Professor Addresses Push To Remove Confederate Monuments With Rich Zeoli
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Christopher Rabb, from the Fox School of Business at Temple University, addressed the calls to rename infrastructure and remove monuments commemorating heroes of the Confederacy linked with racism in the aftermath of the shooting last month at a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Talking with Rich Zeoli on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, Rabb dismissed attempts to compartmentalize difficult issues like racism and the impact of slavery by simply removing controversial names from buildings.
"It's not going to change anything. We can deal with the symptoms or we can deal with the root causes. The irony is that there's a lot of northerners and a lot of liberals who think it's a foregone conclusion to tear down these buildings and change the names without addressing the systemic issues."
He stated that racism must be addressed with more than empty rhetoric for real change to occur.
"We don't actually talk about the actual systemic policies and the families that were really responsible for the worst of the worst and that, to me, I think is a bigger issue. Let's address that. Changing the name is not going to change the history, it's not even going to change policies, which affect people's lives."
Ultimately, Rabb said we don't know enough about our own history to understand the ramifications it has on our culture today.
"We first have to know what the history is. There's a difference between the past, the past is that which has already happened. The history is how we tell that story. We can change history, but we can't change the past,...We don't know because in this country, we do not really honor history, we do not honor that type of intellectual discourse that we should and once we start doing that, we can start figuring out how we want to live in a society that is inclusive and fair. But until then, we're delusional."
