Clay Risen: "removing the legacy of the Confederacy is harder than toppling a few statues."

At the New York Times Editor Clay Risen laments that removing Confederate Monuments from public spaces may be the easiest task we perform in our truly monumental campaign to reconcile the America many of us wish for to the America that indisputably exists. As detestable as this statuary is, a prime example being the homage to Nathan Bedford Forrest above — a miscreant who massacred black solders and helped to found the Ku Klux Klan - it his not his presence in a Memphis park that presents the biggest challenge to us in our efforts to one day live in a nation that lives up to it’s ideals, but rather the cultural milieu his balding visage stands guard over that threatens to thwart our best efforts.

Mr. Risen grew up in the South, in Nashville, the capitol of Tennessee, where a bronze bust of Bedford Forrest with better hair awaits removal. But to a young boy in Nashville, it was not a disembodied head in the Statehouse that challenged his conscience, but the streets that he biked on, the friends he chose for himself and the family he didn’t.

“I grew up in a decently liberal family and was taught all the right notions about tolerance and civil rights and the awful history of slavery. But somehow, as a kid, riding my bike along Robert E. Lee Drive never really bothered me. I knew full well what Lee stood for; had I stopped for a second, I might have imagined how it would feel to be a black person riding along that same street. But that’s the point: I didn’t, because it all just seemed so natural, so all encompassing. Not ideal, but unavoidable.”

For Risen, as for most white folk I suspect, racism was not the choking cloud of foul, toxic noxiousness that it was for our fellow Americans, but rather a peculiar aroma in the air, a “slight stink” as Risen calls it, unpleasant to be sure, but so much a constant consort in our travels, and of so little consequence to ourselves, personally, that it wafted by, if not unnoticed, often unacted upon.

”And isn’t that the insidious thing about racism, generally? Growing up, I never knew a Klansman. I never saw a cross burning, or a gang of skinheads beat up a black man. But my sweet, sweet grandmother liked to talk about “those cute little pickaninnies” she’d see on shopping trips downtown. What was I going to do? I couldn’t change grandmothers. A boy in my school golf club detested the fact that the nearby public course was popular with black people, and said so every time we played together. But I had to take a sport, and I did love golf.

Of course, there’s an obvious right answer. I should have confronted my grandmother. I should have challenged my golf partner. But there’s an equally obvious answer why I didn’t. Because racism was quietly everywhere, in the names of schools and streets as much as the ignorant musings of classmates. It was a low drone that never, in my life, seemed to rise to the point of moral urgency. I didn’t become acclimated to it — I never knew otherwise.