{"id":59840,"date":"2020-06-26T18:10:36","date_gmt":"2020-06-26T18:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59840"},"modified":"2020-06-26T18:12:05","modified_gmt":"2020-06-26T18:12:05","slug":"you-want-a-confederate-monument-my-body-is-a-confederate-monument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59840","title":{"rendered":"You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument"},"content":{"rendered":"

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2020-06-26<\/p>\n

Caroline Randall Williams<\/strong><\/a>, poet<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nP.S. Spencer<\/small><\/a><\/p>\n

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?<\/em><\/p>\n

NASHVILLE<\/a> \u2014 I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy<\/a>, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.<\/p>\n

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country \u2014 with cartoonish private statues<\/a>, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants<\/a> to redress it. But there are still those \u2014 like President Trump<\/a> and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell<\/a> \u2014 who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of \u201cairbrushing\u201d history, but of adding a new perspective.<\/p>\n

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,26,6940,23674,20],"tags":[30938,30939,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-59840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-slavery","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-caroline-randall-williams","tag-confederate-monuments","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59840"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59843,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59840\/revisions\/59843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}