Taylor Swift made a plea to Tennessee lawmakers to remove all “racist” statues in the state.
“As a Tennessean, it makes me sick that there are monuments standing in our state that celebrate racist historical figures who did evil things,” the singer wrote on her Instagram page.
She called out in particular a statue of 18th-century newspaper publisher Edward Carmack, who Swift describes as a “white supremacist newspaper editor who published pro-lynching editorials and incited the arson of the office of Ida B. Wells.” She also lambasted the statue of Confederate Army Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
The statue of Carmack outside the state Capitol was initially torn down by protesters angered over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody last month in Minneapolis.
Swift says the state’s efforts to replace the statue are a waste of taxpayer money. She also attacked Nathan Bedford Forrest Day on July 13, calling him a “brutal slave trader” and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
“Taking down statues isn’t going to fix centuries of systemic oppression, violence, and hatred that black people have had to endure, but it might bring us all one step closer to making ALL Tennesseans and visitors to our state feel safe – not just the white ones,” Swift said. “We need to retroactively change the statues of people who perpetuated hideous patterns of racism from ‘heroes’ to ‘villains.’ And villains don’t deserve statues.”
Monuments and statues protesters deem as representations of historical oppression have been subjected to destruction, beheadings, and vandalism in recent days. Social pressure to remove the figures has made its way to some state capitols, with some vowing to take down “offensive” memorials.
