There are better ways to remember history

TO THE EDITOR:

I write to offer insights on the crisis our campus is facing regarding the Silent Sam monument, from a comparative cultural context and issue: the erasure, and commemoration, of the oppression of Jews in Eastern Europe.

In Ukraine, a monument to the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595 – 1657) adorns Kiev’s city center. 

Khmelnytsky instigated the murder of tens of thousands of Jews between 1648 –1656. 

Ukrainian society has not publicly acknowledged the violent brutality of their national hero. 

In Buczacz, Ukraine, the Nazis massacred thousands of the town’s Jews between 1941–1944. 

This atrocity remains virtually unrecognized by the town. 

The invisibility of both of the history of Jewish life and its annihilation exposes the continuation of apathy towards those who were long treated as the quintessential Other.

By contrast, in Washington, D.C., Berlin, and finally Warsaw museums of Jewish life and its destruction recognize and denounce ethnic hatred and genocide. 

When societies ignore their histories of cruelty, they communicate indifference to that past and its present reverberations. 

When societies acknowledge their histories of hatred, they communicate their concern to end discrimination now and always. 

I urge Chancellor Folt to acknowledge how UNC’s landscape has been marked by the histories of slavery and Jim Crow. 

I urge repudiating the racist goals of those who established UNC’s Confederate Monument. I urge committing to ending the ongoing racism at UNC and beyond. 

Let us stand among those for whom a sober reckoning with history is the path towards ensuring an inclusive, democratic society.

Prof. Michele Rivkin-Fish

Anthropology