In America’s continuing struggle to find a reasonable way to clean up the mess we made when we accidentally-on-purpose festooned the nation with monuments to men who fought and died to keep black people enslaved, no one has offered bolder solutions than The Daily Show’s Roy Wood Jr., who had two good ideas in the same segment Wednesday night. First, in an astonishing bit of meta-commentary on The Daily Show’s penchant for chasing clapter instead of laughs, Wood tells Trevor Noah he’s figured exactly how to solve the problem of Confederate monuments—“How about we get rid of racism?”—then leads the audience in fervent applause before telling them, “We just did it.” “That was very brave of you,” Noah congratulates him.
Wood’s second proposal might draw less applause than ending racism entirely, but it’s a little more practical: adding necessary context to Confederate memorials. Specifically, Wood suggests adding abolitionist Frederick Douglass on piggyback atop statues of Robert E. Lee, as a reminder of what Lee fought for and how things turned out. But perhaps the best idea comes from Trevor Noah, who offers a solid rebuttal of the argument that Confederate monuments are needed to preserve the history of the Civil War:
People say, “We want to remember the history of the Civil War.” I always think there’s an easier way to remember what happened in the Civil War: Just walk around in the south. And if you see free black people, then you know what happened in the Civil War.
As monuments go, Noah’s idea doesn’t have quite the immediate appeal of, say, Wood’s vision of a statue of a LeBron James rubbing his balls on the head of a Confederate soldier as he dunks on him. But it’s also a little more inspiring.
