Split Thread Tearing Down Statues Associated With Racial Injustice

[wareyin]

Lovecraft's award was brought up by me to outline the issue we have within our culture to celebrate people with dubious ties, you then oddly began droning on about tax payers paying for Colston's statue for some reason.

It still escapes you that there is a difference between privately funded celebrations and government funded celebrations? Even after one being voluntary and one being mandatory was pointed out?

 

[wareyin]

Why wouldn't they be involved???

It's in Bristol, or was. Who else is going to deal with it, the A Team?

per your source, the organisation that owned it. Unless what you posted didn't apply, that is.

 

[Gilbert Syndrome]

It still escapes you that there is a difference between privately funded celebrations and government funded celebrations? Even after one being voluntary and one being mandatory was pointed out?

Colston's statue was privately funded by James Arrowsmith, nobody else wanted to fund it.

 

[Gilbert Syndrome]

per your source, the organisation that owned it. Unless what you posted didn't apply, that is.

It's in Bristol, you asked why Bristol council and the mayor of Bristol got involved with a statue that resided in Bristol. That doesn't mean it was paid for by the residents of Bristol, as far as I can tell.

 

[Meadmaker]

You're doing it again. "Yes, I understand that the system is inherently biased against minorities, but these things should go through the system".

Damn straight I'm doing it again.

Yes, democracy is biased against minorities. Not necessarily against racial minorities, but against ideological minorities. That's kind of the point.

And, sometimes, that carries over into bias against racial minorities. That's unfortunate, but it happens.


But, what do you think? Are mobs with ropes a good offsetting factor against the tyranny of the majority? Are mobs with ropes a good way to ensure equality? "The majority is against us! We must rise in revolt!" That's not going to end well. The other team has ropes, too.

Maybe this one will end well. Maybe the American people (and the Brighton council) will see these statues being pulled down and will realize the sins of their ways, and will carry on this work and things will turn out ok. Maybe.

 

[wareyin]

It's in Bristol, you asked why Bristol council and the mayor of Bristol got involved with a statue that resided in Bristol. That doesn't mean it was paid for by the residents of Bristol, as far as I can tell.

Oh, so the city council and the mayor were using...personal funds to create plaques and care for the statue?

 

[Gilbert Syndrome]

If we are getting rid of statues to Robert E Lee, then why can people still buy Morrissey music?

I've never mentioned a single thing about Robert E Lee, Jamie Lee Curtis, or Lee Harvey Oswold. Nor have I asked why people can still purchase Morrissey's albums (not that they should want to, he's dreadful!)

I was poking fun at certain things that we often blindly enjoy without much pause for thought. The point being: are we now going to actually reevaluate the other people in history, and in culture, that we celebrate? Quite rightly, nobody celebrates Jimmy Saville anymore, and some people are mixed regarding Michael Jackson.

It's much broader than all of that, though. We celebrate all kinds of things that are cemented within a dubious history, or within a dubious philosophy.

Kind of like seeing people wearing Che Guevara shirts.

 

[Gilbert Syndrome]

Oh, so the city council and the mayor were using...personal funds to create plaques and care for the statue?

Can you show me any evidence that the people of Bristol were paying for its upkeep?

You've gone quiet regarding Colston's statue being privately funded. Where did you stick those goal-posts?

 

[P.J. Denyer]

FWIW, Little Britain, Come Fly With Me, and Bo Selecta have been removed from many streaming platforms due to their use of blackface.* "The Germans" episode of Fawlty Towers has also been removed (presumably for its use of racial slurs pertaining to black people more than its lampooning of Germans and invocation of Hitler).

*Leigh Francis posted a sincere-seeming video apologising for his use of blackface, claiming not to have had any negative feedback at the time and not having fully understood the implications, and apparently also sent personal apologies to at least one person he was doing an impression of. It's also worth noting that according to Channel 4 Francis was involved with the decision to pull the shows, although what exactly that means is unclear.

OTOH, Harry Enfield went on Radio 4 to defend blackface and used a racial slur, as he did so. There was a backlash over that, over the fact that he and the white host kept talking over the black guest and mispronouncing her name, and over the fact that Radio 4 thought that the issue of blackface even deserved a "both sides" debate.

The Fawltey Towers episode was removed because of the 'n-word', the BBC have a dubbed version that other outlets have used for several years so it will probably be back up pretty quickly.

