AUSTIN, Texas — Earlier this week, the Texas Senate passed a bill making it harder to remove historic monuments and memorials on government and public university property.
Specifically, those monuments 25 years old or older would require supermajority votes by either lawmakers or a governing body to take down. Those would be your Confederate monuments.
And after an hours-long debate on the floor, many walked away questioning the lack of empathy.
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Every day, someone or something reminds me that I am black. Now, don't be confused, I'm not complaining. I celebrate my heritage.
But being black in this country, and this state, comes with a painful history and at times a frustrating present.
When I walk around my beautiful state, I am very much aware that there are places I go and things I do that people of my same race were not able to do a short time ago. My parents, like many of yours, were born and raised in a segregated Texas.
Almost every day I walk into the most magnificent building in the state: our Texas Capitol, with its majestic dome and ornate detail. A building that was built on the backs of black men, most of them imprisoned by the state on Jim Crow laws.
And before you go there – I'm not making this up – take a tour of the Capitol and your guide will tell you what I say is fact.
I am fully aware that there was a time that someone the same color as me would not be allowed to enter that building and sit in the chambers, as I do, and interact with lawmakers as I do.
And I don't need a statue to remind me of the history that is written so vividly in my DNA.
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Some of you say they're just statues, or pieces of history, or reminders of "how far we've come." But, for me, they are reminders that I was not wanted there. A warning that once meant I should not be there. I see a monument, the celebration of a man who would have wanted me enslaved, raped or beaten. Who would have wanted me uneducated, unmarried, only good for service and breeding. He would have my infants ripped from my arms and sold, their price determined by their sex and skin tone.
That's what I see. That's what so many people the same race as me see. Why is this hard for some people to understand?
Perhaps what is most disheartening is the silence from those who agree with me and others who won't say or Senators who won't vote that way.
Your silence is deafening.
I am a proud graduate of a Texas public high school where I learned our state's history. And we can teach future generations about our stained history through books, pictures and museums. And without monuments celebrating the pain, out in open, public spaces, where I am supposed to feel welcomed.
That's The Last Word.
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