The memorials aggrandizing Lee are a personal issue for me. I'm a Lee.
Having done some deep geneaology for my family, I discovered the Lee branch. Many in my father's family, including me, have the middle name Lee, although no one really remembered the source of it.
We are descended via my father's side from the original immigrant Col. Robert Henry Lee, who became politically powerful, and wealthy from slave brokerage.
While the memory of that is not in our family, my family's fourtunes were certainly guided by the wealth of that ancestor, built upon atrocities on people of color, the results of this are seen every day in the school to prison pipeline, income disparity and countless lives lost to violence, policing and poverty.
While most of my father's family (Trump supporters, most of them) have no sense of what our privilege has cost, my siblings and I have decided to try to come up with ways to counter the imbalance - knowing, of course, that we could never make up for the crimes that laid the groundwork for our current way of life.
Getting these monuments to the confederacy removed or at least put into context is one of those efforts. Making sure that social justice issues do NOT get sidelined in the Democratic Party is another.
Is anyone else on DU dealing with countering their family's racist past?
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