Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Graven Images

The first time I remember watching on television as a statue was pulled to the ground was probably in the early 1990s, when statues of Vladimir Lenin were toppled as the Soviet Union came to an end.

Few Americans shed a tear for the fallen statutes. The USSR was our chief rival, had been painted as an evil empire and brutal enemy by every president going back to Truman. The end of the Soviet regime, symbolized by the fallen Lenin statue, was good news.

Fast forward to 2003. Iraqis, with off-camera help from American soldiers, pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein, an image that played over and over again on American television, one cited as proof by the Bush administration that their invasion was seen by regular Iraqis as an emancipation.

Forget the politics here — Russia has become a different kind of tyranny, while Iraq descended into civil war and our efforts plunged the surrounding region into chaos. What is important is what those statues meant in those countries, how they were used, and the role the statues played in cowing the citizenry of those nations. Just as important is the way in which these statues and their fall are consistent with the historical use of memorials and statues — and how they presage what has started happening in the United States.

American statues are falling, and not just those of Confederate generals erected during the Jim Crow era to intimidate black Americans and maintain a system of racial division and power. Some, like those of the generals, were taken down by those protesting the killing of African Americans by police. Others have been removed as official acts of government: The statue of the racist mayor of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo; a racist statue of President Theodore Roosevelt that greeted visitors to the American Museum of Natural History in New York; and numerous others. Princeton University has renamed its prestigious School of Public and International Affairs, removing Woodrow Wilson from the building. Wilson, before serving as US president (and both expanding the American foreign policy footprint and imposing segregation on the federal bureaucracy), had led the university as its president and served as New Jersey governor.

The reaction from the right has been predictable. This is an erasure of history, of heritage, of culture. Some liberals have made the same argument. It is a bogus argument, of course. Statues and memorials are not about history, but about the narratives we seek to tell ourselves, about the mythology we seek to preserve and to foster. The protests in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 by white supremacist groups, ostensibly about protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee, are a good example. Lee, as the leader of the Confederate forces, engaged in treason and was on the side of a racist economic system that enslaved hundreds of thousands. However, the erection of the Lee statue in Charlottesville — and others throughout the south — was designed not to recognize this history but to press the “lost cause” narrative that viewed the fight to maintain slavery as a noble one. This narrative, of course, was central to the creation of the Jim Crow legal system and the statues served notice to black Americans that their freedom was conditional.

Roland Barthes, the French literary critic and semiologist, calls myth a type of speech. In his book “Mythologies,” Barthes says myth is defined “by the way in which it utters” its message, and that “it is human history which converts reality into speech.” Images, he says (here I am extrapolating from pictures, which are his focus, to images more broadly), “become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful,” and that meaning is something that is “chosen by history.” In the case of Confederate statues, the meaning is derived from the timing of their construction (decades after the end of the Civil War), location in the public square, and the heroic way in which the generals and others are portrayed. They also are defined by their audience — southern Whites would see them as reinforcing the rightness of their cause; southern Blacks would see them as forms of intimidation and erasure.

So, what to make of the toppling of a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the storied Union general (and failed president), and the vandalism of statues of Abraham Lincoln and others normally associated with abolition of slavery, like the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier? These statues, after all, would appear to commemorate the kind of people that Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies would hold up as positive examples, of historical figures who did the right thing. That argument is too simplistic.

Lincoln, Walt Whitman, abolitionists like Whittier and William Lloyd Garrison, may have been on the right side of history, but they also are central players in a narrative that has fostered White Supremacy, one that posits that slavery and racism were the product of bad southern whites and not something that is systemic and widespread in American history and culture.

This is why tearing down the Grant statue is consistent with the anti-racist rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement. Tearing down statues is not just about the individual statues, but about the larger narrative. As Noah Berlatsky wrote in The Independent: “The protestors knocking down statues today are trying to get the American public to confront our legacy of racism. They’re also trying to make us think about what it would mean to create an antiracist public sphere, in which prejudice and hatred are remembered, but not celebrated.”

The point is to rewrite the narrative, to reimagine the stories we tell ourselves. American history has been cobbled together by mostly white men, and the stories have been heroic narratives that privilege the great-man theory of history, that focus on presidents and generals and promote a story that frames history as being driven by top-down efforts, by elites, and that obscures the work done by those in the actual trenches.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/Newspoet41 (please consider becoming a patron).

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2020

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