What Should Become of Confederate Monuments?

• In Event: The Contours and Forums of Free Speech

Abstract

Confederate monuments have been the site of much activism and the focus of many arguments about their meaning and their fate. Much of this debate, however, tends to be polarized and simplistic, with some arguing, essentially, that they all have to go, and others arguing that they all have to stay. The debate therefore is not well informed by the startling diversity of Confederate monuments, and the range of possible responses to them. This paper attempts to take these things into account to provide a more nuanced approach to Confederate monuments. The paper begins by focusing on Confederate monuments as a form of state speech, and discusses the constraints to which they are therefore subject. It then surveys the diversity of Confederate monuments, and some of the dimensions along which they vary. Certain types of monument have received the lion’s share of public and scholarly attention, but these are not necessarily representative of Confederate monuments as a group. I then argue that, because they are quite varied, some are more problematic then others, and therefore different approaches may be appropriate to different cases. The penultimate section of the paper discusses the array of possible courses of action that might be undertaken, once a monument, or a set of monuments, have been determined to be sufficiently problematic that they should not remain as they are. Finally, I discuss the process by which all of these determinations might be made.

Author

• Andrew Valls, Oregon State University