Shannon Watkins of the Martin Center devotes her latest column to left-wing campus activists’ campaign to transform the landscape of college campus monuments.
Today’s radical left has embarked on a quest to purge college campuses of their controversial histories. These “social justice warriors” not only believe themselves licensed to tear down statues—they view it as their sacred duty to rid universities of monuments that do meet their standards of political correctness.
But merely removing statues they deem to be offensive is not enough for these activists. Instead, they are demanding that campuses be remade according to their radical vision. …
… There is no better example of the activist crusade on campus memorials than at Duke University in North Carolina. In a recent report entitled “Activating History For Justice at Duke,” several students, staff, and faculty members documented the history of Confederate or “white supremacist” statues and mapped out their locations on Duke’s campus.
The project’s goal is two-fold: First, the authors of the study hope to expose past and ongoing inequities at Duke by mapping out and calculating the disproportionate ratio of memorials of whites to those of minority groups. They argue that prior Duke officials ensured that white hegemony would be visibly memorialized on campus, while the stories of oppressed groups would go unseen and untold.
Second, the activists aim to rectify past abuses by tearing down statues of whites and putting up memorials that more accurately reflect the pro-“diversity” values of the Duke community.
