tonight we are pleased to welcome kristin hass to discuss book blunt instruments recognized in racist cultural infrastructure and memorials, museums and patriotic practices. she'll be joined in conversation by christina olsen, director of the university of michigan museum of art. well, hi, everyone. thanks for being here. i think the format for tonight

is that i'm going to ask kristin a bunch of questions about her remarkable, which hopefully you've all read and then we will time about 15 minutes for questions and answers at about 715. so that's the format. and now i'm going to give a little bit of bio of you, some of you know what i'm going to tell you. but kristin and house is professor in the department of american culture here at the university of michigan. she also director of the humanities collaboratory. and this is her third book about us and national culture. and she's also really a national public thought on memorials and museums and the culture they produce, she is the co-founder and associate director of imagining american artists and scholars in public life. and i feel very, very lucky and blessed and honored to talk to you about your book. so thank you for asking me.

and i thought would launch in with a sort of big picture. i was going to read a little bit. oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. we're already off script. you go ahead and read it and then i will launch and do what i use. this my. yeah, no, no, this one. okay, i'll take that one. okay. this will work. we'll share. we'll share over whelming feeling i have right now i love this. my god, all these people. thank you for coming. thank you for being. i thought i would start reading just a little bit to give you a sense of what's in the book. 14 at grill's me no grilling so i'm just going to read the first couple of pages of the introduction the title of which is white lives matter in march 2018. in march 2021, a group of activists calling themselves white lives matter incorporated stole a heavy stone chair from a

cemetery in selma. it was a memorial for jefferson davis. the group emailed local media with ransom terms for the memorial's the united daughters of confederacy. they included photographs of a hole being cut into the seat of a clever replica of the chair and promised to use it as a toilet unless the women of the udc hung a banner on the front of their headquarters, richmond, virginia, quoting assata shakur, the rulers of this country have always considered their property to be more important than our lives. the group asked for the banner to hang for 24 hours on friday, april ninth, 2021, the anniversary, the confederacy surrender in the civil war. unsurprisingly, the savvy udc did not take the bait. but white lives matter inc. was on to something, and the groups which did not mask cunning its name could hardly smarter, and it captured something crucial about cultural

infrastructure in the united states. the activist successfully called out the power of the ordinary of memorials in parks, museums visited by school children and routine everyday practices of patriotism. for instance, to naturalize simple untruths to make what is not true seem true and permanent in landscape. in other words, white lies matter inc. helps us to see, in a quick, vivid snapshot that lies are all around and that they really do matter. jefferson davis was the president of the confederate states for the duration of the war. he was a man who said things like slavery as it exists in the united states is a moral a social and a political blessing. and yet the plaque that stood beside the stolen memorial read was the most honest, truest gentlest, bravest, tender, manliest man.

there is an undeniable there is an undeniable contradict between believing slavery to be a moral blessing and, being the most honest, truest, gentlest, bravest, tenderest, manliest man. unless, of course, you believe in white supremacy, it is the lie that is implicit, but excuse me, the lie that is implicit in the memorial hundreds like it is that it is not an emblem of inequity violence. the lie is that it is neutral heritage, something the udc has maintained it can proudly protect without being actively racist. the lie is that these memorials are innocent relics of the past that good when the president the selma chapters of the daughter claimed to be absolutely devastated by the theft. and in 2021 she had good reason to be worried. in the days and weeks after george george floyd was murdered on may 25th, 2020, on the street

in front of cup foods in minneapolis, people across the united states and across the world took to the streets to protest. they chanted his name and called for an end to police brutality. and they toppled monuments and memorial days. this may have seemed somewhat incongruous initially, but by the end of the summer, more than 150 memorials had been knocked down by. protesters or on ceremony removed by municipal governments. almost none of them were memorial to police officers. they were they came down in the united states, in india, columbia, south africa and the uk in the united states there were mostly memorials that had stood quietly in local parks and on the grounds government building for at least a century. and they were memorials to. christopher columbus and a confederate soldiers, they had stood mute, but it seemed to become clear quite suddenly in may and june and july of 2020

