Societies grow and change, and acknowledging offensiveness is a testament to progress.
Take Columbia University. Originally King’s College (named for King George II), it was changed to Columbia College in 1784. Citizens acknowledged the harmful connotation of having an institution named for their oppressor, so they changed it.
Nobody thinks that renaming King’s College was erasing history, nor is it. Nobody thinks that changing Kings County to Brooklyn was pandering to liberal sensitivity. People see this change as a triumph over corrupt governments.
These new Americans were people who had broken the chains of tyranny and fought for their freedoms. Tearing down statues of King George III was liberation; it was society never forgetting the past, vowing to be better than it, but refusing to commemorate it. A statue is not an artifact. It is a glorification of the individual. If an individual does not deserve to be glorified, he shouldn’t have a monument in his honor.
Just in the sense that we should not commemorate those who tax us unfairly, we should not commemorate those who explicitly fought for the institution of slavery (even if the depicted didn’t personally own slaves! he’s still being idolized as a figurehead by those who want him to justify bigotry). We should not name our high schools after advocates of rape. We should not celebrate holidays in the honor of genocidal maniacs.
And yet, we persist, largely because the oppressed in the aforementioned examples are people of color and women. When the oppressed is a white male, even if that oppression is essentially what's happening in American territories today (taxation? check; representation? not so much), the public eye acknowledges the need to stop respecting the oppressor. When the oppressor is the white man himself, and his victims are not, it’s brushed off as “oversensitivity.”
And just like post-revolutionary America stopped commemorating the bad guy, we need to do the same. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to grow.
