Rewriting History, Rising to Our Best Selves

 Yesterday, while working on my "Road Tripping," I was writing about the loss of a historical marker celebrating a nineteenth century lynching. Today, I ran across Does toppling statues really right the wrongs of history? which rather nicely bucks my own views.

Having examined various ways in which buildings can be made to lie, Bevan returns to the statue question. Toppling statues, he argues, is also a form of rewriting the past, which allows us to pretend that unpleasant people were not once celebrated; like symbolic politics in general, it also may draw energy away from other, more consequential battles. He hasn’t much time for arguments around the idea of harm and argues that claims that the stress caused by day-to-day encounters with statues of Confederate heroes shortens the lives of black people are more rhetorical than empirical.

Bevan backs himself with unimpeachable voices, such as Angela Davis (“regardless of what people think about it, it’s not really going to bring about change”), and Zyahna Bryant, who started the petition to bring down Confederate statues at Charlottesville (“We are making the courthouse look more equitable without reckoning with the institutional racism that takes place inside”). He makes short work of those who claim that statues aren’t history at all, so their removal doesn’t represent any kind of falsification.

What does Bevan propose instead? A range of possible, situation-appropriate responses, all stronger than the feeble, tokenistic “retain and explain” policies of Tory heritage. Statues can be turned to face the wall, they can be taken off their plinths – cut down to size, in fact. They can be augmented, or a monument can be made of their destruction: in Asuncion, Paraguay, an artist has created a new artwork consisting of the head of the tyrant Stroessner crushed between two massive concrete blocks.

I never understood the outcry over the Confederate statutes – they were losers, they celebrate a poisonous side of America.  In fact, they are anti-American. We need to remember them as such. If we deny our imperfections, we commit ourselves to the same path as those we would topple. Yes, Jefferson owned slaves; he also had radical ideas for freedom that could be used by the descendants of those slaves. He was human. We are human. We deny our humanity by denying our flaws. Our humanity lies in acknowledging our flaws and overcoming them.

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