MISSY ELLIOTT TRULY is one of Virginia’s greatest exports.
Proud owner of a car-bed (like Milhouse’s dad) that she showed off on MTV Cribs in the mid-00s, she’s harmless and has never hurt anyone.
Robert E. Lee, who the confederate monument currently is dedicated to was a considerably worse person than Missy Elliott could ever dream of being.
He wrote to his wife once telling her that black people ‘are immeasurably better off’ as slaves, because the ‘painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race’.
It’s totally wrong that a monument to a man like Robert E. Lee could still exist in America, but as Mic reported, they were mass produced during the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement.
These were periods when ‘white southerners were attempting to disenfranchise black people’ according to Columbia University History professor Stephanie McCurry.
When towns that wanted to resist the Civil Rights movement or intimidate black people during the Jim Crow era, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy would actually donate money towards installing confederate statues in towns.
In southern states there are at least 700 Confederate symbols on public property.
Removing them is not ‘erasing history’, but rather ‘erasing’ the false narrative that was pushed by United Daughters of the Confederacy and other white supremacy groups.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy fought to exclude black history from school text books and perpetuated the myth that the south went to war over states’ rights.
It’s erasing false history that was rewritten to suggest that the Confederacy wasn’t about slavery, but rather about ‘defending a pastoral antebellum Southern identity’.
These kinds of myths paint Robert E. Lee as ‘somebody who was actually against slavery and was reluctantly pulled into war for the greater good of defending the South.’ That’s despite the fact Lee himself was a slave master who waged war to defend slavery.
Mic point out that this myth has been disseminated for over 150 years now. Tearing down Confederate monuments is simply just tearing down propaganda. Not history.
So, back to Missy Elliot anyway.
Fans of the singer believe ‘it is time to finally replace the Confederate Monument in Olde Towne Portsmouth Virginia’.
On their petition they wrote:
Who better to encapsulate the culture and spirit of the city enshrined in a new monument than Grammy Award winning rapper, dancer and record producer Missy Elliot?
Hailing from humble beginnings as the only child of a power company dispatcher and a welder at Portsmouth’s lauded naval shipyard, she rose to become a platinum recording artist with over 30-million albums sold. All this without even owning a slave.
Together we can put white supremacy down, flip it and reverse it. Let us come together in getting City Council to erect this statue in honor of Missy Elliot and all those in the great City of Portsmouth who work it each and every day.
They end their petition with this line:
Missy is all of us. Missy is everything the Confederacy was not.
So far they have managed to get nearly 9,000 of the 10,000 signatures they aimed for.
The only controversy a Missy Elliot monument would create is the argument over which era Missy Elliott they should immortalise.
So far everyone’s supportive of a statue to recognise the achievements of Missy Elliot (whose real name is Melissa Arnette Elliott).
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And Missy Elliott’s reaction to all of this? As gracious and pleasant as you’d expect.
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