NYC Doesn't Fly Confederate Flags, But It's Still A Shrine To Slaveowners & Slave Profiteers
In the two weeks since white supremacist Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine people in a South Carolina church, activists, politicians, and everyday anti-racists have taken up the cause of removing Confederate flags and monuments from the public landscape. The campaign is a noble one—the flag was, after all, created explicitly for Southern white people to start a war to preserve slavery, and Roof posed with it in photos before reportedly trying to incite his own race war—but for some liberal New Yorkers, it has served as a self-congratulatory reminder that the South is a uniquely racist place with a disgusting past that has nothing to do with them.
Of course, the problem with this line of thinking is that the whole country was built on slavery, not just the South, and we have yet to deal with its horrors on anything approaching the way, for instance, South Africa has reckoned with apartheid, or Germany has atoned for the Holocaust. Today, Americans can visit a national Holocaust museum in their own country, but not a national slavery museum.
An 1895 Harper's New Monthly article described slavery as "part and parcel of [colonial New York's] economic organization," and at one time New York was home to the most slaves of any city except Charleston. Yet, it wasn't until last month that Wall Street got a marker memorializing the municipal slave market where, from 1711 to 1762 prospective buyers made enslaved men flex to assess their fortitude, and grabbed women's genitals when considering a purchase. The African Burial Ground near City Hall didn't get a memorial until 2010, and it almost didn't get one at all because the developer building a tower on top of it tried to breeze through the regulatory process without acknowledging the site's historical significance. Few other reminders of this past exist in New York.
Monuments to prominent slaveowners from New York's history, on the other hand, are plentiful, though they're seldom presented as such. For example:
more
NYC Doesn't Fly Confederate Flags, But It's Still A Shrine To Slaveowners & Slave Profiteers: Gothamist
but dukes and hazzards.
In the two weeks since white supremacist Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine people in a South Carolina church, activists, politicians, and everyday anti-racists have taken up the cause of removing Confederate flags and monuments from the public landscape. The campaign is a noble one—the flag was, after all, created explicitly for Southern white people to start a war to preserve slavery, and Roof posed with it in photos before reportedly trying to incite his own race war—but for some liberal New Yorkers, it has served as a self-congratulatory reminder that the South is a uniquely racist place with a disgusting past that has nothing to do with them.
Of course, the problem with this line of thinking is that the whole country was built on slavery, not just the South, and we have yet to deal with its horrors on anything approaching the way, for instance, South Africa has reckoned with apartheid, or Germany has atoned for the Holocaust. Today, Americans can visit a national Holocaust museum in their own country, but not a national slavery museum.
An 1895 Harper's New Monthly article described slavery as "part and parcel of [colonial New York's] economic organization," and at one time New York was home to the most slaves of any city except Charleston. Yet, it wasn't until last month that Wall Street got a marker memorializing the municipal slave market where, from 1711 to 1762 prospective buyers made enslaved men flex to assess their fortitude, and grabbed women's genitals when considering a purchase. The African Burial Ground near City Hall didn't get a memorial until 2010, and it almost didn't get one at all because the developer building a tower on top of it tried to breeze through the regulatory process without acknowledging the site's historical significance. Few other reminders of this past exist in New York.
Monuments to prominent slaveowners from New York's history, on the other hand, are plentiful, though they're seldom presented as such. For example:
more
NYC Doesn't Fly Confederate Flags, But It's Still A Shrine To Slaveowners & Slave Profiteers: Gothamist
but dukes and hazzards.