that they had been doing serious work of maintaining racial hierarchies. the protesters toward them down in an effort to reject these everyday affirmations of profound inequities. and while there's plenty of room subtlety and nuance in understanding and representing even the most fraught heritage, most cultural infrastructure, like the davis chair, not built for subtlety and nuance, like the white lives matter folks, the protesters pulling down monuments were refusing to tolerate lies embedded the landscape. they were right that these monuments are an important part of cultural infrastructure, a system of meaning, meaning, meaning making that enable the brutal murder that was watched by a billion people to be committed. one police officer in front of three others. but these monuments and the thousands that still stand across the united states are only of the cultural infrastructure, the blunt

instruments. so i need you to hold it up the title of the book, the blunt instruments that work to maintain basic, basic untruths about race. blunt instruments is a field guide of sorts to racist cultural infrastructure in the united states. it is intended to be a tool to help readers identify and contextualize and name everyday aspects of. our cultural practices that seem benign or but in fact work tireless to tell vital stories about we are how we came to be and who belongs. that that was a great opening and lot of what we're going to talk about is embedded in that section. but i thought that we should begin by starting at the beginning and asking you, you

came to write blunt instruments and what some of your goals were. so one oh yeah, i had been studying war memorials since maybe i was 20 and i started studying war memorials because i really trying to figure out in a maybe kind of initially and maybe still a very naive how cultural works, what ideas are that bring people together, that make people feel like they belong or don't belong and i've always been interested in how those ideas. are connected to basic inequities in the culture. i mean, just sort of a person coming of age looking around and thinking, i know that women are less i most people i know know that women are less. but we live in a culture where men are more vulnerable to

violence, make less money. structurally, we're less. the same is true for black and brown people. we know black and brown people aren't less, but structural. we inhabit a culture in which they're less all day, every day and. so i started thinking about these things because i just really to understand, not really what makes inequity, but how it gets maintained, how we get up in the morning and put up with it and i did not expect that seems like the least sexy thing to do. i'm going to become a scholar, studies or marketing. yeah, but, but fact. it turns out that war memorials are really they're unusual sites because people are very culture makers. powerful people in the culture are very explicit. and when they are making war memorials, they are debating when they are designing, when

they are having these public conversations about who the meaning that they want to create in the world and explicitly, who gets to be part of it and who doesn't and how they think that's going to work. so i came to study war because i was interested in the work that they they do. and then studied war memorials and museums for my whole professional life, suddenly everybody was interested in, you know, during covid, i was in my pjs and i was looking at these people on cnn, but i got up, got on an and i were talking about and i, i had this i just felt like there are five things. if all these who are having this conversation in public knew about war memorials would really change the conversation. and so i felt like, you know, i better try you. and i really felt like there are a lot of people contributing

something and i'm not too i got bit of trying to contribute something. so the goal was the goals for the book were fundamentally to make the point that and i write the book about museums patriotic practices and war memorials and i really wanted to make the point that these things are tools, that there are tools that have been used in different ways by different people across time in the united very, very very effectively. and that understanding them as tools and understanding them as tools that have been used to shape who gets to belong and who doesn't is a way to start to change the story of who belongs and who doesn't. so i felt like the public conversation was super exciting, but also also not fully understanding and, not putting a lot of people. we're talking about museums, decolonize museum and people were talking about tearing down the monuments and people were losing their mind over colin

kaepernick but but people weren't really seeing these things as part of bigger system that were operating together. i thought that was an important point to make. did i answer? yeah, you totally did. so i think we'll we'll come back to a couple of things that just came up, especially that idea of maintenance that your interest was very much in how systems are maintained culturally, but wanted to turn to a question that i had from earliest reports that i heard about the book, which is your insistence clarity about the title. and i wanted ask you why you thought it was so important to call it blunt instruments and what is said about that bluntness. my first reaction is self-defense. when you're an academic, you're trained to go deeper and and always throw off the synthetic kind of way of thinking about things.

