The Trump administration announced this week that it would be restoring two Confederate monuments in Washington.

One, a statue of Confederate general and likely Ku Klux Klan member Albert Pike was torn down by protesters with ropes and chains during the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. The other, the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, originally commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was removed on the recommendation of an independent commission in 2022.

At a moment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mass round-ups, thoroughgoing assaults on civil rights and welfare, and an ongoing U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, the return of Confederate statues may seem a minor insult atop grave injuries. The struggles to keep our neighbors safe, to protect imperiled people are without question more urgent.

The monuments, however, are more than a symbolic, base-baiting distraction. They are part of the architecture of President Donald Trump’s re-whitening of America. They must fall again.

Monuments to racism license racist violence. White supremacists, for their part, know this well.

When hundreds of far-right extremists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they saw the removal of Confederate statues as a material challenge to white power. Affirming a renewed Trumpian era of unconstrained white supremacist organizing, the deadly Unite the Right rally had been called under the banner of protecting the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee, which had been ordered for removal.

Trump infamously used the statue protest to launder white supremacist violence. “Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” the president said. “The press has treated them absolutely unfairly,” he said of the neo-Nazi rally attendees.

An Act, Not a Symbol

It is for good reason that Black........

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