Recent political tensions have been rising after white supremacist rallies centered around the continued display of confederate statues occurred in Charleston, Virginia. One person was killed, and 19 more were injured after a violent supporter of maintaining the confederate statues drove into a crowd of counter-protesters.

There are many sides to this fight about keeping these statues and monuments up or tearing them down. I believe that they should be taken down.

Confederate statues and monuments give respect and remembrance to an embarassment of a civil war that our country went through. In 1861 when our Civil War began the country was split between people who thought the war was about rights to own slaves or, rather, “states rights”, and this confusion continues today.

The reason why they were fighting for states rights? So they could ensure it would be the states rights to decide whether or not slavery continued.

The Confederate flag and Confederate statues have racism embedded within in their core meaning. Praising the failed attempt at secession means you openly justify the reasoning for the war.

There’s no way you can be proud of generals who wanted to own actual humans without it also meaning you’re fine with the practice of slavery and racism. However, it is obvious that there is still plenty of people who are prejudiced — even if they reject their true label of being racist — who would openly be fine with supporting such a horrible event in history.

The statues are praised by conservative southern Americans because of their meaning and historical value. However, their historical value is actually quite low. Many Confederate statues didn’t actually get put up during the Civil War or even during the reconstruction.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there was actually a boom of confederates statues put up towards the middle to end of the Jim Crow era. For those of us who don’t remember that from AP US History, it was a period of time in which laws were made that enhanced and ensured segregation.

This is when black people were being lynched, beaten by police, and targeted for no reason but their skin color, which isn’t exactly too different from now, they were just able to get away with it. These statues were put up, mass produced for under a thousand dollars each (pretty cheap compared to the high quality alternatives that would have cost thousands), in order to put fear into the just freed population of black people in the United States.

There’s just no way around it. Confederate monuments, statues — even schools named after Confederate leaders — represent a long and hard history for black people in America. They represent a culture of hateful whites that became 130 Klu Klux Klan groups still operating today throughout the USA. They represent literal treason in our country.

These monuments need to be taken down like the scrap metal they are so we can make way for our country to become great.