If Statues Teach History, What Lessons Will We Learn?

“If someone kidnapped your child and sold them, where would you want us to put the statue of that person?”

The words of this meme circling the internet should hit hard, should be obvious. It should be the mic drop to end all mic drops in the conversation about whether we should remove statues celebrating those who gladly engaged in and fought to maintain the oppression of Native and black Americans.

Yet, even here, the cries of dissent ring.

“That erases history!”

We absolutely must learn and remember history, but statues aren’t built to objectively tell history. Statues are built to commemorate, to celebrate. We don’t erect statues of Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, or Charles Manson to ensure we don’t forget history. There will be no statue to COVID-19. You memorialize the victims, not the victimizers. Taking down a statue celebrating a racist who violently fought to maintain racism does not erase the history behind it. It is the bare minimum starting point in ending the celebration of those who don’t deserve to be celebrated. We can still have museums. We can still read books. 

Speaking of reading, you really should look into when and why most of the Confederate statues were built. Check out the History.com article “How the US Got So Many Confederate Monuments”:

“Most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died," says Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. 

“Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments," he says. "The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” 

The history we learn, the history we teach -- with or without statues -- is far too often warped and whitewashed. White Americans have mastered erasing history and culture, hiding our atrocities, minimizing the recognition of contributions from those who aren’t white males, distorting the perspective. 

If you want to talk about concerns with erasing history, let’s make sure we put real discussion into the curriculum of our schools, and in society in general, about the thirty-five city blocks and three hundred lives that went up in flames in Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and the four years of internment camps we forced Japanese Americans to endure. Let’s look at the violent oppression of union organization. Let’s examine the forced, and then broken, treaties. Let’s look honestly at the massacres and the Trail of Tears, and who still sits on the twenty-dollar bill. 

Let’s discuss the forced Christian conversion of Native Americans, the imprisonment and withholding of food that punished Native Americans for following their own religious practices, and the massive removal of Native American children from their families and often from the tribe itself and into white homes. 

Or maybe Americans simply know less about these atrocities because they aren’t marbleized into a white man seated on a horse.

Let’s realize that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and The Indian Child Welfare Act weren’t passed until my lifetime. 

Let’s, on this Juneteenth, stop pretending slavery ended immediately with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and that Civil Rights were fully gained when Rosa Parks could finally sit at the front of the bus.

Let’s recognize there was a loophole in the 13^thamendment.

Let’s admit systemic racism still flagrantly flourishes. 

Let’s work to change it. Even if it means some statues of Columbus fall into a lake.

Let’s stop proclaiming the importance of statues of people from one hundred and fifty years ago at the same damn time we tell non-white Americans they shouldn’t be concerned about what happened a hundred and fifty years ago.

Dissent to the meme continues:

“No one alive had their children sold into (mainstream American) slavery!”

No one living today was a Confederate either.

You are literally demanding respect for your heritage while insisting others ignore theirs. 

Read that again.

Your heritage violently oppressed theirs. We try to be less violent and obvious in our oppression today, but we sure strive to maintain it, to celebrate it. 

When awarding Colin Kaepernick the Sports Illustrated Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, Beyoncé expressed, “It’s been said that racism is so American, that when we protest racism, some assume we are protesting America.”

“If we take the statues down, when will it stop?! Do we change street names too?”

Dismantling centuries of systemic racism (that continues to thrive and that many of us continue to profit from, whether intentionally or not) is messy and hard and damn uncomfortable. But not nearly as uncomfortable as having that racism directed at you. Not as miserable as suffering beneath the heavy weight of racism’s knee.

Do we change street names? Sure, that's easy. We’ve changed street names many times in the past.

City names? We need to at least be willing to have that discussion. To think the names Custer, South Dakota, or Jackson, Mississippi, feel welcoming to all is to blindly bask in white privilege.

Change racist names of sports teams? Definitely.

We ask children to walk into schools literally named after people who would have considered them less than human. We tell students we care about them while celebrating those who very clearly didn’t, so I’m sorry if you feel our “history” would suffer if we changed school names. Our history sucked. It is time to build on compassion and justice, not blind allegiance to things that make us comfortable.

Pause your defensiveness and truly stop to think, to feel, to attempt to understand.

If your child was kidnapped, sold, raped, and murdered, and a statue was built honoring the killer, would you want your descendants to just accept the statue? 

To have to attend schools named after this oppressor?

Would you want our society celebrating holidays in their honor? 

Or would you want those statues, and the mindset that still celebrates and defends them, toppled to the ground?

There is a vast difference between remembering our racist past (and present) and celebrating it with popcorn and confetti.

19 Jun 2020

History.com: How the US Got So Many Confederate Monuments

Variety.com: Beyonce presenting award to Kaepernick

Smithsonianmag.com on the American Indian Religious Freedom Act

Daily: The Devastation of Black Wall Street

Chronicle of Social Change on the Indian Child Welfare Act