You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument

“I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is  a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.” 

“Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past...To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.”

This article, written by journalist and poet Caroline Randall Williams, addresses the sentiment of those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy and who oppose the removal of Confederate monuments across the country within the context of plantation rape. Williams brilliantly denounces the need for manufactured monuments commemorating the Old South because, she writes, her very being is enough of a standing memory of slavery. She uses the phrase “rape-colored skin” and means it literally because she comes from black people who were owned and raped by the white people she comes from. Williams writes this article amidst the criticism of Black Lives Matter protestors who are calling for and/or bringing down Confederate monuments all around the country. Our group agreed this article is incredibly powerful because in offering up her body as a testament to why these monuments must come down, Williams forces the reader to confront this country’s emotional investment in the inferiorization and exploitation of black people and black women.