A warning to listeners that this episode contains discussion of sexual violence.

I have rape colored skin.

My light brown blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of

the old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want

monuments well, then my body is a monument.

My skin is a monument.

Caroline Randall Williams is a poet and writer and resident at Vanderbilt University in Nashville,

Tennessee.

This weekend, she published an opinion piece in the New York Times.

Tidled, you want a Confederate monument?

My body is a Confederate monument.

The debate over monuments and street names and other relics of the Confederacy has intensified

in recent weeks.

A statue of Jefferson Davis was pulled down in Richmond, Virginia.

In Louisville, Kentucky, a monument depicting a Confederate officer was removed from the

city square.

On Tuesday, Mississippi decided to remove the Confederate symbol from the state's flag.

What is lost and what is gained by tearing them down?

Or was it always about more than the metal and stone in the first place?

I am a black Southern woman and of my immediate white male ancestors.

All of them were rapists.

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