What Should Happen to Confederate Monuments?

Public debate about monuments to Confederate leaders and about the public spaces and buildings named after those individuals, as well as the role of Confederate flags in public culture is becoming one of the most potent public discourses in the last decade. When the movement to reckon with the confederate symbols swept the nation, monuments that had long stood in public arenas and college campuses were suddenly dismantled. Some of these monuments, end up in warehouses and some were trashed and in few occasions, they were auctioned. However, as a nation we are still not clear and unified on how to respond to this problem. Statues are being removed one by one, but where do they go? Though removing them from public spaces is a great start, their migration to another location is still ambiguous. Do you have a solution on how to approach this issue? What should happen to these monuments and how far back you go to deal with racism and institutional social injustice in the United States?

To do this assignment either see the attached PDF document or go to Module 6or see the attached PDF document.

Please share your perception by writing a short editorial (500 to 550 words) and make sure to respond to one of your classmates. This discussion is mainly about your educated opinion, therefore make sure to read all the posted materials and then write your editorial.

As you are contemplating to write this short assignment think about the following points:

For any subject of controversy, the first question we should ask is: What is the person known for? How did they earn a place in our collective public remembrance?
Who has chosen to co-opt, usurp, or destroy particular works, and for what reasons? Who has obtained objects in the hopes of transferring a civilizing aura and promoting their cultural enrichment and status? What objects have been subject to iconoclasm, and why?
What qualifies an object as cultural heritage and who owns the past?
Of particular importance to this discussion is issue of identity and contestation of power over objects of cultural heritage.
According to Antonio Gramsci, hegemony locks up a society even more tightly because of the way ideas are transmitted by language. The words we use to speak and write have been constructed by social interactions through history and shaped by the dominant ideology of the times. Thus they are loaded with cultural meanings that condition us to think in particular ways, and to not be able to think very well in other ways.
Hegemony emphasizes that power is not wielded by one class over another; rather, power is constantly negotiated and changing among all classes of people, who struggle with and against one another in the economic, social, political, and ideological arenas in which they live and work.