TO THE EDITOR:
At the March 25 UNC Board of Trustees meeting, College Republicans Chairman Frank Pray explained that the group supports renaming Saunders Hall, but opposes the placement of a plaque on Silent Sam.
Pray said the monument memorializes “our heritage” and honors “our ancestors.” Who is “we”? It could only be white Southerners. White heritage? Those words reek of white supremacist hate — whiteheritage.org will bring you to a “White Nationalist Community.”
But really, what could white heritage possibly refer to except the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples in the New World and beyond?
Our ancestors raped, pillaged and murdered the continent’s original inhabitants and enslaved Black Africans at an unimaginably horrific scale.
The Republicans’ claim that Silent Sam is only about Southern victims of Union violence is disingenuous, especially given that Silent Sam was erected during a Ku Klux Klan resurgence and that at its dedication Julian Carr spoke of the “protection of the Anglo-Saxon race.”
Rather, let us examine the visceral subtext of their statement: Silent Sam is about whiteness and reinscribing white dominance, and the statue has a far greater symbolic value than the name of a classroom building.
