I'm the sort of person who likes to get to root issues. I don't believe symbols have fixed meanings. So I don't think it's inherently wrong to either preserve or destroy Confederate images. We can preserve every one of them, and there will still be an element of our society who feels white people culture is being eroded. And we can melt them down and there will still be an element of our society who experiences racial violence. It won't change anything. After WW2 every scrap of Nazi shit was destroyed and *poof* they are having issues with neo-Nazis.
Personally I think we've long forgotten our past. If we hadn't, I think we'd be having a very different conversation about these statues. Our dialog wouldn't be pegged at either "white pride" and "slavery" but a whole bunch of other issues. Namely that these statues come from a few decades after Reconstruction when the whole mechanism of Jim Crow was being put into place. We wouldn't be talking about these statues as being reminders of slavery. We'd be looking at them as reminders of Jim Crow, especially with angry when men standing under them with torches. Quite honestly, these statues made it through Jim Crow, a couple world wars, the civil rights movement, and now I don't think anybody would be paying attention of some random pricks weren't trying to co-opt them.
So that's my 0.02. I'd rather just deal with the issues.
