There are arguments that it is unfair to judge people who lived in the past by our current moral values. But statues to these people exist in our current reality; they are here now, in our time, and it is therefore certainly fair to judge them by our current values. The question is not if it was right for people to honor in 1860 a slaver, or a Confederate general, by building a statue in 1860. I think not, but that boat has sailed. They were honored by the standards of their time, by enough people to have made the statues happen. And because of the racist standards of the 1870s, 1880s, etc. the honor continued and statues stayed up.
But now most of us recognize slavery to be a horror and an affront to humanity. Time for the statues to come done and either be melted away or placed in a museum of horrors. We don’t have to continue to honor people just because moral standards in the past were not what we hold to be true now.
Well, this comes down to the difference between celebrating and remembering. Personally, I think history should be remembered, though obviously, not always celebrated. Then you could ask the question, should some people who were involved in doing bad things be celebrated? That's a question where we don't seem to be clear on the answer. We often celebrate people who had some involvement with less savoury things. Another puzzling question is what about buildings with a dubious past? Are they worthy of being torn down, are they worthy of serving as a form of remembrance? Can you consider some of these buildings as places that people celebrate?*
The tower of London is a massive tourist trap where people from all over the world happily buy up the merchandise and gather around to get a kick out of gruesome stories, despite the fact that people were imprisoned, tortured and killed there, many of them even innocent to some degree... Likewise, for instance, Ripper tours are similar, they are often full of exaggerated details to dazzle the crowd and enjoyed by people who often sport Ripper cosplay, of all things! There's even a Jack the Ripper museum that's less about remembering the victims and seemingly more about celebrating the murders like they're some Conan Doyle tale. So do some people and places deserve remembering? For what reasons? Can we still read literature, watch movies, listen to music, or admire the art of dubious people? Is that a form of celebration?
It's not so black and white to me (pun obviously intended).
England is steeped in history that isn't exactly brimming with joy, but are we celebrating the history or merely
remembering it? What about holidays that we all celebrate on autopilot that are rooted in dark, sometimes violent origins? Are they still okay to celebrate?
With Colston, people are (rightly) offended by his links to the slave trade, and they feel that he shouldn't be celebrated. I don't disagree with that, I don't honestly care either way, but I don't disagree with it. So are more statues, buildings, monuments, works of art, and even people themselves, up for the same scrutiny? Do we re-evaluate history? Re-evaluate art?
Regarding slavery, it, obviously, was more than a blemish on humanity's history, and it still is, it never truly went away. The problem is that much of our country is rooted in it, from buildings to monuments to cultural institutions, industries, and on and on... So if we're talking about holding everything up to our current standards of morality, how much of our history that we're surrounded with are we realistically allowed to re-evaluate and possibly remove?
