... as partisan forces have found ways to push forward in June, July, and now August, they have tried to make who they are and what they believe known, for those willing to stop and read what has been graffitied onto the walls. After the first explosion in mid-June, this work of clarification dominated, and the riots turned with particular focus toward acts of iconoclasm, beginning first with statues to the Confederacy in the South and then turning to other examples of monumental white supremacy.
In San Francisco, for example, far outside the theater of the Civil War, the parks and plazas are dotted instead with monuments to Spanish colonization and later Anglo settlement. When statues began falling in other cities in early June, the city preemptively took down the twelve-foot-tall Christopher Columbus in North Beach, after getting word that a march would target it. No matter, iconoclastic youth went to Golden Gate Park and took down the big statue to Junipero Serra, the eighteenth-century Franciscan priest whose archipelago of prisons and military fortresses up and down the California coast, where indigenous captives from dozens of tribes were tortured and enslaved, forms the architectural template for most institutions in the state. Next, however, they took down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union military leader who defeated General Robert E. Lee, ending the Civil War, and four years later, as President, enforced Southern Reconstruction, repressed the Ku Klux Klan, and pushed for passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (which granted explicit equal protection under the law to emancipated slaves). He also ruthlessly opened up the American West for settlement, effectively declaring war on the tribal nations of the Plains and the far West.
Where liberal commentators find ignorant, nihilist excess, wrecking things without regard for historical meaning, they often overlook the active thinking of the movement, developed on the spot. In San Francisco, crowds pulling down the non-Confederate statues to Ulysses Grant, to Francis Scott Key, and others, offered explicit justification, tagging the base with explanatory epithets, as those in attendance and passers-by debated the relevant points. In refusing the memorializations of settler violence and plantation slavery on offer, in drawing connections public history won’t, between Southern slavery and the settlement of the West, despite the conflicts opposing the ruling class fractions involved in both, such actions stand US history on its feet and set its sentimental mythology on its head. They also link, in memory, and raise banners to the two most important political moments in the 2010s, which we might name, metonymically, Ferguson and Standing Rock, the first the defining moment of the Black Lives Matter sequence before 2020 and the second referring to the struggle by Dakota Sioux activists and others against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which targeted the infrastructure of ecocidal capitalism directly.
Trump amplified these connections. His response to the wave of statue topplings was to hold a campaign rally at Mt. Rushmore in the Black Hills, the sacred Sioux site defaced by giant busts of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. In response, indigenous protesters blockaded the entrance to the site, fighting with the police and eventually the National Guard. Trump’s instincts here as everywhere provide a moral foil for the movement, establishing continuity where none might have existed. In doing so, he draws toward himself and toward the Federal government antagonism that might have remained more dispersed.
Jasper Bernes, Letter From a Tottering State
