Nishikawa: There is a wide chasm between erasing history and celebrating it. Nobody anywhere is arguing that we shouldn't be teaching kids about the Confederacy or the people who served it. And most certainly they should know what it stood for. But public statues are not about education, they glorify the figures they represent. Can you see that venerating the people who fought to keep African Americans in bondage might be an impediment to improving race relations within the US?

Your Roman examples are not at all compelling. We don't look at those Emperors as heroes; that was the intent when their statues were built, but those people are long gone. Nobody takes the Roman Empire as a cultural model to be emulated. And certainly there is no effort to whitewash the brutality it represented.