and but i wanted to be synthetic. i wanted to i wanted to make a point that didn't require a lot of subtlety and nuance and a lot of this book came out of my teaching. i taught an introduction to american studies for a long time. that was basically a history of patriotism. the united states and i started using the language of blunt instruments when i was teaching that course, i was trying to say, yes, it's important to be a good cultural critic and to sort read everything closely and to break it down. but some of the stuff is, in fact, quite blunt it's not made. as i said, about the jeffers david's chair, it's not made to be subtle. it's made to to make point that you will pick as you walk by from 20 paces. so and the other part of the title is instruments so it's important that it's blunt

because this not rocket science this is this is a big hit that you're getting and instrument it's just important to understand these are tools. yeah. so you've already mentioned the sort of structure of the book that actually broken up into three sections memorials, museums and patriotic practices. and you do a really, really clear, kind of vivid job of talking about outlining the work you've already mentioned it that you think they do or could you break down break that down for us and some examples. sure. so so so i wanted this to be a book might be of interest to scholars but i really want to be a book that people who are not necessarily scholars could read and get something out of and could use kind of as a resource. so it's structured. there's three sections each section begins with a very short introduction. this is the history memorials.

this is the story, this is how they worked. and then these are the key questions to ask if you're trying to figure out what a memorial is doing, what year was it built, who built it right, what were anxious about because memorials sort of surprising come from anxiety. and in fact one of the things that was a comfort in working on this book, which is of all day, every day and sort of meeting racism, except that nobody would build the main racist memorial if they were confident that everybody was in racist. right. this is a tool to try and maintain a particular ideology. so i lost in my count. i was one. was it made? who made it? what were they anxious about? what were they responding to? so, so have a set of questions for. and then in the section on museums i do the same thing here is a kind of history of museums how they worked in the united

states. here are the important questions to ask. if you're trying to think about how to change museums, how to rethink museums. and then here's some examples. and then i do the same structurally with the patriotic practices. you want me to talk about some things? a couple examples, yeah. so the. one example that is not a confederate memorial, but i think is a very powerful way to communicate the work that memorials can do is example of the strom thurmond memorial. strom thurmond, the longest serving. maybe the most dedicated segregationist in the history of the united states, had a lot of ugly ideas that he was not afraid to share. and when he died, the state of south carolina, put up a memorial to him and it's what you would call to mind, he's striding across the lawn, a pie

on plinth, and they carved the names of his children into the memorial. it got complicated when his mixed race, who he kept hidden a secret his whole life. he conceived this child with the 16 year old domestic african american woman who was working for his parents and did not was not public about her existence. and so whole life, when he passed, she came forward and. she asked that your name be added to the memorial which listed his children and his children. their credit said yes. and the state of south carolina had to pass a law to enable it, and then they had to carve the head change in the stone. adding her name. essie mae wasn't too complicated, but they had the change of the four, four, four children to a five. and in order to do that that's

tricky stonework and it's rough and it's a mess. and every time i see it, it raises a hair on the back of my neck because she literally trying carve her existence into the landscape in a way that's very powerful. so it's not just confederate monuments. it's these ideas are carved the landscape all around us in all kinds of interesting ways. my favorite example, the i don't know if this is my favorite examples, but thinking about how this works in museums and it almost seems like a cheap shot, but i the most vivid example is at the museum natural history in new york city, fanciest real estate, huge building, beautiful neoclassical building inscribed with the words knowledge, vision

nature and in front of it for a very long time. until 2022, there a statue, three figures, a teddy roosevelt on a horse in a uniform with a fully articular fitted saddle. everything about him was articulated in great detail. we knew name on one side. he was flanked by an unnamed unidentified, mostly naked indian man, and on the other side he was flanked by an unidentified unnamed and even more naked black man. so the 5 million kids a year who go into that museum to get knowledge about nature were there even in the museum they understand the whole thing. they understand who who matters

they understand they the whole thing. and to me, i mean, we'll talk more about museums hopefully and the way in which this is complicated in museums but the idea that people begged them to take that down for at least 50 years and they would not and it was reflected once you went inside those logics were repeated and have been trying to change in museums. but i think that's, you know, it's hard to get around that as a quick shorthand for how this in museums i write a lot about a bit about the pledge of in the section on patriotic practices which is really interesting because the pledge is about you know, it's actually kind of aspiration was written by a socialist. and the patriotic practice is that i write about in the book are they don't start out with the boot on your throat kind of

