In the years prior to the novel’s publication, some Southern communities in the United States began removing Confederate statues and replacing Confederate memorials and imagery with other symbols. Additionally, states like Mississippi amended the state flag to remove the former Confederate flag from the design. This trend was part of a larger cultural conversation about the legacy of enslavement and the continued structural racism that permeates American society, particularly in the South. The responses to that conversation highlighted the deep divisions in how American society perceives its own past. Many Americans celebrated the efforts to eliminate false narratives glorifying the Confederacy and the inexcusable practices of enslavement that it upheld, often pointing out that the monuments were constructed as part of the broader Lost Cause narrative in the early 1900s that sought to present an ahistorical image of the antebellum South and the institution of slavery; others criticized the removal of historic images, however controversial they may be, as a form of censorship. As a result of the debate and despite efforts to remove Confederate propaganda from public spaces and media, monuments to the Confederacy remain pervasive in the South, and some state and local governments have passed laws preventing their removal.