During the summer of 1993, as I drove down I-59 from Hattiesburg, Miss., to New Orleans to do some historical research for my dissertation, I spotted a bumper sticker with a Confederate battle flag that read “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Jeff Davis!” It was a play on the bumper sticker that emerged following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, which read “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bush!” Jefferson Davis, the one and only president of the failed Confederacy, was long dead, but the message was an indication of how much the Lost Cause remained very much alive in the Deep South.

I’d grown up in Greensboro, N.C., in the 1970s, and I don’t recall such attention to Confederate memory there as I found when I moved to Mississippi to attend graduate school. Now, after a lifetime of studying Southern history, this makes more sense to me, because in the 1990s, Lost Cause sympathies were far more entrenched the deeper into the South one traveled. That has changed significantly in the past 25 years, and especially since 2015, as states across the region, including my home state, have passed laws to protect Confederate monuments as part of an alleged dedication to “Southern heritage.”

GOP-dominated state assemblies have passed draconian legislation as part of Republicans’ culture war against Black Lives Matter and racial progress more generally. Much of it is based on propagating myths that the South fought the Civil War to protect states’ rights (it was to preserve the institution of slavery) and that removing a monument is an erasure of history (it isn’t). Even when a cross-section of Southerners petition for removal, they’re prevented from doing so because these state legislatures have usurped local control through so-called heritage protection acts.

As a historian of the American South, I feel a deep responsibility to share the long history of these statues alongside the stories of racial injustice with which they are associated. It’s why I often speak to community groups, and also why I decided to write No Common Ground. While my role is not to offer advice on whether a monument ought to be removed, I can assist local governments and organizations in their decision-making processes regarding monuments in their communities by providing the necessary historical context.

I also believe it’s important that I, a Southern white woman, write and speak about this topic with blunt honesty. Monument defenders cannot dismiss me as a Northern liberal who has invaded the region to tell them what to do. I’ve grown up here, too. Maybe that makes me a scalawag in their eyes. But I love this region as much as the next Southerner, who, let’s be clear, are not all white. That’s the rub about this “Southern heritage” argument, because it assumes only white heritage counts.