Friday, August 18, 2017

CONFEDERATE STATUARY AS RACIAL INTIMIDATION

"The statues of Jackson and Lee not only symbolize the violence of the ongoing displacements of gentrification; they also initiated and facilitated these changes when they were first put up. Strategically erecting these symbols of the Confederacy at the edges of or atop black and nonwhite immigrant communities provided Charlottesville’s white elite with a means of physically buttressing their ever-fragile hold of white supremacy. To understand this is to understand Charlottesville’s demographic population shifts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and how the statues physically bisect those gentrifying spaces." WHAT LIES BENEATH THE CONFEDERATE "VICTORY" ICONOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHICALLY, SOCIOLOGICALLY, HISTORICALLY, IS WHAT IS LEAST DISCUSSED, PUBLICLY, BUT WHAT IS MOST MATERIAL TO THE BATTLE. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2017/06/how_charlottesville_s_confederate_statues_helped_decimate_the_city_s_historically.html