Should we really tear down every statue?
A response to Gary Younge’s thought-provoking article in The Guardian
I first became aware of the growing movement to remove statues after Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally that led to the tragic death of Heather Heyer. I hadn’t thought much about the origins of that rally — the fact that white nationalists were protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee — until afterwards when Trump asked in a speech “I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” This struck me as bizarrely insensitive — Why is the president squabbling over statues when someone just drove a car full speed into a crowd of people?
Then, when someone repeated the question a few weeks later, I shrugged it off. Sure, I could see people wanting to tear down statues of Jefferson and Washington — they were both slaveholders — but that was the path we’d have to take: we’d have to learn to find a line in there somewhere. Our consciousness is changing, our sense of history is changing, so we’d have to take up these questions anew.
Because of course if your ancestor suffered at the hands of another, you wouldn’t want to see that person blithely celebrated. But also, no one’s totally pure and no one’s totally impure — we’d have to take it case by case and somehow weigh a person’s accomplishments against their failings.
And since then statues of Jefferson and Washington have fallen, as well as many others. A statue of Lincoln raising up a slave was torn down in Boston. Ulysses S. Grant was toppled in San Francisco. There’s even been a stir about the Washington monument in DC, and calls to either remove or at least transform Mt. Rushmore from a “shrine of democracy” to “something like the holocaust museum.” So many statues have come down in the last year and a half that there’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to documenting them all.
Then a Guardian article this past summer grabbed my attention when the author, Gary Younge, made the argument “Why every single statue should come down.” For Younge there is no line between what’s inspiring and what’s offensive; they all should go. Every last one of them.
He made some interesting points. He described how memorials tend to represent the most entrenched and established viewpoints — they “never represented a consensus,” but are born of the whims of the rich and powerful. He pointed out that statues of people tend to be “lazy and ugly” (which makes some sense — they’re commissioned, so the artist’s creativity is often rigidly constrained). In addition, he just thinks they do a bad job of teaching history. Our understanding of history changes as we change; it’s not set in stone, but statues are. They so rarely wake us up to a more dynamic understanding of the past; more often they lull us to sleep by presenting just one side, just one viewpoint.
So Younge cried down with Columbus and Churchill, and also down with King, Gandhi, and Rosa Parks. He ended his Guardian article by suggesting
“Let us elevate [the people we cherish], and others — in the curriculum, through scholarships and museums. Let us subject them to the critiques they deserve, which may convert them from inert models of their former selves to the complex, and often flawed, people that they were. Let us fight to embed the values of those we admire in our politics and our culture. Let’s cover their anniversaries in the media and set them in tests. But the last thing we should do is cover their likeness in concrete and set them in stone.”
But this call to take down every statue — to not sculpt those we admire at all, but instead only portray them in classrooms, newspapers, and museums — seems like a cop out. Is the battle for what’s taught in our schools any less heated? How many art museums have a collection that couldn’t be claimed a “monument to white supremacy”? And why would journalists be any better at telling these stories than teachers, historians, and artists, all of whom have been criticized for perpetuating certain narratives over others?
Younge says he wants a more nuanced and complex conversation, but at the same time he’s kind of saying he doesn’t want a conversation at all. Or at least that public art shouldn’t play a part in it.
Because of course it’s not just statues, the same applies to any work of public art. Murals, for instance, haven’t fared any better. And why would they? They’re just as likely to be controversial and just as vulnerable. So for every statue that protesters on the left have spray painted, burned, or pulled down, you can probably find a BLM mural that someone on the right has defaced.
But what does it mean that we can’t tolerate this kind of speech? What does it mean to call for the removal of all public art that might be controversial? And isn’t all art meant to be “public” — experienced by others?
Some forms of art are naturally more protected because they’re not just sitting in the open, but that doesn’t make them any less controversial. For instance, when it comes to books there’s a constant battle over what’s taught in our schools. Some say the classics are a product of white supremacy; others claim their significance is universal and their origins mixed.
And contemporary white novelists have certainly found themselves in a pickle: people want to see their novels populated with a multiracial cast of characters (like in TV shows and movies), but what if all the non-white characters in a novel are side characters? That can look like the author is glorifying whiteness. But what if they make their main characters non-white? That can look like cultural appropriation, like they’re trying to tell a story that’s not theirs to tell. It can be a tricky terrain to navigate.
When you dig into these arguments you quickly find there are no easy answers — there’s no one way to write, paint, or sculpt that is correct, that everyone will like — and that can be incredibly frustrating. But we shouldn’t forget that at the heart of this movement there is something worth striving for. This movement is fueled by the desire to radically open up the conversation — which means: to hear everyone’s voices, including the voices of those who have been voiceless. And how could we not want this? How could we not want every human being to fully participate in society?
This task is essential to our time.
But it will fail if those of us who have had the chance to speak are unwilling to step back and make space for others, if we’re unwilling to recognize that our systems need changing, that they need to be radically opened up.
And it will fail if we’re unable to imagine new systems, if we’d rather point fingers and fight, then do the hard work of understanding the deeper ills of society and how it could become healthy.
And it will fail if those of us pushing to achieve it — the progressive protesters tearing down statues — are unable to embody it, if we’re unwilling to listen, but instead only shout down and silence our opponents.
Because who will listen to anyone else in the end, if no one’s willing to listen along the way?
