What’s the big deal about statues?
Last time I checked, our parks and streets are littered with them. Museums are cluttered with dead people immortalized in stone. Cathedrals have more statues than living people worshipping most days.
Take Golden Gate Park. There is, apparently, a huge monument and statue honoring James Garfield near the Conservatory of Flowers. Who knew? (And, more important, who he?) There’s even a statue of John McLaren, the statue-hating superintendant of the park, standing at the back of the grove of rhodedendrons.
I love statues but I was shocked, shocked when President Trump took time out of his busy vacation this week to declare that it would be “so foolish” to remove Confederate statues from town squares, parks and, well, odd places like the U.S. Capitol. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” tweeted Trump during his regular early-morning rant.
So why get all hot and bothered about the removal of statues like the one of Robert E. Lee in a city park in Chancellorsville, Virginia? For that matter, why are other people so determined to remove these statues in the first place?
The statues themselves are silent on the controversy. Frozen in time, bolted to their pedestals, they have paid mute witness to the events swirling around them, enduring decades of indifference and the daily humiliation of pigeons crapping on their heads and shoulders.
But people are apoplectic. On one side are the self-appointed sons and daughters of the Confederacy who are standing up for the endangered statuary — there are, after all, only 700 or so Confederate statues left standing. On the other are those who believe that when Dylan Roof posed with symbols of the Confederacy before he gunned down nine elderly black women in their church, it was time we erased these symbols of hate.
There are no statues of Hitler in Germany (never were, apparently). There are exactly two statues of Napoleon in Paris and he was an Emperor. On the other hand, there have been 10 new statues of Stalin erected in Russia since 2012 (and that says a lot about Putin).
Statues are put up by victors (and toppled when, in time, they are defeated) Losers don’t get a statue.
Yet somehow the losing side of the Civil War (and they were the losers — the war did not end with a treaty but complete surrender) managed to rewrite history and erect memorials to their lost cause. Even Robert E. Lee, who lived until 1870, was opposed to the statues and his descendants have said in recent days that they would be fine with removing them.
Yet white supremacists, Nazis, and other unreconstructed bigots still cling to this fallacy that they are honoring history. The statues have become a rallying cry but just as Dr. Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, so honoring history is nothing more than a useful canard.
History is worth preserving and honoring. But you can’t honor your history if you haven’t renounced your past. The statues of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee may have been erected to honor military heroes of the Confederacy —maybe—but they’re really the work of sore losers who need symbols of defiance like Confederate battle flags, rallies, and guns to intimidate African Americans and remind them for 150 years that the South might have lost the war but it wasn’t going to surrender.
Here’s the thing: If the story of African Americans since Emancipation was one of uninterrupted progress, nobody would care about the statues. But the shameful legacy of the Confederacy lived on after Reconstruction, with the counter-revolution of Jim Crow, the KKK’s reign of terror, and a system designed to keep blacks in a state of near-slavery for generations.
It was alive and well nearly a century later on that bus in Montgomery, in the streets of Birmingham and the road to Selma, and it still flashed its poisonous fangs in Memphis that April night in 1968. It lives on in a criminal justice system that’s virtually rigged against African Americans. In the workplace, in the near-segregated state of public schools, in the nefarious gerrymandering of congressional districts, racial profiling, and police brutality.
So when African Americans want to topple the statues, they aren’t taking aim at history, they are toppling the present. Their opponents are locked in a hoary past, a fantasy that never really existed, but one which they still cling to because history has passed them by.
