Statues Remind Us How To Be Better

     If you’re like me, you thought we were beyond the statue debate. Admittedly, it was largely because I stopped paying attention. (White privilege is terribly good at blinding individuals to inconvenient situations.) The fact is the presence of monuments to particular individuals and ideas continues to be an embarrassing problem in society. It is coming to a head now because years of petitioning and protesting has fallen on a deaf bureaucracy requiring more dramatic citizen action.

     For many of us, awareness of the issue started around confederate monuments, with the flag thrown in there. On the face of it, there is something odd about having monuments dedicated to a group of people that A.) committed treason and fought against the country, and B.) lost. (Side note: considering “loser” is one of President Trump’s favorite insults, he has an odd reverence for the Confederacy.)

     When these arguments are raised, energetic retorts abound claiming that those monuments are history. Taking them down is erasing history or at the very least, an effort to censor history. That is simply not so and likely a case of projection.

     First, statues aren’t history, we have books for that. If we had no statues of anything, we would still know history. Artistic expression is an important tool in understanding historical contexts, but it is far from the only method.

Second, a statue isn’t meant to tell history. It’s meant to honor a person, group of people, or idea. So again, it’s weird that we would seek to honor a group that fought against the country to maintain a system of racial oppression, (to put it mildly).

Third, most of the confederate monuments were either erected in the heart of Jim Crow or the Civil Rights movement and often funded by pro-segregationist groups. If you’re getting history from statues, you’re getting a lopsided version.

And that’s the real issue. These monuments emphasize a part of history we should be striving to improve from, not glorify. At best, it should be embarrassing. For a large portion of the population, their ancestors were oppressed, enslaved, and dehumanized by the people and ideas, the monuments glorify. It’s not exactly a welcoming message of civic unity.

I was speaking to a neighbor about this issue and she confusedly said, “I don’t look at them that way.” Right! That’s part of the problem. We (the historically privileged) have been desensitized to these kinds of monuments. That means we’ve also been desensitized to the messages of those monuments.

Statue defenders argue back with “where do you draw the line then?” which isn’t actually an argument. The question is usually followed up with something like “should we take down statues of George Washington and other founding fathers because they were slave owners? Are you trying to erase the founding fathers? Are you saying we shouldn’t have statues of anyone?”

Maybe. If we can’t handle the apparently awesome power that is statues, then sure, maybe no statues.

But if we’re going to keep statues, we should draw the line somewhere. Let’s keep racist organizations and proponents of genocide (looking at you Columbus) on one side and people like Fred Rogers on the other. Hopefully, Washington ends up on one side but if not, no statue. (We’ll still know who he is though because statues aren’t history.)

It comes down to a phrase you might have seen on social media. There is a difference between glorifying someone despite their faults, vs. glorifying someone for their faults. We all make mistakes. Statues should go to those who overcame those mistakes, not those who doubled down on them.