racist statues

June 19th 2020: Statue of Junipero Serra toppled in San Francisco.

Racist statues (fl. 1895-2015) are statues that White people in the US and UK and elsewhere have put up to honour their racist heroes: Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Lee, Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes, White Jesus, etc. One of the glorious things about the George Floyd protests of 2020 is that some of these statues are coming down! Or at least being defaced. Honouring racist heroes is honouring racism.

June 7th 2020: Statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader, being thrown into the harbour of Bristol, England.

Meanwhile in London…

None of this is new. The Charlottesville riot of “very fine people” in 2017 was about taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general. There have long been petitions to bring down some of these statues and all it has led to in most cases is hemming and hawing by the (mostly White) authorities.

The Confederacy, a crash course: Many of these statues are of Confederate generals. These generals fought against the USA as part of the CSA (Confederate States of America) from 1861 to 1865 – to defend slavery! And not just any old slavery, but the racialized slavery of Black people. On top of that, they were traitors to the US and lost the war. To defend these statues as “heritage”, as President Trump does, is to wink at the hate they stood for.

Ditto the heroes of the British Empire. Also built on White racism.

This stuff should not even be “controversial”. But it is. Even in 2020.  Because the racism that these statues represent in bronze lives on in hearts made of stone.

Know your history: Some argue that tearing down these statues erases history, that the answer is to put them in museums or to add an Informative Plaque. I am a huge fan of knowing your history – and so is the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, but you do not see them putting up statues of Adolf Hitler or Adolf Eichmann. Why is that?

As Padma Lakshmi, Salman Rushdie’s ex-wife, noted;

“Germany doesn’t have Nazi monuments to ‘remind’ citizens of their history. Instead, they have memorials for the 6 million Jews and others who were murdered.

“The U.S. doesn’t need statues of confederate generals to ‘remind’ us. We need monuments for Nat Turner & Harriet Tubman.”

Both the US and the UK teach a very Whitewashed view of history – a racist fairy tale. And that is a bigger and deeper issue than these statues. The statues are the tip of that iceberg.

“It was the times!” Who are we, some say, to judge men in the past by our Modern Standards? But most of these statues were set up long after these men lived.

On the practical side, I would not go after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or White Jesus. The right-wing will just bash that as being against God or country while Completely Missing The Point. Mount Rushmore, though, needs to go. Or rather, be given back to the Lakota Sioux Indians.

Hint: There are certain household chemicals that can damage bronze in a hard-to-undo way.

– Abagond, 2020.

See also:

• The George Floyd protests
• Charlottesville riot
  • “very fine people”
• The Confederate flag – many of the same issues
• “It was the times!”
• wilfully obtuse – completely missing the point (on purpose)
• Rushdie
• Among the fallen or removed:
  • Christopher Columbus
  • Junipero Serra
  • Edward Colston
  • Robert E. Lee
  • Uncle Jack the Good Darky
• Among the defaced:
  • Churchill
• other:
  • Mount Rushmore
  • White Jesus
• alternative heroes:
  • Harriet Tubman
  • Nat Turner

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