attitude that is expressed in the confederate monuments right their relationship to belonging to who who matters and is somewhat different and changes over time. so a different kind of tool gets used in different ways but i like writing about the pledge because i do a reading of a photograph, a dorothea lange photograph of these beautiful, happy little girls on a playground in san francisco with their hands, their hearts saying the pledge. and they were photographed two days before they were put in internment camps and the point that i try to make there is the pledge they're saying at the pleasure that they had in belonging was so undermined by the requirement belonging in a particular kind of way. right. and when when you are required to the pledge. and in michigan, a right wasn't

too long ago that there was a state law passed requiring to require everybody to say the pledge. it required teachers to make time, say the pledge, and as soon as your requiring a oath, you're getting into a whole kind of complicated territory around belonging, at. one of the interesting things about the pledge that that i discovered doing my research is in fact the original. instead of putting your hand on your heart, the original practice around the pledge was actually it's so similar to the nazi salute because. it was borrowed eventually by the nazis. and so during the war, practice was stopped and children were no longer required to salute like that that's why 42 of these young girls in san francisco had their hands on their heart. so i try in the book to have a

lot of these little details to give you a hint. this is what the tool looks like here. this is how it's used by these people in this moment. and this is why it matters. and this is how you can identify how to think about how to understand maybe had use these tools in new ways. that's super interesting. thank you for offering up those examples. and so partly what i'm what i hear and what i sort of began to understand and as i read the book was that the bluntness is very much about legibility. that and you tell me if that partly it's the symbols and the has to be really really legible to a lot of people so we can circle back to that. but i want to ask you a sub story that is in that in the section on memorials and it's about the daughters of the america of the of the american revolution. and they these groups, the

beginning of the century, do to play a kind of outsized role in the early history of memorial making, at least around the lost cause right. and i wondered if you could talk to us about that and why you think it is. yeah, i mean some of the the short version of the story that you get when people are defending confederate monuments is they will say these grieving mothers. these are grieving widows who built these. well a just forget it right most the confederate memorials were built between 1890 and 1920. so when life expectancy radically shorter. it is now right, though women who were building the and they were women were building the memorials may have been grandmothers aunts great aunts but they were not this was not an immediate act of grieving families. these were politically active

women in a time when they especially i was going to say, especially in the south, it's not true. they had much less access to political participation. they couldn't vote. they couldn't run for office. they couldn't be on the government boards in their communities. they they were pretty limited in terms of their political participation, but they could use their moral authority. you know, like me saying, wow, you know, so, so the confederate monuments were built by and later other monuments were built by the daughters of the confederacy, the daughters of the american revolution. and i think they developed memorials, developed as tool. they did in the united states, because these women didn't have access to other kinds of political organization and power

expression. but they form a women's club and. they could use the resources of the wealthy men that they were associated with in their communities to fundraise and build a memorial to a confederate monument, to a confederate soldier through they could make the argument that they were really very anxious to make about the importance of maintaining white supremacy. yeah. so let's turn to museums. the second section of the book and one of the points you make which you refer you've alluded to already, is that we don't even have to understand, pay attention to the details of a museum, the interior, the exhibitions, installations with that, to understand the kind of broader work, the ways in which museums support certain kinds of social cultural norms, widespread risk being among them and wondered if you could talk more about that and then maybe we'll ask a couple other a couple talk a bit more about

museums, because i have a special interest in museums. we know that well. i mean, i actually think that what happens inside really important but it's this is where you go to receive knowledge this is where you go to receive authority. this is this a kind of i don't know this is a place where you go to learn about the culture that you assume is going to have a kind of neutral a not a political ax to grind and. most museum people do not wake up in the morning and think i'm going to advance white supremacy. right. but but if they are aren't aware of the ways in which museums have done that work then then they run the risk of continuing to do that work. i mean i think we could talk about the work that tina has done in the university museum,

which is amazing. it's not our topic. i know, i know. but but you're a good example of. that kind of so the exterior of our building is similar. it's a little modest than the natural history museum in new york, but it's a similar kind of architecture. but in fact, museum was built as memorial to university of michigan students who died trying to end enslavement. and i think that's a that we don't we don't tell teams trying to work on that very specific but it it has this kind of neo there's a authority here and the assumption that people have about what they're going to get that facade are so power ful that you really i mean you know this but you really to turn what is happening in on its head i to do an assignment that i can't do anymore. tina is here and she's changed

