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Students divided after returning to schools with Confederate names restored (www.bbc.com)

submitted 3 months ago by sjmarf@sh.itjust.works to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (6 children)

One of the people leading the charge to restore the schools' names is Mike Scheibe, a father of two students at Ashby Lee and Civil War re-enactor, who is also the spokesperson for the Coalition for Better Schools, a local organisation that campaigned for the school board to change the names back.

. . . "But to be taught that everyone who fought for the Confederacy, or did this, or did that, is a racist slave holder, that's all or nothing, and that really isn't doing history justice," he added.

Well, I’ll give him the point that he didn’t use the word “heritage”, so. Good job with that. However he did mention something about justice.

[–] bizarroland@fedia.io 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I will say that's actually probably a fair point.

Maybe the only fair point in the entire argument. Most of the people who fought for the South were ignorant uneducated redneck hicks who were being told that the gub'ment was going to seize their means of production and leave them to suffer in poverty.

That vastly oversteps the fact that the means of production and question were other living human beings with fundamental value equal to theirs, but when you have the power of media and a society built on closed-mindedness, I can almost understand why they would choose to fight to protect their ignorance and their way of life rather than to adapt to a new world.

Doesn't make it right, and it does not validate anything else about their movement. The Confederacy failed. Slavery is bad. Memorializing Confederate slavers is bad. No city has a statue of Pol Pot hanging out in its Town center.

Maybe we should have the same amount of self-respect that the survivors of the Khmer rouge do.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It’s a fair point in a good faith argument.

I highly doubt the good faith of a school board restoring Confederate names though.

[–] bizarroland@fedia.io 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You are correct.

Everything about their argument is stupid and regressive and part of a shoddly orchestrated attempt to restore slavery to America and to take away the rights of anybody other than wealthy white men to vote or own property.

But if it were argued in good faith, this one point is a point that makes sense to me, that likely not every person who fought for the Confederacy was a racist, there were likely a few of them who fought to "protect their way of life" not knowing that they were fighting to keep slaves enslaved.

Even with saying that, the grand majority of them, I'm willing to wager 97% or more of them, were by all accounts racist and were fighting to maintain their claim to white superiority.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Agreed. It gets really complicated at a certain point, and - again, arguing in good faith - it’s interesting to consider how people who don’t agree with slavery get caught up in the fight for it (and, likely, vice versa).

But, that’s for some other discussion.

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