12
" Granted, to approach this history with the binary framework provided by the Civil War can make for a simplistic morality play. One in which it's all too easy and too obvious for a Yankee to traipse into a Southern cemetery and clutch his Northern pearls. Robert Penn Warren called this instinct the "treasury of virtue" - the white Northern's feeling that, by dint of our affiliation with the Union, the great, emancipating army, well, then we were (and remained) morally upstanding, unimpeachably good. It was a feeling that could render us "happy in forgetfulness," the Civil War like an event horizon beyond which our own pasts vanish "
― , Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy
16
" If only we would sit at bus stops in the discomforting silence that comes with the knowledge that we are instead antagonists, that we are implicated, if only passively, in a centuries-long campaign of oppression and extraction. A campaign waged in our name and for our pockets. Not the most pleasant way to pass the time, I admit, which is probably why we've developed such extraordinary ways to avoid doing it. But if we are ever to gain a clearer sense of who we've been, and thus who we are as white Americans, we are going to need to revise the story "
― , Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy
17
" I do think that there is a need for folks who are not of African descent but who have in any way, shape, or form benefited not only from slavery but from systemic racism that has survived beyond slavery, to be able to acknowledge that," she explained. But not by taking blame for the actions of an ancestor; it's not about blame-placing it or taking it. Instead, Wells said, the idea is to see past an individual's feelings or actions to the systems built to protect the privilege and fortune amassed by some through the deprivation of others. We have to recognize the injury and care about those who have been harmed, she said, then we have to see the systems that produce and perpetuate those injuries. And to do that, we need to use our sense of the past to hone our awareness of the present "
― , Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy
Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy