I'm surprised you chose this as the prime example. I think things surrounding George Floyd protests are more apt examples (tearing down arbitrary statues, cancel culture, CHOP/CHAZ, social media mobs, etc).
Similarly, US police have been routinely murdering people for years. What social media has done is allow the creation of a "headless" protest movement that can outrun attempts to take it down.
In both cases, some people have leapt in and gone too far because they enjoy the chaos, but don't let that obscure the real issues.
No, the problem of social media is reactionary movements arising against entirely fake problems, like "pizzagate".
Christopher Columbus and Francis Scott Key aren't arbitrary? It's not like they were removed by a democratic process. The majority had no say. A loud minority decided they needed to come down for arbitrary reasons and did it without permission. Anyone challenging them would be browbeaten by the loud minority mobs on social media and cancelled (employers pressured to fire them, etc.). Loud minorities have effectively been making entire corporations cower and kowtow on social media during recent weeks.
The last line of defense for conservatives is "well actually there's a silent majority that thinks otherwise" and "actually most people don't care, they're just virtue signaling". And this works well when the Fox+ apparatus are the ones creating boogeymen out of minor things like CHAZ.
That's a given, but it's arbitrary in that he's not generally recognized as a "symbol of slavery" like Confederate flags or statues are, so it's just minorities taking advantage of turmoil to bypass the democratic process and impose their will on everyone.
On a side note, I personally think it's wrong to retroactively "cancel" historical figures because we now judge their actions to modern morals. It's better to recognize they were victims of their time and not judge them as harshly - "with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" and all.
Most of the founding fathers had slaves, but let's face it, most of us would have had slaves as well had we been born in their shoes. If we really decide it's a good idea to hold historical figures to modern standards, and cancel them if they fail the test, prepare for people in 2525 to retroactively cancel us and all of our heroes because we don't live up to the lofty (unknown) morals of 2525.
> Regardless, corporations are not saying BLM because some tiny segment of the country thinks that.
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about meaningless virtue signalling that corporations attempt to try to ingratiate the small, but extremely loud, mobs on social media (think GitHub changing master branch name). It's a corporation's worst PR nightmare to be harangued by the mob on social media.
Putting up a statue of Lee was whatever the opposite of virtue signalling is - vice signalling?
He's not recognized as a symbol of plantation slavery because it didn't exist at the time. But he enslaved the native population of Hispaniola and was incredibly inhumane and cruel to them. So much so that the Spanish crown "canceled" him. Crazy, right?[1] He also never set foot on the US mainland. There aren't really any good reasons to have statues of the guy around.
> Most of the founding fathers had slaves
Is anyone taking down statues of Jefferson, Washington, Adams and co? You're drawing a false equivalence between them and Confederate leaders.
Confederate leaders engaged in high treason, and took up arms against their countrymen to defend their right to own other human beings. They deserve to be "canceled". There was already a public hearing about all of this 160 years ago. It was called the Civil War and they lost. The only reason these people weren't tried and executed for treason is because the Union saw fit to offer generous terms in order to end the conflict quicker and save lives (note how it never occurred to the Confederates that they too could save the lives of their own people, if only they gave up on their determination to own other human beings).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Accusatio...
On the other hand, they were (at least those vary many who had sworn oaths to the federal Constitution that were broken in rebellion) permanently barred by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (not coincidentally the same one that expressly imposed due process and equal protection constraints on the States) from public service, federal or state, unless rehabilitated by a 2/3 vote of both houses of Congress. It seems silly to honor and celebrate people whose acts against the country were so extreme as to warrant the creation of such a bar in response.
A majority of the nation supports the Statement "Black Lives matter" a Majority of the nation supports reforming the police and holding them accountable. And a majority of the nation supports ending systemic racism in our laws and institutions
BLM as movement / organization however has many many positions that are not supported by the majority, the organizers are self described Social Marxists, the BLM Foundation web site speaks of breaking down the nuclear family, and with in the movement is also an undertone of socialism even communism none of which is supported by the Majority of the nation
I'd wager that a majority of the nation knows there's no "systemic" racism in our laws and institutions, but does support ending the institutional problems that affect everyone who enters the justice system.
I would agree that not everything that is claimed to be racism based is in fact racism based, alot of it is Class based as well. But to say there is NO racism in the law is also an position that is not supported by the historical record
It's hotly debated topic. Sometimes, statistics clearly show that some system has a racial bias. But often it's misleading because the variable the system is _actually_ selecting might be poverty, not race. The racial bias only appears due to the fact that <race> is disproportionately impoverished.
The biggest factor keeping someone from succeeding in the US, is intergenerational poverty, not skin color. Black and brown immigrants have high success rates in America, because they do not have intergenerational poverty. Black and white people from impoverished families struggle in America. The problems of black citizens in the inner cities are very similar to the problems of white people in rural trailer parks.
If we focused on dealing with the problem of intergenerational poverty, we might make a lot of progress in improving the lives of both black and white Americans. However, the rich elites of all races might see their money And influence diminish. So they use race to divide us.
I’ve been calling for the cancellation of Columbus since at least 2015. In part because he was a genocidal maniac. But mainly because it would give us an excuse to turn Columbus Circle in DC into a proper intersection.