The fight over Confederate memorials is a proxy for this question. Their origin is in the myth-making of the Jim Crow South as symbols of white supremacy over a “redeemed” South and building blocks in a narrative of national innocence meant to unify a divided white polity. In the myth, a figure like Robert E. Lee is transformed from the disgraced general of a brutal effort to expand an empire of bondage to the glorious figure represented in monuments like the one in Charlottesville, a valiant leader in a fight for independence. A man worthy of honor.
That myth-making was the foundation for a new narrative of the United States, one tailored to a white public that could now celebrate the past without guilt or shame, and honor men like Lee without confronting what they actually fought for. In this story, slavery is marginal, black people are incidental, the Confederacy is tragic, and American history is an unbroken line of progress populated by heroes, saints, and demigods. Those massive equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and other Confederate leaders were built to immortalize this story and the racial domination it justified.