museum but i used to i used to teach an essay on how values are expressed in museum and my students into the museum and they would back and they would say, oh my modern art doesn't include anybody who's not white. and the the art from africa is displayed as if times stopped. in fact, there was never a clock and there's still dirt on the know. it was way that museums and and art museums, science museum. they have all long been dedicated in the way that they were organized to to share knowledge. they have all all come from a place where they were organized around telling a story of the movement from savagery to civilization and it's in the dna of every institution and

responding to that understanding as tina does you walk into the museum used to walk in the museum and there were these beauties full, intense oil paintings, religious oil, which always involve a lot of bare, bare breasts and fully clothed men. right. and so you would come in and you would get european art, oil, all this stuff matters. it's important. and then you would move through the museum kind of past the work of outside that narrative. and then you would the the end of the museum was the modern art section where there were no people who were not so understanding that the museum been has been a tool part the system of telling our kids you and i went with cameron jeff to the toledo museum of art. well while i was writing the book i you guys were looking at some interesting stuff and i ended up stuck in the section on

egypt because i was so interested in toledo has an incredible collection of antiquities of the amazing work from ancient egypt. and i was thinking about all the kids who come from northern ohio, get on a bus and they come away with the idea. yeah their stuff does. nobody's trying to teach them a racist lesson, but museums are built on collecting, owning, showing in a way that contribue gets to the kids who walk by the guy on the horse in of the museum. it's a similar of thing that they get out of going to that that exhibit without a little texture. why is this. yeah did i finish answering that. yeah you did and i can just tell one little tiny story that really the point that you're

making is that when i first arrived and you've heard the but when i first arrived at ooma and i was meeting a lot of people a lot of students and faculty and docents and all kinds of folks and asking about their impressions of the museum. and a student set down early. i'd been here like maybe a month or two and she asked me, was an african american student, a junior? and he said, what are the most important collections in the museum? i said, well, you know, certainly asian most most significant collections korean, japanese, chinese art and african art. and then he said to me, well, you know, that big, very beautiful space you have here all the where all the weddings take place. a couple of you mentioned to me that you were going to go to weddings this summer. what's in that space? and i said, those are all european and american paintings within like 50 year period, not even like. and he said, well, why is it that your most important art is not in that space? where i go for all of these presidential and proposed jobs and canonical and arbor events? why is it that your best is back in the building?

and so these spaces do matter and they're highly highly symbolic and they're freighted with meaning and significance. and he said it. he said, i feel like the art that art by people who are not white does not matter in this institution, because you've you've sequestered it in the corners of the building and the big joke always among people in museums. it's like if you're not sure where going to find the african art of a native american art, just go down the basement, because that's where it will be. and usually that is where it is. the museum has had its moved installation, but we're digressing. i wanted to ask about one of the points that you make about museums, sort of about their sort of contradictory impulses. and this is a point that i relate to very, very much. and you said, you know, they're instruments of social power, but they're also intensely pleasurable and we get a lot of joy, delight from them. and i wanted you to talk about that and how tricky that is, at

least for me. yeah, no, it's very tricky. i mean, i think it's the good news because the contradiction is where the power be moving forward. right. using that the way in which it there is so much pleasure and come to museums and they anticipate it. well you know people over 13 that they're going to that they're going to experience pleasure and that they're going to have some fun and that they're going to see something that opens them up in some way. and i think. i think that does the individual artwork doesn't it doesn't have to participate in the big narrative that that the that it's it it won't be as you have. it's not going to be that once once museums decide they are going to work across the narrative that are expecting and across the practices that have been in place.

