Just a note: The removing hagiographic memorialisations is not an ‘erasure of history’ as so many are touting. Hagiographic memorialisations are, by nature, excessively flattering depictions of a person that often whitewash or obscure reality.
In removing the statues of those whose wealth and power was derived from the kidnap, owning, selling, and often murder of human beings, we are not ‘erasing history’. That’s not how history works. Removing one statue does not erase someone’s history. It does not change what they did. These men had hagiographic monuments erected of them, often by others years after their death, and notably after the abolition of slavery, which ‘flattered’ their ‘philanthropy’, but whitewashed how they came by that money in the first place. The people who erected these monuments knew how these men got their money, and deliberately omitted it. Even now, when asked to update plaques for these statues, those in power will continue hagiography and omit the important details either through shame or willful ignorance.
The erasure of history comes when we fail to face up to it. You cannot accept a person’s ‘philanthropy’ without also acknowledging in full where the money came from. You cannot say ‘look at all the good they did for these orphans’ without also acknowledging that they were responsible for orphaning children by kidnapping their parents and selling them into slavery, or throwing sick children overboard to drown because they were no longer valuable. By leaving a statue like that, in its place, without proper acknowledgement of why and how that person came to be memorialised, then it is already participating in the erasure of history. It effectively states ‘the people who were kidnapped, sold, or drowned, do not matter because he used the money he got from selling them to feed some orphans’. It memorialises the notion that the lives of the people in this country matter more than the lives of the people kidnapped and sold for profit in a foreign land. It reinforces the idea that feeding a few hundred orphans, and constructing some buildings, mattered more than the hundreds of thousands of lives torn apart when they were ripped from their homes, put onto boats, sold in a foreign land, and died with no one to memorialise their real names. If a statue of a person such as this, remaining in place, matters more to you than acknowledging the full history behind the reason it exists in the first place, then there is nothing more to say. You already know what you are.
The defacement, and removal of statues of people who no longer represent our ideals or morals, is a time honoured historical tradition. A practice of millennia for people who say ‘no more of this’. We still have these toppled statues, their history is not gone. They are a reminder that ideas and monuments are not permanent, and their removal often comes at a time of great upheaval. Changes in human history are often marked by the fall of statues and monuments, yet we still remember them. Time and history march on. You either go with it and grow with the changes, or remain stagnant and see yourself consigned to the relics of a history that refused to acknowledge its own reality.
