Growing Up in the Shadow of Confederate Monuments

Drawing on her memories of growing up in a racially segregated South, the author argues not so much for the removal and erasure of Confederate memorials as for mutilating them or retaining a version of their presence glossed with an explanation for their rejection. Connecting the southern anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism of her youth, she explains the parallels and differences between German efforts to come to terms with the Holocaust and American efforts, southern and northern, to move beyond and make reparation for both slavery and continuing twentieth- and twenty-first-century racism.