ASHLAND – The conversations communities, particularly those below the Mason-Dixon line, are having about Confederate statues can be complicated and rife with emotions.
That may be because discussions of these symbols are often proxies for even more difficult conversations people want to avoid, suggested Charles Tucker and Susan Glisson, co-founders of Sustainable Equity. The pair led about 30 Ashland University students, faculty and community members in discussion about the topic Tuesday as part of the College of Arts & Sciences’ biennial Symposium Against Indifference.
“Conversations about symbols bear the weight of the conversations we don’t have about race or white supremacy or the role racism has played in our country,” Glisson said.
Removal of monuments, Tucker said, can make a segment of people afraid.
“They start thinking, ‘What’s going to happen when we’re no longer the big dogs on the block? What are we going to do?’ And those symbols coming down is the first sign. Because those proxies start falling, and once the proxies are down, what’s left? The real issues,” Tucker said.
Glisson and Tucker have spent years working to reduce inequities in the South, in part by listening and fostering conversations that lead to mutual understanding, and ultimately, change.
For many people in the south, Tucker said, Confederate symbols are a piece of cultural identity and a way of building a narrative of valor despite the fact that the Confederate States of America lost the Civil War.
“They lost that sense of identity, and one of the ways to combat that was to create monuments glorifying the grand traditions, the honorableness, the nobility of the lost cause … These statues were something they could look at when they lost all hope,” he said.
Tucker believes that somewhere along the way, people lost awareness of the specific things the monuments memorialized and thought of them as symbols of “our heritage.”
The popular concept of “Heritage Not Hate,” Tucker said, neglects the history and the context of the monuments and instead “focuses on feel-good elements of the myth.”
So what should a community do with statutes that to some people represent heritage and to others represent deplorable causes?
Tucker walked the group through the options communities have considered — maintain the status quo, remove the statues or add plaques to contextualize the monuments.
Tucker and Glisson said each community needs to determine for itself how to appropriately deal with their symbols. Tucker called the list of options “imperfect solutions to an imperfect situation.”
One city Sustainable Equity worked with, New Orleans, chose removal, but is still debating what to do with the statues next. While some people have suggested putting them in museums or storing them at City Hall, others want disposal. For now, the statues are in storage.
Another option Tucker would like to see American communities consider is one Germany has embraced. There, they build new monuments memorializing victims alongside those commemorating Nazi soldiers who died.
“They don’t make an attempt to hide what happened … but for every monument, they make sure there’s another one just as large, just as impressive, that mentions the victims,” he said.
Tucker said he challenges individuals and communities to listen more fully to one another, to do more introspection to better understand their own reactions to conflict and to figure out how to learn from the history and move forward in a better direction.
That’s sometimes easier said than done, he said.
“It takes a lot more strength to live with an inconvenient truth than it does to live with a pretty lie,” he said.
Following the discussion, Ashland University senior David Grim said he appreciated the program because it helped him gain perspective.
“I liked it. I think it’s easy to avoid topics like this,” Grim said. “I come from a very conservative background and I think a lot of people from my background would quickly jump on this as insensitive or trying to be too sensitive or something like that.”
Grim said he still considers himself politically conservative but he now has a better understanding of different viewpoints than he did before college. He believes education is the first step to greater understanding.
Another student, sophomore Jacob Nestle, said he looks forward to getting some tools from Glisson and Tucker’s workshop Wednesday that will help him facilitate tough but important conversations with people back home in Tennessee.
“I think conversation is step one, even if there’s disagreement. Your goal is to listen and understand first … I don’t think it’s contradictory to support state identity and also support equality,” he said.
Tucker and Glisson have two free, public events planned in Ashland this week.
They will share their stories of uniting communities and bringing people of different backgrounds together during a public lecture titled “No More Enemies” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 30.
They will also lead an interactive “Welcome Table” workshop at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31. Both events will be held in the Trustees Room of the Myers Convocation Center at Ashland University.
