What to do about Silent Sam? The debate continues

The following Sunday Forum is in response to “Protesters topple Silent Sam Confederate statue at UNC” (Aug. 20).

‘Privilege’

I am a white female, a 2011 UNC alumna, and a 10th-generation North Carolinian. There is a memorial in Mooresville that bears the names of 100 confederate soldiers, two of whom are my great-great-grandfathers.

Most of these facts give me pride. None give me shame. But together they give me something else, something powerful. They give me privilege.

The statue removal debate is not just political issue, it is a personal one, and I believe I have both the privilege and the responsibility to contribute my voice to this conversation. And I would like to concede it.

We multi-generational white Southerners cannot change our past, and nor should we forget it. But the mistreatment and oppression of the black community at our hands is not an uncomfortable relic of our history. It did not end with the Civil War or civil rights. It is happening here, now, today.

If we are unable to confront this basic truth, and do not use our privilege to lift the voices of those we have silenced for so long, we are just as complicit as our ancestors. Those voices say that these pervasive symbols of white supremacy need to go. And those are the only voices that matter.

Toppling ‘necessary’

The faculty of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies supports the removal of Silent Sam. We condemn public memorials to an illegal war defending slavery, racial segregation and militarized white supremacy.

Because of official stalling, the students’ action was a necessary step towards justice. Silent Sam also celebrated men’s violence against women. Julian Carr, a white, wealthy man, dedicated “Sam” in the name of protecting an elite, white and restrictive femininity that rationalized excluding women from UNC.

By beating a black woman and boasting about it in his speech dedicating the statue of an armed man, Carr communicated that black people are less than human; that women who reject femininity deserve punishment; and that black women don’t deserve to exist.

These views excluded black women from attending UNC for over 150 years. Such harmful ideas and their consequences persist unless people take collective action against injustice. At UNC, women of color, especially African American women students, have recently been this struggle’s most visible, creative, and courageous leaders.

Criminal investigations into the statue’s removal should be dropped. Instead of memorializing violence, honor UNC’s true heroes, Edith Hubbard, Maya Little, Preston Dobbins, Mary Smith, and Elizabeth Brooks, among others.

‘Furious’

Those who toppled Silent Sam demand tolerance and understanding of their cause yet practice intolerance.

Silent Sam doesn’t belong to protesters. He belongs to all the residents of North Carolina, but especially to me and other graduates of UNC. He is not protesters’ to destroy or even displace.

Within me, sympathy for their cause evaporated when he hit the ground. They aren’t social activists. They are an anarchist mob. They don’t want social justice. Rather, it is their justice they seek.

I wish they could see the hypocrisy, but they either don’t or won’t. Sam belongs to me and I am furious. We are furious.

Honor Loyalists

What to do with Silent Sam’s pedestal? How about a new bronze, one that would honor the heroic struggles of lost cause soldiers and the heritage they embody; but would also strike against the legacy of slavery?

I propose a statue dedicated to the Loyalists, those brave soldiers who answered the call to fight in the Revolutionary War against Patriot insurrections meant to undermine the way of life they cherished. Specifically, I’m thinking of two true figures of Tar Heel history: One-Eyed Hector McNeill and Scalding Dave Fanning who in 1781 led a company of Loyalists in a battle near Wilmington to take Beattie’s Bridge from the accursed Patriots.

True, in time their cause was lost, but so was the Confederate cause. But, unlike the Confederates, the Loyalists fought on the side that actually called for the emancipation of colony slaves, as expressed in the Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779.

A monument to North Carolina Loyalists would honor local ancestral heroes who fought valiantly to preserve a southern way of life and yet fought on the side that had just emancipated the American slaves.

Remember Tea Party

The downing of the Silent Sam statue in Chapel Hill should be compared to that act of civil disobedience definitive to the history of American democracy: the Boston Tea Party. Both actions were taken to oppose a tyranny which had taken away local self determination.

In Boston in 1773, that tyranny was the British government. The destruction of British tea can be rightly described as civil disobedience, or an illegal mob action, but it is fiercely celebrated by today’s conservatives.

In Chapel Hill in 2018, the tyranny is our undemocratic gerrymandered state legislature, which three years ago took away the right of local communities to decide which monuments were wanted in their towns.

Most of Chapel Hill “town and gown” have wanted Silent Sam removed for some years. The statue is widely regarded here as an insult to black students and citizens.

But Republican state legislators – many of whom came into office as a result of the “Tea Party movement” in 2010 – decided Chapel Hill and UNC have no rights to local self-determination in this matter. In an act of breathtaking legislative overreach, they created a new law just to prevent the removal of Silent Sam. Thus an orderly removal was precluded.

Like the Boston Tea Party, civil disobedience followed an arrogant overreaching government figuratively declaring, “You have no say in what happens in your community. We decide, not you.”