I agree with removing Confederate statues and renaming buildings that were named after white supremacists. However, I often find the line quite fuzzy when it comes to defining white supremacists/racists. For example, would you consider Abraham Lincoln as a racist since he wasn’t an abolitionist who’d openly criticize southerners? If so, would you support taking down his statues?
I think a general principle could be that we focus more on how a person affected history in the most dramatic way. If an attitude or behavior we criticize is so common for that era, we should study and criticize the systemic social problems of the time. As long as the individual didn’t do anything outrageously bad that’s behind their time.
Then one could argue the Confederate generals were neither behind their time nor ahead of their time. They represented what the southerners believed at the time. If Robert Lee is not considered behind its time, why does having his statues around so controversial?
Robert Lee is no longer merely a historical figure. In fact, many statues of Confederate generals were actually built after 1970, way after their contemporary time. They were erected mostly to agitate a terribly outdated, inhuman trend of thoughts or cultural norms. So, in my opinion, they should be taken down with no questions.