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CULTURE
Why Some White People Refuse to Let Go of Confederate Names
They're treating traitors like heroes, and there's a reason for this
When comedian Katt Williams spoke about some people having an "unnatural allegiance to losers," he could have easily been talking about White people who cling to the Confederacy. Despite them losing the Civil War in 1865, there's this cultural obsession with honoring fallen soldiers and generals. A Virginia school board in Shenandoah County voted Friday to restore the names of two Confederate soldiers. Despite changing the names a few years earlier in response to community-driven conversations about racial injustice, they've decided to, once again, honor the Confederacy. Mountain View High School will again be Stonewall Jackson High School, while Honey Run Elementary will again be Ashby Lee Elementary.
Putting Confederate figures on a pedestal is a problematic fixation, an unnatural allegiance to losers. To unravel this thread, we should first consider the framework — who the Confederacy was and their goals. This historical context sheds light on the modern sociopolitical discourse and the impact of these enduring symbols of racial oppression. The Confederacy was a republic created by a group of eleven states that seceded from the United States in 1861 due to the…
