[160/366] statues

[cosmolinguist]

By now probably everybody knows the statue of a slaver was torn down in Bristol and thrown in the harbor.

Someone I know tried to pre-empt people justifying it as "of its time" by saying that it was put up significantly after he died and after the abolition of the slave trade. It's apparently like the U.S. Confederate statues made in the twentieth century.

But this itself was an idea I wanted to nip in the bud because it implies that contemporary statues of racists should be left as they are. Indeed this person also said she's "not in favor of erasing the past" and I cannot possibly give this all the eye-rolling it deserves. So I said:

Even if it was "of its time," that's no reason to keep it. Opposition to slavery has existed alongside the whole history of slavery. What about that bit of "its time"?

And even more, what about our times? We aren't beholden to the bigotries of the past. Their celebration is either used to prop up our own bigotries or to make us feel better about having cleared some astonishingly low bar like not trying to own other humans (or profit from that). Either way, we can do better. Otherwise in the future, people will be saying we were fine with racism because it was "of our time." So far, racism absolutely is of our time.

The argument that removing statues is "erasing history" is so frustratingly ridiculous. As the news of this statue spreads, it's starting conversations in many other places scrutinizing their local statuary, and every time I've seen locals say "oh that's who that is?!" or "he did what?!" or "jesus christ we've got a statue of him?!" They're not meant to be history lessons, and they don't work very well as such.

po8crg made the good point that someplace like Manchester has too many statues of people relatively recently dead when the Victorians put up lots of statues and not enough of twentieth century people. (The only twentieth-century people I'm aware of who have statues in Manchester are Emmeline Pankhurst (that one's very new, no doubt doesn't mention her racism, and was immediately appropriated by TERFs) and Alan Turing.) It hadn't even occurred to me that statues could be of someone contemporary. But that's what the Victorians did. The psychic wallpaper provided by all these old white guys in funny clothes or on horses or whatnot is very different now from what they'd intended. To really emulate history, we should get to put up our own statues and to take theirs down. We should get to be "of our time" too, and not have all their baggage to drag around all the time.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Have you heard about the Betty Campbell statue in Cardiff?

[cosmolinguist]

I have not!

[angelofthenorth]

Black, Welsh 20th century woman. Going up in the new public square outside the beeb and the railway station

[cosmolinguist]

Looked it up now (link for anyone else who hasn't heard of it). That's great.

[conuly]

Sweet!

[redbird]

I suspect most of those people who object to removing those statues have no problem with statues of Stalin being torn down after the Soviet Union dissolved.

rydra_wong pointed out in a discussion on oursin's journal that Colton's own descendants are the ones trying to erase the past: they objected to a plaque being added to the statue, explaining who Colton was.

[conuly]

Of course they did.

[cosmolinguist]

no problem with statues of Stalin being torn down

Yeah my boyfriend was telling me about this tweet gif of black-and-white footage of a swastika being blown up]. Obviously since that happened, no one even knows what a nazi is, right?!

they objected to a plaque being added to the statue, explaining who Colton was

I read about a similar thing happening in Edinburgh, not the family (as far as I know!) but just some random historian making excuses for someone who prolonged the slave trade. The terrible excuses people make are just endless. And it really shows they have no interest in statues as history lessons at all.

[jesse_the_k]

Even if it was "of its time," that's no reason to keep it. Opposition to slavery has existed alongside the whole history of slavery. What about that bit of "its time"?

THANK YOU.

[cosmolinguist]

You're welcome! :) (and I really love that icon)

[nanila]

I'm pleased Colston got in the sea. He can stay there.

[cosmolinguist]

I hope he does. I imagine the optics of dragging the statue out of the water will be expensive even if the actual cost wasn't.

[theandrewhickey]

I agree. And in Manchester, particularly, you can probably win with "Do you want Liverpool to be better than us?"
They have their share of old statuary, but the statues that stick in *my* memory from Liverpool are Bessie Braddock and Ken Dodd at the train station, John Lennon on Matthew Street, and Billy Fury at the Albert Dock -- all of whom died within living memory, and all of whom are *vastly* more deserving of statues than anyone who has one in Manchester with the exceptions of Abraham Lincoln and Alan Turing (neither of whom were Mancs, while all the Liverpool ones are Scousers).

[cosmolinguist]

This is a really good point!

[po8crg]

You know someone's going to put up a Tony Wilson statue now, don't you?

But at least it would mean something to someone, which is more than can be said for most.

[Also, there's a John Bright, who, unlike Cobden, has a decent case for deserving one]

[theandrewhickey]

Absolutely. I'm not a huge fan of Tony Wilson, but he did stuff, some of the stuff he did was good, some people liked him, and as far as I'm aware he never enslaved tens of thousands of people.

[silveradept]

The obsession with keeping the memory alive of a thing that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, but for "we did this, we were wrong to do this, and we will forever be making it up to those who we wronged" in all the detail that it requires for every subsequent generation to say the same, well, it says a lot about how far along the path to admitting to "we were wrong" everyone is. So I am entirely happy with those who chose to remove the artifacts celebrating the people who were wrong.

[cosmolinguist]

I read a good article about this from a Classics perspective:

[Roman] acts of erasure were not meant to obliterate the memory of the person. The act of removing the name or image is...a deliberate attempt not to forget the memory of the person, but to alter it: to render that memory negatively.

Rightfully, there is an attempt [now with BLM] to dishonour those who stand for oppression and bigotry, racism and profiteering off the backs of other human beings.

[silveradept]

That is a lovely piece, and I think the Romans have it well - the point is not to erase the people who were, but to make it clear to everyone that these were terrible people.

[cynthia1960]

I think that people who put up statues ought to realize that their real purpose is to provide bathrooms for birbs, especially pigeons.

Taking down statues of wrong people is a good thing. I was also just amused by a article in Slate about Cheeto Hitler's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame getting improved by a Black Lives Matter paint job. (It seems to be a preferred target; dog poop is a typical gift to it)

[cosmolinguist]

Those dogs are doing good work. :)

[cynthia1960]

The picture I saw had a nicely packaged up by primate staff bit of dog poop on top of the repainted star.

[sfred]

We should get to be "of our time" too, and not have all their baggage to drag around all the time.

Hear, hear!

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I just heard "of its time" once too often and couldn't cope with it any more. "What about our time?! Why does that time always win?!" Plenty of people do still want to live in times like that and I don't want them to win either.