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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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One thing I've never quite caught on is how may memorials to Northern generals there even are in the US, since all the culture war about Confederate statues gives the impression that the entire South (and some other states besides) is downright peppered with them, that there are memorials to Northern generals only comes up when someone poses a "They'll come after Grant next!" hypothetical, and I haven't seen basically any mentions of notable Black Civil War era figures getting memorialized, apart from maybe Harriet Tubman?

There are fewer actual statues of Confederate generals than the media would have you believe, and fewer statues of union generals than that. However confederate/union cemeteries marked with the appropriate symbols are commonplace and while these gravesites are not usually well maintained, it is frequently obvious that they were intended to be burial grounds for war heroes. A major confound is that I live in Texas, which was the main recruiting ground for the confederate shock troops, and thus had a high percentage of confederate war dead. It seems like there is no appetite for destroying these cemeteries- in at least some cases due to superstitious terror of the ghosts(the general pattern in Texas is for older areas of the city- those which have confederate graves because of when they were built- to be full of poor and often superstitious people because the houses are smaller), but more often due to apathy.

There are additionally lots of elementary schools which were at one point named after confederate generals or politicians, but which are now named after "literally who?" figures(and usually these aren't particularly woke figures, they're a school district administrator who contributed a notably large amount of well-credentialed stupidity to the district which is responsible for the school). Street names, particularly Jackson st, exist fairly commonly but it's actually a lot of work to change a street name so it's easier for everyone to just ignore it was named after Stonewall Jackson. Hood county(named after the general who took over command of the confederate shock corps when Stonewall Jackson was killed) is a regular source of controversy but will not be changed any time soon and anyways the proposed name changes are to be named after random and not very notable blacks.

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