This call to take down every statue isn’t actually very radical — it’s what will probably happen anyway, just one at a time and in a haphazard way. Because once you take down Abraham Lincoln’s statue are you going to leave Frederick Douglass’ statue standing? Do you think angry counter-protesters won’t attack it in retaliation? It seems many governments aren’t willing to take that chance and have already begun removing statues they fear might be controversial in an attempt to protect them.
But I do think Younge’s article is radical in a different way. It imagines the end result of what we’re already doing — it says “This is what the world will look like in 10 years anyway, so why not just get it over and done with!” And that is helpful. By giving us a glimpse of the result of our actions, it also gives us the opportunity to ask if that’s what we really want.
At least, that’s how I’ve experienced it. Since reading Younge’s article this summer, I became fixated on this question of what the world will look like without statues. I started searching them out and really looking at them, and I discovered that, for the most part, I agree with Younge’s observations. Most statues are kind of lazy and ugly and no one pays any attention to them. I certainly never did, which is why I shrugged at the idea of tearing down Washington and Jefferson. Who really cares? Do you?
And it’s not because I don’t care about Washington and Jefferson — I’ve found real inspiration in both of them. But I’ve never found inspiration in one of their statues.
So the article pushed me to ask, Why aren’t statues doing something more? Why don’t we have a strong experience of them? Why don’t they wake us up to history so we can better understand our present and hopefully create a better future? Why don’t they wake us up to beauty? Why don’t they inspire?
I would say a part of the reason is that we rarely, if ever, empower our artists. As already mentioned, statues have often been commissioned by those interested in maintaining the status quo. In a sense, the artist’s hands are tied.
But Younge’s criticism that they’re not born of consensus isn’t any better. What powerful work of art was ever born of consensus? And can anyone even imagine consensus in our time? Younge quotes the American historian Kirk Savage as saying that after the Civil War “public monuments were meant to yield resolution and consensus, not to prolong conflict… Even now to commemorate is to seek historical closure…”
And maybe that’s part of the problem. The desire for consensus is actually a desire to shut the door on history and put the whole matter to rest — “That’s what that was, and everyone agrees” — instead of waking us up to the work at hand — “Can you see how that ideal is still with us today, how we’re still striving to make it real? Can you see how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go?”
So what if we left artists really free? What if we gave them the resources they need — including perhaps a committee of local historians, educators, and community members to consult with — and a clear mandate to try to wake people up? Of course not everyone would be happy, but maybe the artwork would move some people.
And to stop unhappy people from tearing it down, why not just give every statue a lifespan from the start? We could say — We’ll keep this statue here for 10 years, or 20 years, and then we’ll take it down. And then the statue could be put in storage, or move elsewhere, or get melted down for a new artist to rework.
Is that an impossible idea? Is it more impossible than the alternative — everyone agreeing that we should keep a statue for all time?
We have to find concrete ways to work together, to keep the conversation moving.
I think the main issue is our lack of inspiration — we’re dragging in a big way. Our lives are built around consumerism, but there’s no inspiration in eating stuff. It keeps the body alive, but not the spirit. But it is comforting, and it would be so nice to just sink into the couch and leave it all behind… But we’re also hungry to work, to serve some higher purpose. We’re torn between wanting to sleep and wanting to wake up.
And how do we even wake up? One way is to see how our group is being wronged, and to fight with all our might against those wrongdoers — to tear them down, because “war is a force that gives us meaning.”
Another is to try to find the ideas and impulses to build something new. And one way to do that is to wake up to the living stream of history, to see the ideals that fired others and to stoke that same fire in ourselves. But to do so we have to be able to recognize those ideals, that inspiration. We have to see how someone was moved to take a step that was never taken before, how they had the courage to do so, and how that made it possible for all of us to take that same step.
It’s true that George Washington was a slave-owner, but that’s not the only thing he was. He was also the first leader of a new nation, and someone who voluntarily stepped down — stepped back — from the highest position of power to make space for others (something virtually unheard of at the time). That single action brought the experiment of democracy into movement. It made it an ongoing process, an ongoing conversation, and not just another dictatorship. Can we find that inspiring? Can we celebrate it?
In his final memoir Across that Bridge, John Lewis described how civil rights activists were trained to withstand violence by imagining the perpetrators as they were when they were babies — innocent, full of potential. If they could see that basic humanity still in there somewhere, then they could find the strength not to strike out, not to meet hatred with hatred.
I think we’re being called to do something similar, though perhaps even more difficult in some ways. The evil is not some obvious and hateful brutality, but the very basic impurity and imperfection of every single person. Can we tolerate this in each other? Can we see it and not have to tear each other down? But even more — can we find the good in each other, can we see the noble impulses and become inspired by those?
Because it’s no longer the original purity and innocence of the child that we need to discover in each other, but that which can only be born out of the struggle with the dragon — out of the struggle with that which is impure and ignoble, with that which would pull us down.
It’s hard to see such nobility in the human being anymore. Not because it’s not there — if we were really looking we could find nobility even in the human form itself — but because we’ve grown so frustrated, so tired. It’s hard to find inspiration.
And so we might have to continue tearing down statues for a time. But maybe their absence will also serve a purpose. Maybe when we see the human being torn down, it will inspire us to inwardly lift them back up. Maybe the empty pedestal will encourage us to ask, How do I need to look at another person in order to see that which is worthy of my praise?