Down Along with That Devil's Bones Quotes

“The monument immortalizes; the memorial mourns. ... Memorials, in other words, want to hold us to account.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“This is what ideology does. We don’t adapt our view based on the facts at hand,  we assemble facts based on our ideology.  We remember what we like. And white Americans are well practiced in this magical thinking, this selective memory. American exceptionalism dictates that we are entitled to a good history as our birthright. Received wisdom that, in the defense of our good name, encourages white Americans to be less than critical about our past.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Knowledge alone cannot make the nation more just or equitable, nor does it create or change policy. Knowledge alone cannot undo what's been done in America's name.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“During the American Revolution, New Yorkers took down the statue of King George. After World War II, Allied troops diligently removed Nazi symbolism from occupied Germany. After the Battle of Baghdad in 2003, American Marines toppled the statute of Saddam Hussein. But after the American Civil War, statutes of the losers started to go up instead.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“It's all too easy and too obvious for a Yankee to traipse into a Southern cemetery and cloth his Northern pearls. Robert Penn Warren called this instinct the 'treasury of virtue' - the white Northerner's feeling that, by dint of our affiliation with the Union, the great, emancipating army, well, then we were (and remained) morally upstanding, unimpeachably good. It was a feeling that could render us 'happy in forgetfulness' the Civil War like an event horizon beyond which our own pasts vanish.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“A city with black and white neighborhoods, black and white churches, black and white schools, black and white histories, black and white memories would have black and white monuments, too.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“You can think of them [Monuments] as monuments to the power of the people who erect them, rather than as solely of the person depicted. [Monuments] are double-jointed, holding the present in the past, the past in the present.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Free, pure, Christlike; tawny, black, the Devil - these were their notions of self and others. And it is by this formula that the early white Americans could abide the contradictions inherent in founding a nation based on principles of life and liberty on property that was stolen land.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“I do think that there is a need for folks who are not of African descent but who have in any way, shape, or form benefited not only from slavery but from systemic racism that has survived beyond slavery, to be able to acknowledge that," she explained. But not by taking blame for the actions of an ancestor; it's not about blame-placing it or taking it. Instead, Wells said, the idea is to see past an individual's feelings or actions to the systems built to protect the privilege and fortune amassed by some through the deprivation of others. We have to recognize the injury and care about those who have been harmed, she said, then we have to see the systems that produce and perpetuate those injuries. And to do that, we need to use our sense of the past to hone our awareness of the present”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“If only we would sit at bus stops in the discomforting silence that comes with the knowledge that we are instead antagonists, that we are implicated, if only passively, in a centuries-long campaign of oppression and extraction. A campaign waged in our name and for our pockets. Not the most pleasant way to pass the time, I admit, which is probably why we've developed such extraordinary ways to avoid doing it. But if we are ever to gain a clearer sense of who we've been, and thus who we are as white Americans, we are going to need to revise the story”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“I can reject every tenet of the Confederacy and yet the fact remains that, in fighting to maintain white supremacy, Forrest sought to perpetuate a system tilted in my favor. Forrest fought for me. The work was to understand the proximity, not the distance”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“America's conception of race has been the kneecapping of people of color in order for white people to feel tall”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Jim Crow laws and lynchings defined and enforced the racial caste system while letting the white man know that, no matter his class, he stood above black people. The bucket my have had spit in it, but at least it was yours”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Northerners were distanced from the violence, from the inhumanity of the practice [of slavery], but were implicated all the same”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Granted, to approach this history with the binary framework provided by the Civil War can make for a simplistic morality play. One in which it's all too easy and too obvious for a Yankee to traipse into a Southern cemetery and clutch his Northern pearls. Robert Penn Warren called this instinct the "treasury of virtue" - the white Northern's feeling that, by dint of our affiliation with the Union, the great, emancipating army, well, then we were (and remained) morally upstanding, unimpeachably good. It was a feeling that could render us "happy in forgetfulness," the Civil War like an event horizon beyond which our own pasts vanish”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Growing up in the North had fostered in me a sense that I was somehow exempt from the legacy of the Civil War and, for that matter, the racial madness of the country”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“In that way, they [monuments] are a reflection of the times in which they are erected as much as they are a reflection of the times they seek to commemorate. You can think of them, Alderman went on, as monuments to the power of the people who erect them, rather than as solely of the person depicted.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Of course it all rests on the unshakable belief that the men and women Forest bought and sold into enslavement were subhuman. But many in America have held and hold such beliefs. We know about Forest, specifically, because he was born poor on the frontier and availed himself of the opportunities to advance in the country and an economy built on the backs of others. You might say he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but those bootstraps were other human beings.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“But if we are ever to gain a clearer sense of who we’ve been, and thus who we are as white Americans, we are going to need to revise the story.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“The aspirations of our founding documents are indeed commendable, but in order to maintain moral authority, our collective memory holds that we have already achieved them. As many a flag-pin wearing politician will tell you, that’s what makes us the greatest nation in the history of the world.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy

“Even though Confederate monuments are extensively about remembering the past, "[they] can also be about facilitating forgetting... the public is encouraged to see the past in one way. So inherently it is being encouraged not to remember another part of the past.”
― Connor Towne O'Neill, Down Along with That Devil's Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy