Rant about the military bases/monuments:
It's not just the military bases-the National Park Service runs huge military parks at battlefields across the country that are chock full of Confederate apologia.
In my hometown as a kid, which is 75% African American in the most poverty stricken part of America, there's a
large military park full of Confederate and Union monuments. They (to an extent, even the Union ones) are grotesque ; an obscenity that has no place of federally funded grounds. The whole place needs to be reworked to respect the need to understand history, but not to boost Lost Cause framing and romanticize treason.
Civil War monuments and parks should be reimagined, don't erase the war but do make it clear that it was an outrageous, revolting thing to protect a stratified society that had no place in the America. These places should be ugly places where we look horrible things in the face for what they are.
Sorry for the derail, I wanted to say this because it's not right for a community of color to have to see this every day on the way to work nor is it right that a community feels they have to accommodate people who have horrible beliefs about the Civil War just to put food on the table. And it's super not right for it to happen due to taxpayer dollars.
www.chicagofed.org
