what do we remember?
Politics of monuments
What interpretation of the past are we telling?
At sites of historical conflict: What story are we telling? What purpose do monuments serve? Should we remove controversial statues? Some people argue no, that removing the monuments is synonymous to pretending the traumatic event never happened. On the other hand, some argue we should remove controversial monuments from their pedestals and still remind the public of the events they represent. It’s time to mediate the relationship between the past and the present.
Statues can inform us about history, but they don’t convey some immutable truth from the past. Monuments are often symbols of fixed ideas of a specific community at a point in time in the past- not representative of the whole story of everyone involved.
Pulling down statues is a terrible way to erase history – you can’t erase memory.
“If controversial monuments do have a connection to history, it is because they attempt to shape it, not reflect it. To believe we can learn history from them is like a judge choosing only to hear testimony from the defence. Public statues are political acts; when the politics change, so must the statues.”
“Statues, almost always of historical White male figures made famous for their role in a country’s past, have been painted over, chipped away at, dragged down from their pedestals, hung, and dropped into the nearest river. While discontent with the American monumental landscape is actually not a new phenomenon, the groundswell of pent-up rage and frustration with the seeming impunity of wealthy White men and violent White supremacy sweeping the United States is perhaps unlike anything the country has seen for decades. Recent years have been defined by the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the police brutality and systemic racism inflicted on Black communities…”
Should historical statues of racist figures and pasts be left as they are or removed and destroyed? Should they be rehomed in statue parks intended as final resting places for disgraced statues? Or should they be left but with additional monuments and signage added to their surroundings to provide further context?
Read more from Kaitlin Murphy by clicking below!
"The history of every people is written in its monuments. They reveal, without diminishment or partiality, their mores, their beliefs, their institutions."
Who do we Remember?
50,000 U.S. Monuments
Most recognized people:
- Abraham Lincoln
- George Washington
- Christopher Columbus
- Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
- Saint Francis of Assisi
- Robert E. Lee
“Of 5,917 recorded monuments that mention the Civil War, only 1 percent also mention slavery. Of 916 monuments mentioning pioneers and westward expansion, only 15 percent also mention Native Americans, Indians or Indigenous people.”
“Of the 50 historical figures most frequently honored with a monument, only three were women: Joan of Arc, Sacagawea and Harriet Tubman. Tubman, the only one of the three who would have called herself American, was born enslaved and was not considered a citizen until she was in her 40s.”
“Of the men on the top 50 list, more than half were enslavers. Twelve were generals, 11 presidents and four Catholic saints or missionaries. Four were leaders of the Confederacy. Three men in the top 50 are men of color: King, Tecumseh and Frederick Douglass.”
Monument vs. Memorial
- Kerry Whigham (2017: 107) writes that part of the “work” of memorials is often to construct a space of memory in honor of who have suffered, and, in so doing, to function as a form of symbolic reparation for the harm done to them.
- Monuments effectively function as speech acts: they are public proclamations of certain narratives that are intended to simultaneously reify that narrative and lay claim to the space in which the monument has been placed.
- This is the irony of monuments: they are often backward-facing, serving as reminders of the past, but they can also play a critical role in opening dialogue, encouraging citizen participation, addressing long-standing erasures and silences, and igniting cultural reckoning with racist, brutally violent pasts and their lived afterlives.
- Monuments matter precisely because they are symbolic, because they are celebratory, because they are speech acts about cultural values. As a cultural practice, monumentalization thus has incredible value. It is incumbent upon cities and regions to more fully democratize the practice so that monuments do not represent only the wealthy elite but rather celebrate the broader communities within which they reside.
