Germany confronted its racist legacy. Britain and the US must do the same | Black Lives... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...onted-racist-legacy-britain-us
history falsification uk germany legacy culture revisionist monument comparison empire imperialism
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Poverty and poor health in black communities – the reason why African Americans have died from Covid-19 at three times the rate of white people – also contributed to rage. But the problem goes deeper: the falsification of history.
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That falsification is especially galling to Americans because, unlike most countries, the United States was built on a set of ideals.
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The cruelty that reigned between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the civil rights movement, when racial terror was not only the rule but the law, was veiled by the obfuscating name “Jim Crow”
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The revision of US history was broad and deliberate. The south lost the war but it won the narrative.
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Beginning in the 1890s, across the US, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans erected monuments to their fallen heroes, and vilified the era of Reconstruction that granted civil rights to freed African Americans. They received support from the early film industry in Hollywood, which produced hundreds of movies that valorised southern rebels.
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The US began a broad and public reexamination of its history in 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine people in a black church in Charleston
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Until the past week, Europeans have been slow to examine their own histories of racism and colonialism.
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one in five Britons regards their former empire as something to be ashamed of. Such nostalgia for empire played a toxic role in Brexit fantasies.
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Germans use their history to think about an uncertain future, while Britons use their history to console themselves for a less glorious present.
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Monuments are not just a matter of heritage; that’s why we don’t memorialise everything. Monuments are values made visible, embodying ideals we choose to honour. Unless we choose to celebrate their values, statues of slave owners belong in museums, not public streets. We cannot have a just and decent present as long as we refuse to face our pasts.
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It took Germans some time to learn this after the second world war, but they finally invented a concept for it: Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates as “working off the past”
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The rebuilding of Berlin – a long, discursive process in which historians, politicians and citizens debated for more than a decade – was aspirational.
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The city’s public space represents conscious decisions about what values the reunited republic ought to hold
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In addition to reimagining public space, Germany paid reparations, rewrote school lesson plans to include material against racism and filled its museums with exhibits about the worst aspects of its history