Split Thread Tearing Down Statues Associated With Racial Injustice

Gilbert Syndrome said:
The point I was making is that where do you draw the line? I'm in no way saying that the Tower of London should be torn down, but if someone argued the point that it should, would they be heard? Is gathering around to hear stories of innocent people being brutally murdered an act of remembrance or an act of celebration? ...snip...
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Why shouldn't it be up to the people alive today what they do as it was to the people hundreds of years ago? Societies and cultures are always changing.

Gilbert Syndrome said:
If monuments to questionable people of history are up for scrutiny, are buildings? Is art? Music? Film? Literature?
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Seems pretty much unconnected to this topic but again why shouldn't the people today be able to make such decisions for themselves?

Gilbert Syndrome said:
In another thread, the topic of Lovecraft's racism was mentioned, yet we continue to celebrate him as an important author who influences many. In fact, his very likeness was made into an award for authors of Fantasy fiction!

Isn't this shedding light on whether or not we can ever truly forgive and forget? Is all of the good a person does negated by the bad he also does?

Seems to me we don't bother thinking about any of it because it's a messy, blurred road that inevitably leads to contradiction somewhere along the way.

Again, I've no issue with Colston's statue being torn down, but inevitably, it leads me to wonder what else we can now re-evaluate and be rid of because we no longer see fit to accept it.

It's a pesky battle between celebrating and remembering.
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People have always had this issue; it isn't a new thing. I'd say these days we are in fact much more sensitive and try to be better informed when we are making these types of decisions then ever before. It’s only a few hundred years ago the word would go out from the ruler that X is now out of favour and everyone would be quick to remove anything that even reminded people of X.

We’ve now decided as a society that slave traders are not people we want to commemorate no matter if they did other things that we still respect. It is just a change.

There is a slight wrinkle in this for the USA folk as it is apparent that many of the “confederate” statues were deliberately put up in quite recent times to commemorate the fight to keep slavery so there is no “but he was loved his dog” that needs to be taken into consideration.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
The latter method is to be preferred, if workable. If, however, it is itself an example of how institutional racism actually manifests, then what is to be done?

Bear in mind as you're decrying this that the mayor of Bristol has come as close to endorsing this as his office will allow, and that the city council has collected the signs left around the base in order to preserve them in the local museum.
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He's only a Mayor for a short time. This is not about the Mayor.
 
Pixel42 said:
I understand what you're saying but it's pretty clear that Saville's charitable activities were designed solely to give him access to vulnerable children and adults, so he's probably not the best example to use.
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Be fair. He did teach people to go, 'Clunk, Click, every trip', and out their seat belts on.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
How is tearing down a statue of a slave trader avoiding scrutiny of Bristol's past? Couldn't scrutiny better be served by, say, a memorial to the slaves? Or, as I've said previously, a statue of important black people from history? My suggestion was the men who created and led the Bristol bus boycott - it's still the history of the town, it's appropriate because it replaces a racist with people who campaigned against racism, and it's filling a space emptied by a protest with a statue to people who instigated a protest.
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That's a good idea. I like it!
 
Captain_Swoop said:
How is that any kind of excuse? the same could be said of Hitler.
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Economics and society evolves. It started with the family unit, then became feudalism, then the slave trade, then they discovered it was cheaper to build factories of mass production (industrialisation), the old slave plantations became massive industrial sized farms, moving from the old plantations in Barbados and Jamaica with a big old house governed by a younger brother member of the gentility to overseer-managed 20,000 acre sugar and cotton fields in North and South Carolina, as the ruling classes discovered you could pay the former slaves and peasants a wage, out of which they could pay their own housing and food (but only just enough to cover that, mind) with the excess profit going into the pockets of...that's right people of the same class as Colston and the hedge-fund managers shorting the pound over Brexit.

So we are at the stage of late capitalism. Thanks to the recent pandemic and crash of markets we are now looking for the next stage in economic evolution.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
How is that any kind of excuse? the same could be said of Hitler.
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I don't think "excuse" is a proper word, but it does go back to the point I was making about the society in which Colston lived. He was occupying a niche in a corrupt society. Had he not participated in the slave trade, no slaves would have been saved. On the other hand, had he not participated in the slave trade, several charitable organizations in Bristol would not have existed.

I'm not saying that we ought to replace his statue. I'm saying that when compared to his fellow men of his time, he was probably not particularly awful. Being a slaver made him no worse that the people and politicians who supported slavery. On the other hand, being a philanthropist made him better than a lot of equally wealthy individuals of his day.

Maybe it was a good thing to take the statue down, though, just to spare all who viewed it the reminder of the unsavory moments of the past. While everyone in that society was touched by slavery, not all were quite so enmeshed in it. Public statuary should, above all else, make us feel good. Perhaps Colston was just too tainted with the rot of the times to be enjoyed anymore.
 
Well, it brings a whole new meaning to the term "Everything Shipshape and in Bristol Fashion".
 
https://twitter.com/Femi_Sorry/status/1270667995447164930?s=20

Femi said:
I'm trying to organise building a statue of Jimmy Saville outside Birmingham Children's Hospital because his contribution to kids' entertainment is an important part of our history, and without a statue we'd forget the great things he did.

Let me know if you're willing to help.
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For those who don't know him, Femi is black and this tweet is a parody.
 
- I really didn't know that so many people just hate statues in general.

- I still say that demanding we have the conversation on top of / in parallel to disenfranchised people asking that statues specifically put up to glorify the people who oppressed them is inappropriate.
 
Checkmite said:
Protesters in Richmond, Virginia toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus and set it on fire before tossing it into a nearby lake.
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And they undoubtedly patted themselves on the back for being good people for doing it. Nothing says virtue like properly targeted vandalism.

ETA: I read the article. Despite them being good people doing great and virtuous deeds, they were reluctant to allow a news photographer to record their efforts.
 
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