America’s original sin: Floyd’s death prompts historical soul-searching

WASHINGTON: Confederate monuments are coming down and statues of Christopher Columbus are being toppled as Americans grapple with the ghosts of the country’s racial history in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

“It seems like maybe we’ve hit a tipping point in the retelling of the narrative of who we are as an American people,” said David Farber, a history professor at the University of Kansas. “We’re seeing tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans wrestling with fundamental questions of what do we do with the unsavory -- and, let’s be frank, even immoral -- aspects of our past.”

The May 25 killing of Floyd, an African American, by a white police officer in Minneapolis has ignited mass protests for racial justice and police reform across the United States.

But the death of the 46-year-old has also triggered a national soul-searching of the country’s checkered past.

Demonstrators in several US cities have targeted monuments to generals and politicians of the pro-slavery Civil War South, pulling down a statue in Richmond, for example, of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president during the 1861-1865 conflict.

“The symbols of the Confederacy are, I think, the most polarizing of these memorials. But it extends all over the United States,” Farber said.

“In New York it’s statues to Columbus. In New Mexico, there’s a statue of a conquistador who’s a genocidal figure in the eyes of the Pueblo Indian people.

“There’s high schools all over the United States named for John Calhoun,” a former vice president who was an avowed proponent of slavery.

Farber noted that the debate over Confederate memorials has been going on for years and civil rights marchers of the 1950s and 1960s decried the fact that they were “walking down streets named after avowed racists and white supremacists.”