I have responded – pretty rudely much of the time – to an awful lot of comments and posts which say that pulling down statues and renaming buildings and streets is erasing history. I tell the oblivious posters that you do not learn history from statues and buildings and streets! You didn’t learn who Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson were by reading their names on placards or street signs! Or at least I hope you didn’t! Removing these things is not going to change humankind’s actual knowledge of the times these people lived in.
Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t say much about the positive purpose of these statues and street and building names. Why were Germans so keen to have Hitler’s name on their street signs? Why the hundreds of Confederate monuments in the southern US? Why the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol – or of Oliver Cromwell in London, or Edith Cavell or Winston Churchill or indeed King George V? Why do we have these things in our streets? Actually, phrasing the question that way gives a clue to the answer. To answer why we have these things, we need to ask who “we” are.
Public spaces are supposed to be for “us”. What goes in them tells you who is included in that “us” – and perhaps more importantly, who isn’t. Black people in Bristol who walked past slaver Edward Colston’s statue were reminded every day that the “we” who put that monument there didn’t seem to include them. Any survivor of the Bengal famine who walks past Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square in London might have trouble identifying with the “we” who put it up. German Jews wouldn’t have much appreciated walking past an “Adolf-Hitler-Strasse” sign. Those statues and signs tell those people that public spaces don’t belong to them and they don’t get to be asked what should be put there.
In the early 20th century in the southern United States, this was almost the actual public purpose of the Confederate monuments, not even to speak of what the white people who put them up might have thought privately. The purpose, and, more importantly, the effect of their existence was to remind former slaves and their descendants – many of whom lived in conditions not far removed from slavery even after emancipation – that the public spaces that contained them were for white people. And that is also the effect that Edward Colston’s statue had in Bristol, no matter what the intentions of its promoters.
People in government – the people who decide who and what to celebrate by creating and maintaining monuments in public spaces – should remember that their “we” includes everyone who might pass by those monuments. If they don’t, then they shouldn’t be surprised if “we” decide to throw those monuments into the river.
Another Middle-Aged White Guy 