Don't Destroy Cultural Artifacts. Contextualize.

When I was in college back at the tail-end of the 90's, I took a class on the earliest days of cinema, which covered everything from the very first silent films to, roughly, The Wizard of Oz. Among the movies on the syllabus? The Birth of a Nation. Yes, that's right: I was required to watch D.W. Griffith's paean to the Ku Klux Klan. My professor didn't impose this requirement because he was eager to indoctrinate us all on the glories of white supremacy. Like 99% of the academics in his field (probably), he was a proper lefty. No: we were required to watch this movie because, regardless of its repugnant message, my professor believed it to be a seminal work from a purely artistic standpoint. Now, I'm sure other students of film will take issue with this aesthetic judgment, and that's perfectly fine. Debate to your heart's content. But personally, I'm glad Dr. What's-His-Name didn't expunge The Birth of a Nation from the record simply to soothe our modern-day, more enlightened sensibilities.

Now let me veer off in another direction: A few years ago, I visited Stone Mountain in Georgia -- not because I, a transplanted Yank, have any real love for the traitorous Confederates pictured there, but because I was concerned about its possible loss. (I literally texted to a friend that I wanted to see it before "some apparatchik decides to sandblast that thing.") Whatever you may say about its subject matter, said carving took the work of multiple artists and several decades to complete and shouldn't simply be ground into powder to satisfy our current moral impulses. (And I'd just like to note, for the record, that every single person in my Sky Car could separate the artistic achievement of the carvers from the problematic history just as easily as I -- even though I was the only one who was white. Weird. It's almost like normal people of any color can look at questionable artifacts from bygone eras without getting the vapors.)

It's creepy, this yen our radicals have for erasing our history -- this Year Zero mentality that imagines we can eradicate racism forever simply by clearing away everything that's been tainted by it. And it's also wrong-headed. All that icky stuff that dots our cultural landscape? If you advocate for the disposal of such things, you are, quite frankly, missing many important nuances. Gone with the Wind might overly romanticize the Civil War-era South -- but, as many on Twitter have observed, it also netted the first Oscar ever awarded to an African American. Erase Gone with the Wind and you erase the achievement of Hattie McDaniel.

There's a better path than wanton, feral iconoclasm. You can put Confederate statues in museums -- or, if that's not possible (perhaps because, like the Stone Mountain carving, they're much too large to transport), put plaques beside them that fully explain their existence. You can erect accompanying installations that honor civil rights activists and abolitionists. You can put content warnings in front of uncomfortably racist movies. (I'm honestly okay with this compromise if it means we avoid outright censorship.) Do whatever you want -- so long as it's creative and not simply destructive.

After World War II, Poland could've razed Auschwitz to the ground and nobody would've objected. But instead, it's been left as a memorial to human cruelty. Similarly, if permitted to remain, our offensive statues and reprehensible movies could provide opportunities to critically reflect upon our mistakes. We should consider this option before we start applauding today's leftist vandals.