babies over the fact that the Robert E. Lee statue from Charlottesville, Virginia, has not only been removed, but also melted down. Cool, cool. Folks, nobody's trying to erase history. What's being erased is a bunch of early-20th-century white supremacists trying to dictate to voters of color that they should know their place.
The important fact here is not just that the Lee statue helped foment the deadly 2017 protests in Charlottesville. (You know, the ones about which Benedict Donald said there were "very fine people on both sides"?) It's that Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States, and nothing in Virginia or anywhere else in America should have been named after him. No statues should have been erected 60 years after the Civil War to intimidate Black Americans.
But what the MAGAts are forgetting is that Lee's demise goes far beyond having his statue destroyed. Lee was so persona non grata back in the day that the US Army seized his home, the Custis-Lee Mansion, during the Civil War, and eventually turned it into Arlington National Cemetery. It's a place where patriots who didn't rebel against the United States — in fact, who gave the last full measure of devotion — rest in peace.
Our history is fraught with stuff. Maybe we didn't totally realize it in the sunshine of the postwar era, but we're definitely grappling with it now. There is no understanding of American history without a complete appreciation of the Black experience. If iPhone video had been around during the antebellum period, things would be a lot different now, wouldn't they? In the meantime, we cats are glad that Lee has been melted down, and we PURR.
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