the the tool that they will be able to use is the joy people have when they come to the museum. and that's the power right. so so i the contradiction and i, i it was some parts of this were tricky to because about museums, because i like i wanted to stop every third sentence and say, you know how really great but i end up writing a lot about there is a robust group of african american museums in the united states that emerged response to all of this and starting in the 1950s. somebody had a collection in his house and when he came back from service, the military, he discovered that his neighbor, his had burned it because they thought it was dangerous material. and so he thought, okay, maybe i need to put this someplace day. so he started a movement to build african american museums, which has been very successful and there are all these wonderful institutions now that

do work that that started from a place of working against those expectations. and i think there's more work like to be done so yeah yeah i mean that would be a whole other interesting. it's like, okay, you can take a form, a tool, right? and appended or appropriate it right your own other purposes and yeah clearly that's kind of what they're doing. yeah. and i would just add i my looking at my daughter who is applying for jobs and she's graduating my first job out of college, i worked at the national museum of american history and i, i got that because i went to the museum because. i love museums and i walked into this exhibit and there was a klan robe hanging. you had to kind of almost walk around in the national museum on the national mall. and i was like, really? you can do that. you you can tell the truth, you know? and i was so thrilled by that

exhibit, which was produced by someone who was actually of this tradition of african american museums and has gone on to do amazing work. and i wrote him a letter and said, can i work for you? he said, well, i can't pay anyway. let's talk a little bit about the last section, which is about patriotic practices. i wondered, i know you earlier in your remarks, the pledge of allegiance, but i wondered if you could talk a little bit more to all of us about the work that those practices do and why they're important to scrutinize. yeah, i write about the pledge. i also write about colin kaepernick and the anthem i think is a an important story track because. he was being required to participate in patriotism and he felt like that requirement was asking him to celebrate a country that he was feeling quite alienated from by the murder of black men.

and what's interesting i think about the story is the timeline. so in 2009, the. started requiring players be on the field for the for the playing of the anthem prior to 2009 nobody was attention they had to be on the field by the time colin took a knee in 2016 and people reacting as if a bomb had been detonated in the center a stadium and people talked about standing players standing for the anthem as if it was a tradition from time immemorial. it was the bedrock of american culture. it was a rejection of military service not to stand for the anthem. and all of that was malarkey

made up history. right? the history of the anthem and the history of military service and the history of patriotism and military in the united states. and i won't go back and geek out on my early history stuff. but but a conflict hated, antagonistic at all. the story that was getting told public and the reason the league was players to be on the field in 2009. any as to why it might be a value because we engaged in some wars that were quite unpopular and we had an all volunteer military and the nfl was getting paid dollars by the department of defense for advertisements that not supposed to look like advertisements so in fact

kaepernick was up for everybody watching seemed to be making a comment about black lives matter but for the league he was an an income stream that had everything to do with recruiting more young into the united states military. so so it was a tool that was used and the federal government before the first world war, the federal government was absolutely not involved. patriotic practices producing patriotism in advertising, starting first world war, the federal government gets involved and then it is increasingly involved and especially only kind of exponentially the beginning. this the 21st century is involve with producing practices because

there's anxiety about military service and about patriotism. so i think that story, it's a distinct story from, the other stories, but it is a story about. here's a tool. the anthem that's being used by the department of defense and the league in a particular way and. then, of course, donald trump used it for his own purposes, in its own way. but the interesting thing is, captain eck took a knee for the first time in 2016 and in 2015, john produced a report saying the of defense is spending all this money on the national football league and all the other sports leagues and. it's it's outrageous because they are trotting these people who are risking their lives in iraq. for $22,000 a year out on the field as they're doing it out of

the goodness of their heart, when in fact, they're a league. that's not suffering for cash, was doing it to make more. so for me, understanding that tool and how it's being used, especially who is in the united states military, all that seem really important. yeah, but i'm going to ask you just one or two more questions and then we're going to turn to the q&a. we're doing okay. time. so i want to turn us to summer 2020 and george murder and what happened then to like what? what the role of that murder was in the kind of cultural infrastructure landscape that you had that you have been describing, and whether all memorials treated the same way after that or whether that different depending on the on

the kind of memorial. and cisco they took down the grant memorial, which cracked me up like really. no, i think it was a i think is a good time the most interesting thing to me about what happened in 2020 was that the covid and everything else but around a cultural infrastructure is what what was unspoken, what was not on our radar was suddenly everybody knew, okay, what are we you know, people were locked and then they they saw this thing and we had seen these other murders. we had watched them filmed on, you know, on phones we had oh, we this is something that has been going on the entire history, the united states. but in that moment, it seems that we we had watched enough of

