11 Quotes by Connor Towne O'Neill

This is what ideology does. We don’t adapt our view based on the facts at hand,  we assemble facts based on our ideology.  We remember what we like. And white Americans are well practiced in this magical thinking, this selective memory. American exceptionalism dictates that we are entitled to a good history as our birthright. Received wisdom that, in the defense of our good name, encourages white Americans to be less than critical about our past.

Even though Confederate monuments are extensively about remembering the past, "[they] can also be about facilitating forgetting... the public is encouraged to see the past in one way. So inherently it is being encouraged not to remember another part of the past.

In that way, they [monuments] are a reflection of the times in which they are erected as much as they are a reflection of the times they seek to commemorate. You can think of them, Alderman went on, as monuments to the power of the people who erect them, rather than as solely of the person depicted.

Growing up in the North had fostered in me a sense that I was somehow exempt from the legacy of the Civil War and, for that matter, the racial madness of the country

Northerners were distanced from the violence, from the inhumanity of the practice [of slavery], but were implicated all the same

Jim Crow laws and lynchings defined and enforced the racial caste system while letting the white man know that, no matter his class, he stood above black people. The bucket my have had spit in it, but at least it was yours

I can reject every tenet of the Confederacy and yet the fact remains that, in fighting to maintain white supremacy, Forrest sought to perpetuate a system tilted in my favor. Forrest fought for me. The work was to understand the proximity, not the distance

The aspirations of our founding documents are indeed commendable, but in order to maintain moral authority, our collective memory holds that we have already achieved them. As many a flag-pin wearing politician will tell you, that’s what makes us the greatest nation in the history of the world.

But if we are ever to gain a clearer sense of who we’ve been, and thus who we are as white Americans, we are going to need to revise the story.