If people wish to go somewhere and pay to hear such stories, I don't care. Lumping that in with statues that people don't choose to pay for seems like an apples and oranges thing.
It's only an apples and oranges thing if you seek to see it as such. I'm not talking about what people like to do, I'm asking whether we can now look to other examples of dubious celebration in society that are rooted in a darker history many don't care to focus on. Should places of inhumane activities be seen as places where we can flog a few t-shirts, for instance? People here are asking why we, us of today, cannot look at the past and decide what we want to continue remembering/celebrating. I'm merely furthering that line of thinking.
It really looks like you are struggling to differentiate between things that people choose to pay for and choose to attend vs things that the government forces people to pay for and puts in public places of prominence. As I don't think those are remotely the same, for absurdly obvious reasons, I don't really know how to make the differences more clear.
It seems more that you just aren't able to understand the connection. Monuments to slave-owners are being torn down because we do not feel we should celebrate such people who were so involved in the atrocity, yet you don't feel that the celebration of, say, a known racist's literature, which was rooted in their hatred of "inferior" people, should now be questioned? Okay, well that's contradictory, or maybe it's just too complicated and makes you realize that flying the flag for change isn't as simple as you originally thought it would be.
Oh no, a privately funded award with the face of someone who held racist ideas! Given that knowledge, how can we justify not using public funds to purchase and maintain on public lands statues to people who fought a war solely for the right to own slaves or people who made vast fortunes selling slaves?!?!
Your downplaying of it is telling, because many black authors, and white, campaigned strongly against the award to the point where it was eventually changed, yet here you are acting like it wasn't an issue.
Never was this clearer than in the debate in 2010 surrounding the World Fantasy Award, a prestigious literary prize for fantastical fiction molded in the caricatured bust of Lovecraft himself, which a number of writers came to petition. Established in 1975 in Lovecraft’s home city of Providence, Rhode Island, the “Howard” award was intended to “give a visible, potentially usable, sign of appreciation to writers working in the area of fantastic literature, an area too often distinguished by low financial remuneration and indifference.” Like most awards named after an artist, it was intended to acknowledge Lovecraft’s precedent in the field of fantastical fiction.
But as his racism and xenophobia became more widely known and discussed, it became obvious how flippant and egregious it was to potentially award black nominees with the face of a man who once proclaimed that “the Negro is fundamentally the biological inferior of all White and even Mongolian races.” As Nnedi Okorafor, the first black person to ever win a WFA for Best Novel, put her internal conflict, “A statuette of this racist man’s head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer.”
https://lithub.com/we-cant-ignore-h-p-lovecrafts-white-supremacy/
The basic gist of the situation is the same, yet you cannot see it. A man was being celebrated for his work, yet that work was very firmly grounded in a hatred of other races. "Oh no!" Indeed, mate, indeed.
In the case of the Confederate statues, those were put up to celebrate the bad they did. That makes it difficult to forgive and forget the bad they did.
Was Colston's statue erected for his bad deeds? Not that I recall.
I'm sure that if we break things down to the sub-atomic level we can find some blurry messiness. But from here it looks more like you are struggling to find a mess, even going so far as conflating obviously different things to create a mess.
Nope, I'm merely pointing out the larger issue of hypocrisy when it comes to the cherry-picking of history in the spirit of change.
No, I think the distinctions are still pretty clear.
Your "Oh No" remark made it clear that you're about as clear on this as muddy water, mate.
