MS NOW’s Antonia Hylton called out the Trump administration after she said officials “literally rewrote history” by removing language critical of slavery from an Arlington National Cemetery Confederate memorial.

In 2023, the 32-foot bronze statue was removed from the cemetery, following an order from Congress. A plaque was then installed at the site, noting that the sculpture portrayed a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”

Among other images, it showed a weeping African American woman described as a “mammy” holding up a white child for a kiss from a Confederate soldier off to war. Hylton called the depiction a “painful and inaccurate stereotype” but said it was “the kind of dissonant imagery that forces us to pause and reckon with an uncomfortable past.”

However, as the MS NOW host explained, “that context is now missing.” In recent weeks, the language was removed from the department’s website, and the marker in the cemetery was replaced. “All that remains right now is the base, but the military says the sculpture will return next year. What they haven’t said, though, is if that context will return too,” she said.

Hylton connected the administration’s actions to broader messaging about American identity coming out of the White House. She shared comments from Vice President JD Vance last week, who said he was “tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country” and was “tired of being called racists for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.”

Hylton said Vance’s comments are part of a pattern of “contempt and dehumanization that we’ve seen in our politics.”

You can watch Hylton’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.

The post ‘Literally rewrote history’: Antonia Hylton unpacks Arlington Confederate memorial change appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.