New Orleans Flees the Confederacy

Whitewashing the ignoble aims of the Confederacy, and of the white supremacists who continue to glorify it, is a deeply ingrained political instinct. The lie of the “Lost Cause” owes its longevity not so much to the racists who believe in it as to the many politicians who enable it.

In many cities and towns across the American South, that political complicity is memorialized in granite and stone. Flags, statues and monuments, along with honorifics attached to schools, streets and public spaces, valorize the Confederacy. They also serve as a reminder that some whites persist in rationalizing the historical subjugation of one race by another -- while others are too indifferent to raise a ruckus about it.