The past week there's been a lot of talk about what to do with the Confederate monument on the UNC campus -- commonly known as "Silent Sam." Faculty lounge blogger Eric Muller has an op-ed in the Daily Tar Heel arguing that Silent Sam can be moved because he is in danger of being torn down -- as happened to the Durham County Confederate monument last summer. And now there's a letter from 17 senior faculty at UNC saying they'll take the monument down if the university doesn't. Perhaps we should call the monument "Son of Sam," though? Maybe by renaming him it would make it more likely that the University will take him down? Who knows. As long-time readers of the faculty lounge will recall, I'm generally against removal of statues because I think that facilitates forgetting.
Meanwhile, in Tuscaloosa the controversy is over whether there will be a university-sponsored study of slavery at the University of Alabama. A lot has been written on proslavery ideas at Alabama before the Civil War already. And at UNC, for that matter. One of my hopes is that these controversies will become opportunities to talk more about ideas on campus in the eras of slavery and segregation. But as Autumn Barrett and I have argued recently, amidst all the talk of monuments to the Confederacy there has been a surprising lack of attention to the ideas of white supremacy in books (and I'd add articles) of that era. I hope to say something more quite soon about ideas of segregation in the Yale Law Journal and in North Carolina in the 1870s.
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