Running racism in America thread

This had zero to do with any of that drivel.

The depiction of Sacajawea in that statue is just offensive, in a fairly objective way.

When they were putting up large statues of confederate generals to send a not-s0-subtle message to black people in in that area of Virginia in the early 1900s, they created this statue as an homage to Lewis and Clark, who came from near there. It's in the same racist vein. The depiction they came up with was of her cowering beneath them. It's just a shitty statue that doesn't even match the history we all got taught, where she guided Lewis and Clark and created cultural contacts with natives they encountered along the way.

Compare that statue to the heroic depictions of her in statues created when women suffragists adopted her as a symbol. This was probably meant to be a direct answer to those statues which had been popping up in the decade before.

We don't have much of a reliable history of Sacajawea. She was largely overlooked for 100 years in the Lewis and Clark history. Once she was introduced to people, though, they did what people do. They appropriate historical figures for their own ends. In the case of that statue that was removed, someone commissioned a Lewis and Clark statue and decided to put here in there as the savage cowering in front of them.

But fight the good fight over that one.