Erasing History

Because of the recent and ongoing racial tension in the wake of the killing of young Black Man, the process of erasing history via toppling of statues, names of teams and products based on historically minority names and deleting or erasing number of racist scenes in movies is continuing unabated. Even some famous people on social media have been trying to defend themselves in the face of their post of past videos which have become now taboo due to their racist content. Although these people are trying to defend their behavior and apologizing for it and even deleting it, it seems it is this moment of reckoning that no amount of apologies or reeducation of sorts is coming to their rescue. Lets start with statues for instance, it seems no historic figure statue is safe how as their past racist attitude have overshadowed their achievements and people are just fed up and trying to topple their statues and in its place trying to either erect a politically correct one or just erasing them, but is this way to do it, I have my doubts. Although I understand that is so called cancel culture is trying to correct the wrongs done before but by erasing them, people would not know what sort of people were at that time and place and how their beliefs came to shape at that particular time in history. It seems like the people trying to erase these are saying that part of history never happened. And when it never happened, people would not be able to learn, how far the current era has come from those dark and unjust era.

The same goes with the erasing of some of the most racist pieces in media as some of the companies are trying to erase scenes which were okay for that era (rightly or wrongly) but it should not be shown now. It would have been more appropriate to mention those times of history when these movies of made and explain that era  and preserve this past so that people know how must injustice was there at that time. But by completely erasing it from media, it seems nothing happened at that time and those times were the same as today. I don’t believe in this erasing an important part of history. Also books should be read of that era but with a side note that it was done at that moment and it should not be done then and it should never be done instead of ignoring and sweeping under the carpet.

The changing of the brand names to less controversial ones is a welcoming sign and needs to done for which I once agree but this will take time to change due to marketing and other costs and time related to it. The process has started so let’s see how far this phenomenon will go but it is promising.

All I am saying is that there are certain aspects of history that you don’t want to erase but learn from it and teach the next generation the dark times in our history but to completely erase it will be ignoring what had happened before and unless the people are reminded about what kind of past they had they will not be able to create a new future based on learning from their past mistakes.