After Boston removes that statue of Lincoln and the freed slave, what should replace it?

Everything is offensive to someone.

Molasses to rum to slaves was what I learned in my Boston Public school education.
I guess you learn something new every day because I have never heard of pineapples representing it, and I was not being tongue and cheek.

Do you have any links to pineapple being a symbol of colonialism, besides you saying so?

Pineapple is better known as a symbol of hospitality.

The whole "Lincoln freed the slaves" narrative is oversimplified and many feel it promotes a white savior narrative and/or is patronizing.

My apologies for being glib.

I get what you're saying, but when I look at that monument, I've always seen it as Lincoln bidding the recently freed man to stand up. Paternalistic, definitely, but pretty progressive for its time.

The problem with telling somebody that they're now free to stand up is that it forces us to acknowledge that person's previous lack of freedom. That's a sticking point in recent historiography.

For around the past fifty years, there has been a trend in historical writing focusing on narratives emphasizing the agency of oppressed peoples. In terms of American slavery in particular, this has led to a flavor scholarship focused on slave rebellions, acts of passive resistance, sabotage, and the creation of a unique African American culture under the most horrible of circumstances--basically, how the enslaved carved out autonomy for themselves within "the peculiar institution." These are obviously stories that demand to be told, and it seems like a prime motivation for telling them is to shed a communal feeling of victimhood.

My concern is that this sort of approach risks turning slavery into something of a victimless crime. You may think that's a straw man, but I've definitely sat through at least one Africana Studies course that spoke of slavery almost solely in terms of resistance and the creation of a vibrant new culture--constructing what felt like feel-good narrative around slavery. It puts historians in the odd position of discussing brutal oppression while simultaneously making arguments that tend to undercut the scope of that oppression.

It reminds me of some of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's sociological writing decades ago. His basic thesis, if I recall, was that systemic racism created horrible circumstances that degraded the African American community. One big reason why his work fell out of favor is that--understandably--no community likes to think of itself as having been degraded. That's just terrible.

All of this is to say, it seems like a tricky balance between uplifting the spirits of a community by moving past victimhood and remembering the suffering of the enslaved. Both are incredibly compelling priorities. I guess the fundamental question is: "who is a monument for?"

Perhaps a montage or series of some sort that reflects the history leading up to and resulting from the "moment" of the Emancipation Proclamation.

A good read.

The cartoon Simpsons

Might be close to that.