Lots of people have been pushing back at this train wreck of an article in the Chronicle, and for good reason. chronicle.com/article/Histor… There is so much wrong with Zimmerman's piece, but this passage is what made me spit out my coffee: /1 
Talk about Projection: Zimmerman's whole article is an exercise in condescension from a privileged white male academic who has never had to navigate a landscape riddled with physical and metaphorical reminders that some people think he is less than human. /2
His title is also problematic, implying that historians have been "silent" about Silent Sam. No, historians have been quite active in the debate. What he really means is "historians who agree with me" have been silent. And that's an important distinction. /3
Why haven't historians "ended their silence" to argue the best place for Silent Sam--a literal monument to white slaveholder supremacy!!--is to remain on campus to "educate" about the past? Zimemrman asks. Because we don't want to vocally support shitty arguments, I answer. /4
Zimmerman, as @KevinLevin has ably demonstrated, conflates memorialization with education, which leads him to argue that we can never understand the past fully if we do not memorialize it--as if memorials were the only historical sources we have. /5
Zimmerman equates critics of Silent Same remianing on campus--which is, again, a literal embodiment of white supremacy on a university campus in the year of our lord 2018--with those who wish to silence the past instead of reckon with it. /6
Of course, the irony here is that the folks who raised that statue in the first place-the UDC and Lost Causers in the early 1900s-are the ones who sought to silence their past, and who certainly did not want to reckon with it. And Zimmerman is endorsing their argument. How? /7
Look at the way Zimmerman conceives of "history," in his belief removing Silent Sam will cause us to miss out on vital aspects of "history." In this conception of 'history', it's clear that Zimmerman is only thinking of white people. I doubt he consciously realizes that, even. /8
What we get in Zimmerman's screed, then, is another example of the all-too-common white insistence that the violence and pain inflicted on Black bodies be put into the service of "educating" whites who refuse to do that work themselves. /9
And his tactic of wrapping himself in high-minded rhetoric about honesty & education, and how any less would be "condescension," is the *chef's kiss*
Z:"I'm not trying to tell people of color they're wrong about what racism is."
Z: *spends an entire essay doing exactly that*
/10
Z:"I'm not trying to tell people of color they're wrong about what racism is."
Z: *spends an entire essay doing exactly that*
/10
If your first reaction to people of color and their allies wanting to remove a symbol of violent white supremacy from their college campus is to rush to the barricades in defense of the "historical value" of that symbol, you might want to sit with that a minute. /11
Maybe Zimmerman should have "remained silent" on this one. Just sayin' /fin
