Last Week Tonight Explains Why We Really Should Relocate Our Confederate Statues
2017 has been tough – there’s been no shortage of events and controversies, and it gets hard to keep up. In the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, NFL players kneeling, and hurricanes, the conversation around our many Confederate statues has become less prominent.
This week, John Oliver returns us to that topic. In typical Last Week Tonight form, Oliver breaks down the misconceptions around the Civil War and refutes all those arguments about why we need to keep the statues on public grounds.
The point here isn’t that we should erase our history, and Oliver is careful to point that out first. But at the same time, we have to be careful not to warp or sanitize that history.
The ways that we talk about the Civil War itself can alter our perspectives on what the war was like or why it was fought.
As an example of this, Oliver takes a moment to call out Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, a staple of the family fun capital of the world, Branson, Missouri. High point – they serve you an entire chicken there. Low point – it’s a Pepsi establishment.
More importantly, they feature a “friendly rivalry” between North and South. Oliver emphasizes that if you grew up with things like Dixie Stampede in your life, it can mischaracterize the Civil War. Actually, it was a lot less fun.
Here, Oliver points out that the war was fought over the right to own slaves. According to the Pew Research Center, a lot of people in the US believe that the war was about states’ rights. Which, sure – just states’ rights to own slaves.
And truly, many people in the US today have ancestors that fought for the South or owned slaves. In order to make that a little more comfortable, people tend to shift the story a bit. It becomes about people fighting for their rights or their land, which erases the reality that many other people’s rights were literally nonexistent at that time.
Seeing Confederate monuments can be a painful experience for some, and that’s something we shouldn’t ignore. And obviously people aren’t directly responsible for the actions of their ancestors, but trying to sanitize or ignore the reality of that history is not okay.
Oliver argues that we have to reckon with the reality of the Civil War, personally and as a country, and we haven’t yet. Though there are a lot of Confederate memorials out there – 1500+, actually – what message are we sending with them?
Importantly, the majority of the statues were erected many years after the Civil War – coincidentally during the eras of Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement. We literally have color footage of the monument in Stone Mountain, Georgia being unveiled in the 70s.
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Oliver asserts that statues are really about sending a message about our values. Some of the monuments were literally dedicated by KKK members, which seems to point to a message of white supremacy rather than “remembering our history.”
Monuments are how we honor and glorify people – there are many other venues for recording and appreciating our history, like museums, books, or documentaries. This, Oliver says, could be where we find a solution.
Oliver argues that the statues should be in a place where they have appropriate context and allow people to learn more about the figures depicted – specifically, museums.
The segment ends with Oliver unveiling statues that might make good replacements for the Confederate ones. Robert Smalls and Bessie Coleman are suggested figures, both African Americans with interesting and accomplished histories.
Florida’s statue is just an alligator giving everyone the finger (“It definitely says Florida without having anything to do with slavery!”).
For South Carolina, Oliver unveils the actual Stephen Colbert, who will just hang around and tell you fun facts about the state. He really doesn’t have anything better to do, right?
Next: Last Week Tonight Calls Out its Own Parent Company in Segment on Corporate Consolidation
Check out the full episode for a quick recap of the week’s (predictably insane) news and newscasters inadvertently drawing phalluses (we all need a little bit of comic relief).