How do we think about removing controversial statues in the US?

These statues were intended to promote white supremacy and racial terror.

Question: How do we think about removing controversial statues in the US?
Position1 of 5›: "We must remove these statues!"
Argument‹4 of 4: These statues were intended to promote white supremacy and racial terror.

The people who created these statues intended for them to be re-enforcing agents of white supremacy.

The argument

Confederate monuments comprise a significant portion of the statues facing backlash, and the dispute over them is a dispute about purpose. Although many claim that controversial, Confederate memorials were intended to serve as innocent reminders of our history, the circumstances surrounding these statues' establishment say otherwise. The method here is to read intent from timing: were the monuments simply commemorative, their construction should have followed the events they commemorate rather than clustering decades later. That is not the pattern. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "The dedication of Confederate monuments and the use of Confederate names and other iconography began shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865. But two distinct periods saw significant spikes." These two spikes coincided with the enaction of Jim Crow laws in the early 1900s, and the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s. This correlation speaks to the intentions of the people who built these statues. The two moments share a feature that mere anniversary does not explain: each was a point at which the racial order was being written into law or being challenged. When people strived to protect white supremacy by law, these monuments became common. They were also built rapidly in a time that featured threats to white supremacy. A memorial raised at such a moment does work in the present, addressing the people living under that order rather than the dead it names. Given these links, it is difficult to deny that the people who constructed these statues had racist intentions. They wanted to reinforce white supremacy and promote racial subordination — and if that is what the monuments were for, leaving them standing continues the message they were erected to send. For this reason, we should remove these statues.

Premises

[P1]Confederate monuments were not erected as innocent history; their construction spiked during the imposition of Jim Crow laws in the early 1900s and again during the 1950s civil rights movement. [P2] These spikes coincided with efforts to protect white supremacy and respond to threats against it, revealing the builders' racist intent to reinforce racial subordination. [C] Therefore, because they were intended to promote white supremacy and racial terror, we must remove these statues.

Counter-arguments

The original intentions behind some statues were terrible. However, we should preserve them as reminders of history. Removing these statues erases reminders of our society's previous racism. Our communities must remember this part of our history- the terror efforts of the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras- in order to prevent this sort of intimidation in the future.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The dating evidence is strong on origins, but the premise treats correlation in time as establishing the intent of everyone involved, and the same spikes coincide with the passing of the veterans' generation and with the war's semicentennial — factors the argument never weighs. [Rejecting P2] Even granting the intent, the step to removal is not made: what a monument was built to do and what it does now are different questions, and the counter names an alternative that goes unanswered — retention with context, or relocation to a museum, as evidence of the period that produced it. The argument also treats a category assembled by dedication date as uniform, without distinguishing between the cases inside it.

Proponents cited

Southern Poverty Law Center
“The dedication of Confederate monuments and the use of Confederate names and other iconography began shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865. But two distinct periods saw significant spikes.The first began around 1900 as Southern states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise African Americans and re-segregate society after several decades of integration that followed Reconstruction. It lasted well into the 1920s, a period that also saw a strong revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Many of these monuments were sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The second period began in the mid-1950s and lasted until the late 1960s, the period encompassing the modern civil rights movement.”
Annette Gordon-Reed
“The Confederate statues were put up when they were put up [not just after the war but largely during periods of Civil Rights tension in the 20th century], to send a message about white supremacy, and to sentimentalize people who had actively fought to preserve the system of slavery.”
Karen Cox
“It parallels also the movement to legally disenfranchise black men, turn back the clock on the 15th Amendment, an increase in racial violence, the rise of Jim Crow and legal segregation. . . It's also a celebration of the return of white control and white supremacy.”
Don Doyle
“Many of the monuments were put up in the heyday of Jim Crow in the 1890s and on into through the 1920s and they were understood to be a rebuke to Northern interference in southern race relations as well as symbols of the lost cause of the Confederacy.”