them to feel a kind of level of outrage and fury like, why does this keep happening? and the fact that people turned so quickly to let's take down the confederate monuments, let's go in the night, pull them over to demonstrate that on some level, people really know what the work that those things were doing, that it wasn't that they were embedded in the landscape, were naturalized, but were very much aware of the work they were doing and and i think that. the daughters of the confederacy, as far as the confederate monuments go and the sons of confederate veterans are, you know smarter and ahead, the people who want to bring the memorials down because starting. in 2015, when dylann roof murdered those people four people in the basement of the church, they started develop legal campaign to protect

confederate monuments across the south. and many of the memorials that came down are still in legal battles. and well, come back up. you of north carolina. it's very statue on that campus silent sam which loved and described as till you read the speech at the dedication which one of the people brags about whipping a black woman with a horsewhip. her skirts were in in shreds because looked sideways at a white woman so. this is that. so this is the speech given the memorial dedication in 1913. but when the memorial removed from the campus in 2021, the sun of the confederate veterans sued and the university ended up having to pay them.

$2.5 million. so 2020, this big, but none of it is over none of it is over. in order to transfer our infrastructure, the stories that we tell ourselves about, we are in the culture and who belongs we need to keep working on the museums. we need to understand the patriotic practices and we we need to keep keep them on the fight, on the monument front. which is a ton. yeah. all right, people might have okay, let's let's turn it over to all of you. i don't want to interrupt if you had. no, i think that your last was really kind of one of the one of the answered one of the questions that have even when i was reading the book, which is your book is so so effective and successful at, revealing and describing what has seemed or what the culture understands or takes in to be neutral and benign and invisible and and so

i think the the question that i had was like, well, well, it's knowledge enough. this knowledge inoculate. what do you do then? i think you kind of answered it in terms of you do the work inside museums and you do the work of coming up with new monuments and but that's a whole other book that's and that's what so i think we should turn it over to all of you for questions. and i can we can put this mike out in the oh, i don't know if there's another one, but. oh no, that's true, that's true. but well maybe we don't even need them. but who, who has questions for kristen. well, this certainly you've done a lot of study is washington dc and you talked a lot about confederacy and those memorials and monuments. you can't throw a baseball and i know monument in d.c. so according to who did when did

they do it what was their anxiousness? how did that was that a reaction to what was going on in the confederacy or the former confederacy? great question. the there were a lot of small individual union monuments, and that's most of the union monuments were built in the more immediate postwar period. so the 1870s, 1880s, as opposed to 1890, 1920 and most actual individual people. so silent sam in north carolina is a generic soldier. he's not named person. most the statues. in fact, they're the sort of lone figure of the union soldier is not as not nearly as prevalent those mostly almost all of them to individual people. and they're not the center of this, the sort of cultural

sacred space in washington which is the mall. so the national mall is interesting. the national mall was they started to build it in 1791 from 1791 to 1982, when the vietnam was dedicated. there were no war memorials, no, they were memorials to great thinkers about democracy, but not war memorials. and the story that the story about memorials in d.c. in the 20th century is that memorials went out of style after the confederate memorials were built. so about 1922, 1980, nobody was paying attention. it just wasn't tool that people were using in the culture. the vietnam veterans memorial changed that in a very dramatic way. it's completely transformed the national mall because it was a big, very popular memorial. so that made service in an

american war seem tragic rather than heroic. and again, department of defense military leads had a heart attack of military. we can't have all these middle school kids getting off a bus learning that it's really sad, you know? and so the mall was transformed. the korean war memorial was built, the world war two memorial was built a women's memorial was built, a bunch of other memorials were built on mall in response to that. so that's the sort second memorial boom in the united states. and that's the story. and it's also it's interesting. it's the story about reshaping militarism after vietnam, making war great again is really what that is trying to do. so in a follow up to that, with the memorials that are more generalized, the memorials that

are built to a specific person, do you think that it is harder? like is there more cultural significance placed on the honorable you know, the honorable dead, the weight of honorable dead, who people use to hold these up is it harder to confront it when it is a general statue like silence. sam is it harder to fight that weight that is the respect towards all of these great, honorable dead? who you know? or is it easier when? you have one person to fight against who you can hold up and say they did these things. yeah, great question is it easier to look at the writings of jefferson davis and say, yeah, not not so doesn't hold up so well in the 21st century as opposed to a generic figure of the soldier. and i think the generic figure of the soldier is much harder. and it also falls on the end. i write about this a lot in the

