Black folks have spent all week cackling, meme-making, and yelling collective gratitude into the smoke as we watched the ancestors give multiple divine smacks to the face of white nostalgia and its sadistic fetish for racial oppression. In the span of days, three shrines to white supremacy caught heat, holy fire, and even a drop kick from a tree.
First, a fire engulfed the big house at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation, where scores of enslaved Africans labored and died. Then, days later, came news out of Oak City, North Carolina, that in April, the Confederate Fort Branch Museum got demolished by a tree because it, too, was probably tired of the revisionist lies. And then earlier this week, the Kalorama mansion burned in Washington, D.C.’s whitest neighborhood, where racist housing covenants used to keep Black folks out, except when we were scrubbing toilets and polishing silver.
Black folks are now standing by with popcorn, tea, Juneteenth grills, sage bundles, and Soul Train lines, watching to see what gets smited next should the ancestors have some righteous rage and ancestral wind left.
Because there’s lots more racist kindling out there.
Maybe a lightning bolt at Mount Rushmore straight through George Washington’s stone wig. Perhaps a few sinkholes to swallow the remaining Christopher Columbus statues, or maybe just hit them with a weeklong pigeon orgy. Maybe they can bless us with a heat wave that melts every wool waistcoat and makes butter churns explode at Colonial Williamsburg. Or maybe they’ll dispatch a hungry termite plague on the Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters.
Meanwhile, white folks have been sobbing and grieving over these destroyed historic relics like somebody intentionally knocked MeeMaw’s ashes off the fireplace mantle. They’ve also taken to popular social media pages such as Plantations and Mansions to call Black folks “haters” and “racists,” and they’re crawling onto our pages to give us breathless lectures about not “erasing the past.”
But Black folks aren’t trying to “erase” history when we celebrate the destruction of these monuments to white terrorism. We’re tired of white folks venerating the parts of it where their ancestors were committing genocide, slavery, and all other manner of human rights violations and calling it “civilization,” “progress,” and “democracy.”
We are unapologetically declaring that we don’t care about granite altars to genocide, cast-iron heroes of enslavement, or roadside shrines to domestic terrorism masquerading as Southern “heritage.” We don’t need these chambers of horror, haunted houses, statues, and other relics to remember atrocities. We have books, archives, museums, and oral histories of those still living.
As a historian with a Ph.D. in African American history, let me say this with my whole chest: Destruction is not always erasure! It is often correction. There’s a false premise that preservation of all history, in every form, is inherently virtuous. It ain’t.
Should Nazi swastikas be maintained on buildings or Hitler statues appear on street corners in Germany for the sake of teaching “valuable lessons?” Should Indigenous nations across the Americas be forced to maintain monuments to conquistadors who raped, pillaged, and renamed everything they touched—for the sake of “historical context?” Do people really believe that enslaved people were standing around and saying, “Wow, what a teachable moment that ride through the Middle Passage was, or that lash across my back is?”
Mature societies that truly want progress don’t fetishize their hate symbols, nor do they honor their shame. They confront them, dismantle them, teach about them, and bury the symbols that glorify the horrors.
The very idea that we should retain relics, monuments, and institutions built on white supremacy for the sake of “reminders” is ahistorical and dishonest. These old relics aren’t neutral. They are tools of power and propaganda that don’t teach history. They shape memory and rewrite history in service to power. Confederate monuments, for example, weren’t put up right after the Civil War. They popped up decades later as part of a 20th century campaign of narrative warfare to reassert white dominance during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement.
Real historians know that history isn’t just about preservation. It is about interpretation, confrontation, and accountability. Some relics deserve to be in museums, stripped of their pedestal and power. Others, especially the architecture of white supremacy, deserved to be bulldozed into dust and spit on for good measure, not to erase the past, but to end its hold on the present. Because memory without justice is nostalgia for oppression.
Black folks and other groups on the receiving end of white hatred don’t need to see violent relics on display, so we don’t forget how sadistic our oppressors can be. We live with the echoes of that inhumanity every day through police brutality, discrimination, racial disparities in all indices of wellbeing, voter suppression, mass incarceration, eco hazards, underfunded schools, and…and…and…
While racist white folks are out here sobbing about a burned-down big house, they’re silent about Donald Trump and his ilk banning books, gutting DEI, firing teachers, shuttering archives, eliminating Black Studies programs on college campuses, purging Black and queer authors from libraries, rewriting slavery as “skills training,” slashing healthcare access, gutting reproductive rights, criminalizing homelessness, and recreating Jim Crow.
If your moral compass needs a plantation house, a statue of a slaver, or a dusty Confederate flag and some damn cannon balls to know right from wrong, then you are broken. ut don’t expect Black folks, whom you’ve spent centuries demonizing and calling outsiders, to join in solidarity at the altar of whiteness so you can feel connected to the past.
SEE ALSO:
White Folks Gave Us ‘Black Fatigue,’ Now They’re Trying to Steal It
America Welcomes Afrikaner ‘Refugees’ to Rescue Whiteness
Op-Ed: Ashes to Ashes, Big House to Dust: Why White Folks Are Grieving Over Destroyed Relics To White Supremacy
was originally published on
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