Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…federate statues there, and it– I used them to talk about different strains of memory and used recon– They’re– The Lee, the main tenor of the Lee statue when it went up was this reconciliationist Lee. He, Lee wanted the nation back together. Lee at Appomattox, that kind of stuff. Didn’t have anything to do with Jim Crow or white supremacy, although all the people who put them up probably would’ve– Clearly, we would consider them racist. They were in favor of white supremacy. But you don’t need statues in the post-war South and the Jim Crow South. You have the police force, state law, local law, state troopers. That’s what enforces white supremacy, not statues. The historian in me likes to use them as part of the historical record, interpret them, use them to explain different parts of U.S. history. That’s how I used them. Having said all that, I did, I do, did, and still do believe that it should be a local issue. If a locality decides they don’t want them up anymore, then don’t have them up anymore. I think if we ignore history, we’re gonna be doomed to repeat it. I think that’s… We should never censor books. We should read books. We should read Mein Kampf. We should read books that capture a certain moment in history, even if it’s a hateful moment in history, even if it’s a destructive moment in history. We need to understand- Or have them read texts written at the time that have language that we wouldn’t use now. It helps you understand the ti- It’s, it’s- There are a lot of hard edges in the past. There are a lot of nice edges too that make you feel good, but there are a lot of really hard edges in the past, and if you’re gonna be serious about coming to terms with history, you need to accept that and deal with them and talk about them and not just try to erase them, I think. There are a lot of books that people won’t read now. I taught a graduate seminar at one point on foundational 19th century texts, and one of the texts I was gonna… that I assigned in the class was Huckleberry Finn. And a lot of the students said they wouldn’t read Huckleberry Finn because they knew it had language in it that they… And they didn’t wanna see those words.…

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