book, but under the umbrella of heritage, right? that's our he is our heritage, not necessarily in my bloodline, but he is in the sort of our bloodline. and so i think it is much the in the confederacy, the individual figures are lee, jeb, stuart and jefferson davis and so beloved. and they continue to be so beloved they are hard to challenge in a way. but i, i think your question is kind of indicates maybe the individual generic lone soldier is harder and to to take on and i think you're right, it's. kind of. i think so. did you encounter any kind of

trace of the lost cause because because, you know, that is like the clash white grievance, right. and what i found so interesting about in my in my studies of post-treatment early 20th century. i mean we've got to remember the klan resurged in the north in the 20th century and i think what's really interesting is that these confederate statues and memorials you know northerners didn't think anything of them. you know, i mean they were. and the reason you know, at the time when you offered about the union memorials right after the war, right. and then these confederate ones coming after, you know, in the mid 1920s or so is, you know, by the end the 19th century, northerners don't want to hear about the war anymore. that, you know, they don't want to hear about slavery. they want the south to deal with

the freedmen. just do what the hell you. and there's this rhetoric of reconciliation. and so i just see, you know, these confederate memorials going up with the kind of knowledge that northerners going to think they're okay. yeah, a lost cause. all day, every day for for as far as the confederate memorials. yeah. and the lost cause as an ideology that defends without being explicit, uses terms like indentured black laborers. right. that that that explicitly dripping with blood but is right up on the edge of it. yeah. so the lost the i mean one of the sub sections of the book is called how the lost cause one. okay, so the last thing it related to the lost cause is that you know it kind of sank

fight right it kind of sacred these memorializing, you know, these grieving people. right. and you were disabused this disabused us of the lies. but the lost really, you know, it plays to our wanting identify with the underdog, you know, and i mean and that whole lost cause thing in the south is like we lost. but morally, you know, we won. and the language, the histories is, the south lost the war, but they won the peace. right. and and that we lost. but we you know that we is a really important part of this story. there's a there's a credit, a powerful op ed written by, a written by a blanking on her name, caroline randall williams.

and the first line, you know, she's the think the title is my body is a confederate monument. and the first line of the op ed is i have raped colored skin and that is my heritage. and i'll tell you what i want. this is my heritage. want them to come down. and so the kind of work even having to do now the work of making argument the lost cause is not innocent right it's is it's important part of what people are trying to do now. somebody has to ask one more question because. we can't end on that note. let me just repeat. people needed to build these monuments because they knew everybody wasn't mean, right. okay. i can ask forward looking. okay. i wonder you would like to say a few words about your thoughts of about the future of mine in high

aspirationally speaking and perhaps since we're talking statues and monuments to people focusing on those it sounds like one part of the future that you envision or the book implicitly describes is dealing with the monuments that are out there that need to be dealt going forward. i find myself wondering whether, i'm coming out of all these years of research reflection, you are inclined to think of a pathway that's more about creating different of monuments to different kinds of people in different kinds of causes or, whether you are beginning to question the validity of that form of public commemoration. thank you. i'm of two minds. i'm torn because on the one hand, i think the future of commemoration should be people and communities should get together. and it should be because something is they want to express something important about who they are and they should work collectively to come

up with an idea and a design and i really think that's the way commemoration should happen. it should come from the community. it shouldn't be an organization like the daughters are just one slice of a community. so i really think that's how it should be. on the other hand, they were very effective at using their tool and the memorials that are designed by committee memorials that are, you know, a lot of people are doing very cool work getting kids to i don't know like make things express themselves all of which is fantastic but never be against that but in a way that that work is a lesson effective use of the tool does that make sense so the that the instrument less powerful and less blunt and i think that's a good thing i'm

not advocating for more confederate memorials. to be clear. but i think it's an it question. i think an interesting question going forward. do you do you stick with the powerful hit that will work from 50 paces or do you try do something more subtle and complicated complicated? i don't know. i think on that now we should thank you for your remarks. patience.