Confederate Statues and ‘Our’ History<br />This is the tradition that the Southern Confederacy embodied and sought to preserve and<br />that Mr. Trump, inadvertently or not, identifies with by equating the Confederacy with “our history and culture.”<br />Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.<br />The great waves of Confederate monument building took place in the 1890s, as the Confederacy was coming to be idealized as the so-called Lost Cause<br />and the Jim Crow system was being fastened upon the South, and in the 1920s, the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching.<br />President Trump’s Thursday morning tweet lamenting<br />that the removal of Confederate statues tears apart “the history and culture of our great country” raises numerous questions, among them: Who is encompassed in that “our”?<br />Should American nationality be based on shared values, regardless of race, ethnicity<br />and national origin, or should it rest on “blood and soil,” to quote the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., whom Trump has at least partly embraced?<br />But the advent of multiracial democracy in the Southern states inspired a wave of terrorist opposition by the Ku Klux Klan<br />and kindred groups, antecedents of the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.<br />The very first naturalization law, enacted in 1790 to establish guidelines for how<br />immigrants could become American citizens, limited the process to “white” persons.<br />When Mr. Trump identifies statues commemorating Confederate leaders as essential parts of “our” history and culture, he is honoring that dark period.
