The Purpose of a Statue
Who We Choose As Our Heroes Says Everything About Us
In a little over three weeks, more than one hundred statues and memorials have been pulled down in the United States, and over a dozen more torn down in other countries.* The vast majority of these were dedicated to the memory of Confederates, slavers, colonizers, and racists. Why they were put up in the first place is part of the reason they are being torn down now; most of the Confederate memorials were erected within the last century, some of them in places that weren’t even states or territories during the civil war, and so have no historical connection in time or place to the events being commemorated.
The proponents of the statue removal argue that these monuments to racists serve as propaganda, an attempt to intimidate African Americans and all minorities, a reminder of their second class status, and a threat to maintain it. Defenders of the statues claim, well, who cares what they claim. They’re full of shit, frankly.
The proponents of removal are right: these are totems of a racially segregated past and commemorating them gives them and the ideas they represent hold over the public’s imagination. To review history is to look into a mirror. And one cannot interpolate history in any other fashion, if that mirror is being held by a “heroic” slave master. And that’s what these statues are, ultimately: a mirror, or window through which we view ourselves.
The reason the discourse surrounding the confederate statues is so fraught, is because our country, founded by White Anglo Saxon Protestants, refuses to acknowledge the true purpose of these statues: veneration.
Tearing down statues you don’t like goes back a ways. Pharaoh Akhenaten (1351–1334 BCE) tried to remove all the statues of the Egyptian deities, so that he could be the one true god. This didn’t work.
It didn’t work because statues are poor teachers of history. They’re often devoid of any context, or what context they have is self serving. Like Akhenaten, who built statues of himself and nothing else, while defacing those of his predecessors, his monuments didn’t serve to anoint anything but his own ego.
Slightly more recently, The Protestant Reformation had a thing for tearing down statues. The Iconoclastic riots of Northern Europe lasted decades, and the Protestants burned and destroyed thousands of statues of saints, martyrs, and even Christ, and Mary, in an effort to change the discussion about who and how they should worship. The Catholic Church did its best to try and stop them, but it turns out you can only burn, hang, or imprison so many people before popular opinion switches to the side of the ones being burned, hanged and imprisoned.
Many of those iconoclastic tendencies came to the US with the Puritans and later waves of immigrants.** This is part of the problem still coloring the discourse surrounding Confederate statues today. We refuse to admit, as a culture, the true reason we build statues in the first place. This lingering shadow of Iconoclasm creates a barrier obfuscating honest discussion about who we as a culture value, and why we choose which heroes to honor. This obfuscation favors white supremacist spin, distancing all discussion on the topic to a matter of history, which we think of as a static thing, rather than a living narrative about the sort of people and country we choose to be today.
The statues we’re currently tearing down are not merely historical oddities left us from some long ago age; most were built during the Jim Crow 20th Century. And most are cheap as Hell.
The protestors aren’t erasing history, they’re tearing down monuments to white supremacy, and the fact many Americans don’t know the difference is the problem. Monuments are lousy at teaching history but they’re great for promoting propaganda.
Mount Rushmore was carved by a Klansman, into land stolen from the Sioux. It should be returned to the Sioux nation, to do with as they wish.
The rhetorical flourish of defenders of White Supremacy asking, “where does it stop?” Never ends but it sure does get old, especially since they’ve been asking the same question since Reconstruction. “Do you want to tear down the Washington Monument too?!”
Sure, but not all of it. Personally, I’d tear down the top half, about to where the part built by slave labor ends. Level it off, and put a statue on the new pedestal, one of Robert Smalls, holding a lantern aloft, looking north easterly, towards the Statue of Liberty. Maybe put a little statue of Washington in a niche at the base. Something tasteful and easy to reach with a can of spray paint.
So where does it end?
It doesn’t. Not any time soon at least. We haven’t yet achieved racial justice or equity, by any stretch of the imagination. And while tearing down racist monuments won’t achieve that equity, it sets the stage for actions that will. Get rid of the monuments to slave masters, and clear the room, so we can build something better.
The purpose of a monument is to promote an idea. It is, in a very literal sense, idolatry, but of the sort that serves a civic purpose: humans need heroes. We love them and need the sense of grandeur they stand for. They remind us that while we as individuals may live fleeting lives, the actions we choose to take during our short time on Earth can live long after we are gone. If the ramifications of our actions persist, should we not strive to glorify the best of us?
So let us all ask ourselves: to what purpose is this statue being put? Is it to glorify a murderer and a slave trader? If so, tear it down, and replace it with something — someone we can all believe in.
Footnotes:
*As of June 23, 2020. Dozens more are scheduled to be removed by city and state governments, and who knows how many will be torn down by citizens angry and impatient for change over the coming weeks and months.
**Not that you would know this, as the Puritans were against statues or memorials of any kind, so naturally we have no idea who they were or what they believed. It’s too bad statutes are the only method of teaching history now.
