STATUE OF LIMITATIONS

(On storing statues of Confederate generals): I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve.           Erin Thompson

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
(On storing statues of Confederate generals): I like to think of them as America’s strategic racism reserve. Erin Thompson
 
I am not sure this hilarious observation needs any explication, but that never stopped me before.
 
I have family in Richmond, Virginia, and inevitably when we would visit there would be a drive on Monument Avenue. It was not to see the statues that stood in the verdant median strip, but because it is the main drag to parts of the city we had come to visit. Those statues were erected long after armed hostilities ceased between the armies of the United States (aka, the North) and the Confederate States (aka, the South). They were part of an attempt on the part of descendants of the Confederacy to reclaim the dignity they felt they had lost when the North defeated the South and imposed the rule of law as enacted by Congress.
 
It included the elimination of slavery (or, as I understand current usage, enslavement). Once you declare that it is a crime to claim ownership of another human being, it is only a matter of time until those human beings expect to be treated as equals. What nerve. And as society began to creep with excruciating lethargy toward that goal, it became necessary to remind people – the equals and the previously unequals – that things were not always that way. And one way to do it was to erect ginormous statues of the soldiers and politicians who took up arms to preserve their way of life in which men were men, women were women, and people of African heritage were chattel.
 
There are many fewer folks who would defend any semblance of slavery these days, and most of them belong to groups watched carefully by the FBI and Southern Poverty Law Center. But there are plenty of people who believe that just because history should not repeat itself, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t celebrate that old times there are not forgotten. And honestly, I don’t care how skilled a general or competent a legislator or brave a soldier a person was in the mid-19th-century, if they were using those skills in the service of the Confederacy, they were dedicated to the proposition that some men (and all women) were not created equal. Putting a statue of Arthur Ashe at the front of the line only mitigates that fact if you never continue down the road to the rest of the canonized saints of human trafficking.
 
The mayor who had those statues on Monument Avenue removed grew up to overcome the residual obstacles placed in the way of his parents and grandparents. He was not the first Black mayor of Richmond, and therefore not the first head of the city to travel in the shadow of those who would have denied him the right to his elected office. It appears that these things take time.
 
But what should be done with the oversize representations of the heroes of the South?
 
There is an argument to make that statues and other public monuments are historical artifacts, and therefore, like archaeological treasures from past civilizations, they should be preserved for posterity. The guardians of the Confederate legacy, however, strike me as having more in mind than guarding resources for future understanding of the circumstances of the Civil War. Oversized and idealized representations of military and political leaders are designed not to call to mind any accurate representation of what happened to cause or fight the war. Those statues – created and established long after the war ended and the subjects were dead – were erected to celebrate a shameful blight on the promise of our democracy. Were a visitor from another time or culture try to analyze what they symbolized for adherents of “the lost cause,” they could not help but conclude that in defending the secession and independence of the South, those iconic figures were not merely endorsing states’ rights and economic freedom; indeed, they were defending the enforced dehumanization of an entire segment of the human family based on their race.
 
Do we need to remember these monuments? Take a picture. They add nothing to our knowledge of the men (and few women) they represent. Rather, they serve to deflect the conversations that might eliminate the obstacles to full equality for all people in this country by allowing the preservationists to lay claim to some bogus sense of righteous indignation about the past, while the great-grandchildren of the enslaved people wonder rightfully why those same folks don’t share their own indignation about being victimized.
 
There is only one reason to preserve these statues rather than melt them down: to give people a touchstone for their own remaining bigotry. That’s why Erin Thompson’s sardonic observation is correct.