Newsweek Discovers Racism Exists In 1940s America
Newsweek reports on the recent outrage after Black soldiers, originally photographed for a WWII memorial, were replaced with white soldiers in the final bronze sculpture. This 'sparked fury' from the families, predictably. What Newsweek 's careful framing misses is that this isn't a shocking aberration; it's a feature, not a bug, of how America (and its media) traditionally 'honors' its past. The
memorial's original photos, taken in 1944 on Wake Island, depicted a racially segregated military. The subsequent erasure in the 21st century merely continues a long-standing tradition of sanitizing uncomfortable truths about race and conflict in America. One might wonder why the 'fury' surfaces now, and not, say, when the sculptures were first unveiled or when countless similar erasures occurred
across decades. It appears some stories only become 'news' when sufficiently distilled into a palatable 'mistake' rather than a systemic pattern. While Newsweek points out that WWII was supposedly fought for 'democracy and freedom,' it bypasses the minor detail that many of the soldiers fighting for that freedom abroad returned home to Jim Crow laws, racial terror, and systemic discrimination. Why
bother with that unpleasant context when you can just highlight a 'mistake' in bronze?