PC Gone Too Far

Very neat.--Percy

Over the past year while this thread has lain mainly dormant I have occasionally reflected on this topic and find my attitudes changing. This Last Week Tonight video pretty much sums up the point of the view that I'm having more and more trouble denying: It's long, but it's John Oliver and he's funny.--Percy

I think what influenced me most was the bar graph showing when the monuments were constructed. I originally figured their construction was fairly evenly distributed over time with a bump in the early part of the 20th century, but I had no idea that period represented the bulk of the monuments. I've positioned the John Oliver video to start just as he's introducing that topic, with the bar graph following 10 or 15 seconds later: --Percy

60 Minutes tonight ran a story on Confederate monuments. If you didn't catch it you can see it on the "edisodes" page of their website: This episode hasn't been posted to the webpage yet, it was just broadcast tonight, but maybe by tomorrow it will be there.--Percy

Yesterday the Tennessee House passed legislation cutting $250,000 of state funding for the bicentennial celebration of the city of Memphis in retaliation for their removal of Civil War statues. Statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis were removed last December.The Tennessee Historical Commission had denied the city's request for a waiver from the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act so they could remove the statues. The city did an end run around the law by selling the parks to a nonprofit agency, which removed the statues.Both statues were placed as symbols of oppression by whites over blacks. The Forrest statue was erected in 1904 during the Jim Crow era, while the Davis statue was erected in 1964 during the fight for civil rights. Cutting funds allows the white and rural Republican dominated legislature to punish mostly black and Democratic Memphis.Sources:

• Memphis took down two Confederate statues. State lawmakers are punishing the city for it.
  
• Confederate statues come down in Memphis

--Percy