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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Okay. But how do we know when it's a 'large enough group'? I have no idea how many indigenous people in Victoria feel threatened or angry about the statue. In many of these cases a dozen unelected people say they speak on behalf of a whole community. Throw in a couple newspaper columnists and an academic or two, and we call that 'popular opposition' or 'widespread outrage.' In many cases we're letting our cultural norms be dictated by very small numbers of people because we mistake outrage expressed emphatically for popular opposition.
Virtually all Europeans in the 19th century thought the Natives of the Americas were savages. Are we going to start tearing down statues, or defacing the portraits, of Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickenson, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, etc. etc. It was recently discovered that Albert Einstein made racist comments in letters while was travelling in India as a young man. What sort of penance should we inflict on his memory?
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The US is going to have to rename their capital eventually as George Washington was a slave owner. The capital of Texas, Austin, is going through this now, renaming streets, monuments and maybe the name Austin itself.