A Friendly Conversation About Confederate Statues

I don’t think we should take down a statue of a confederate “hero,” or any other historical figure because the person was a bad person by today’s standards.

I know, I know…

It’s important to know that I am a cis white dude, and I can cry progressive, but I get all the criticism deserved for taking on a topic that marginalizes by design. The argument I am going to make has the goal of being inclusive. I may miss the mark, so feel free to respond as you see fit.

The good things we do may one day be judged as bad things. And vice versa.

I worry that taking down parts of our society that we willingly put in place is a failure to connect with the humanity of our society. We are people, good and bad. We are not good people, because there is no such thing. We are people, and we do good things and we do bad things.

If you want to take down a confederate statue because the community wants to replace it with a different type of tribute, I get it, and if most of the community wants that, ok, fine. If you want to take it down because a small portion of the community thinks its in poor taste, then let’s talk about it.

I can’t think of a president aside from Jimmy Carter that I would argue deserves a statue in a public square because they are a “good person.” And I don’t know the last one before him who should get one. I could hear a case for Abraham Lincoln, I guess. And you could easily convince me that Carter wasn’t a good person. The guy ran for president and won—that makes him specious in my book.

You might not be surprised to hear that I often reject the idea of “good” and “bad” outright. There’s not much use in these descriptors and they are by current definition fraught with the weight of judgment, and judgment is, well, mostly a bad idea.

These thoughts jumped into my head because I saw (via the delightful kottke.org) that artist Kara Walker had repurposed and re-contextualized a confederate statue that had been removed from Charlottesville. I’m all for the art and the artist, it’s a really spectacular piece of work. I also think it’s more powerful for the fact that it’s the actual statue that had been repurposed. I just wonder if a natural extension to this is like using a Picasso because he was a scumbag at times in his life. 

Corporations have already done this with dozens of creative works, recently William Friedkin’s French Connection. As a pre-internet brain rot fan, we shared VHS tapes of Looney Tunes outtakes that were no longer shown on tv or available through official release. I am not arguing that Song of the South, for example, should be on the Disney Channel for kids, but there is something missing when we try to erase the work of creators because they are misaligned with current times. We seem to have enough distance from Wagner and enough cultural distance in the U.S. from Riefenstahl to keep them in context, and maybe we could do that with other artists.

I would rather we contextualize in the way that Nell Irvin Painter and Howard Zinn and Ta-Nehisi Coates re-contextualized their topics, we can do this with art.

Now, I agree that we, and by we, I mean Americans in general, have not done this particularly well, and that there are populist movements currently which are trying to undermine context itself, but my goal would be to fight this decontextualizing. Free speech should be for everyone, not just weaponized by bad actors.

Or maybe, we should let an artist make a collage from the Mona Lisa. Maybe all art is history and all history needs to be recycled and reused and re-contextualized. I’d just argue that it might be just as effective with a facsimile.