Once we take down Confederate statues, Texans must still grapple with monsters in the past.
My great-grandfather, José-María Arana, was a racist.
My great-grandfather carried his message throughout Northern Mexico, making speeches in working-class towns like Cananea—whose poor copper miners he thought ripe for radicalization—and urging city and state leaders to restrict the types of businesses that Chinese immigrants could run, relegate them to ghettos, and expel themI’ve thought increasingly about my great-grandfather and his ignoble legacy as I’ve settled into life in Texas, where the Confederate cause is memorialized on statues,...
It is a lie easily debunked by looking at Texas’ Ordinance of Succession, which laid out the state’s own reasoning for withdrawing from the union. The document declares that Blacks were “rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race” and that “the servitude of the African race … is mutually beneficial to both bond and free” as well as ordained by God. Even the monument’s Confederate death count, scholars have pointed out, is inflated.
It was perhaps easier to dismiss them before the Obama and Trump presidencies brought the Nazis and white, Christian nationalists out of the woodwork, when it was at least a bit more plausible to reassure oneself that “America is getting better.” It’s become harder to think of racism as a healing wound on the body politic when white nationalists demonstrate openly in public and Republicans in the Legislature try to ensure K-12 students only get taught a sanitized fairy tale about Texas history.
My great-grandfather has no monuments dedicated to him, nor do I think he deserves any. What he represents is too corrosive to memorialize.
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