The “hate or heritage” debate to take down monuments honoring Confederate heroes of the Civil War has been quite the uphill battle.
It began with Confederate flags, and the most recent removal was of a Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans’ Jackson Square that garnered protests. Singer and movement music creator Solange Knowles knows just how to celebrate the win.
As reported by The Washington Post, in May the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee became the last of New Orleans’s four contested monuments to go, an end to more than 130 years of publicly honoring a man who embodied Southern pride and racial oppression.
“They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history,” said New Orleans’ Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
“These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.”
Also celebrating its removal was Solange Knowles, who took a selfie where the Confederate general who fought to break the South from the North as a means to continue slavery, stood.
“what’s good robert? who’s next?,” she tweeted.
Hopefully, this is one of the many steps made to break down symbols of racism and injustice masked as patriotism.