To be honest theres a few aspects of Little Britain that strike me as 'hitting down' and endorsing pretty harmful stereotypes on top of any racism.

 

[Elagabalus]

If you include people who supported from murderers and slavers, you'll need to cut down a lot of statues. If you include people who benefited from murderers and slavers, that's pretty much all of them.

I still want statues of Columbus, ...

Never understood that one. The guy never even set foot on "North America".

And, the places he did "discover", he thought they were part of India.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Blackface was not originally using makeup to change your skin colour, it was the disgusting parody of black people - in the UK infamously illustrated by the "The Black and White Minstrel Show^WP".

I would argue that the "blackface" in Little Britain is "acceptable" as they are creating and acting as different characters and when playing a non-white character being black/non-white was just one of the character's attributes, not the focus of the character. The two creative people behind Little Britain are white males, I would say it would have been more wrong for them not to include characters that are "representative" of Britain today. They dress up as a variety of non-white male characters. From my memory there is one character that I think was probably not OK and that was the "mail order bride" that I think was meant to be from Thailand. For that character being "asian" was the focus of the character.

(All this is from memory so I may not be remembering the extent of their use of non-white characters so what I've said above may be completely wrong!)

And the character was trans and called "Ting Tong". Actually, the sketch is about a caricature of an Asian trans woman played by a white guy being sold into sex slavery and having to perform sex acts on her buyer to avoid being handed over to the authorities for deportation. I admit that a lot of humour sounds bad reduced to it's starkest terms, but it's hard not to cringe at this one.

 

[Meadmaker]

Never understood that one. The guy never even set foot on "North America".

And, the places he did "discover", he thought they were part of India.

I read once of him, "He got lost. He didn't know where he got to. When he got back he didn't know where he had been, and he did it all on borrowed money."


But he assembled a crew, set sail for the unknown at the risk of his life, made it back and forth across an ocean which no one had ever done before, and changed the world. It was an impressive accomplishment, and incredibly important to our modern world, and especially to the United States (where I live) and the other nations of the Americas.

Oh, and he was a conqueror that was not very nice to the natives.*

When I think of people who deserve statues or other recognition, I think of what they did that distinguished themselves from ordinary men, not the things that made them the same as their peers. For his time, racism was pretty normal. Sailing across oceans was not.

*ETA: Or to anyone else. I just read his Wikipedia page. Not a nice guy at all. But that's not what the statues are for. And, I'm willing to cast my one vote to keep, and let others cast their one vote to get rid.

 

[Giordano]

Why wouldn't they be involved???

It's in Bristol, or was. Who else is going to deal with it, the A Team?

I thought you were suggesting that the statue was the property and responsibility of a private organization.

Shouldn’t they pay for its recovery? If my yard were vandalized I, not my city, would haveto pay to fix it.

 

[wareyin]

Can you show me any evidence that the people of Bristol were paying for its upkeep?

You've gone quiet regarding Colston's statue being privately funded. Where did you stick those goal-posts?

Oh dear, it appears you got confused. Again. I didn't claim that Colston's statue was privately funded. I claimed that it was under government control and maintenance. Now, most people understand that when the government takes care of a statue, this is paid for by the taxes that the people being governed pay. In this case, that would be the "people of Bristol." And, as I'm sure you will be confused again, the mayor was involved in writing the new plaque, and the city council is involved in storing the statue right now. The monies required to do these things were not privately paid.

 

[Giordano]

I've never mentioned a single thing about Robert E Lee, Jamie Lee Curtis, or Lee Harvey Oswold. Nor have I asked why people can still purchase Morrissey's albums (not that they should want to, he's dreadful!)

I was poking fun at certain things that we often blindly enjoy without much pause for thought. The point being: are we now going to actually reevaluate the other people in history, and in culture, that we celebrate? Quite rightly, nobody celebrates Jimmy Saville anymore, and some people are mixed regarding Michael Jackson.

It's much broader than all of that, though. We celebrate all kinds of things that are cemented within a dubious history, or within a dubious philosophy.

Kind of like seeing people wearing Che Guevara shirts.

I think it is pretty important to periodically take the time to thoughtfully re-evaluate our cultural heros and villains. Many times we will decide to continue to honor the heros or disparage the villains, but we will have obtained a greater insight into the larger sweep of their lives.

It’s not binary: one can still value Einstein for his genius even though he probably cheated on his wife and he married his cousin.

 

[wareyin]

I thought you were suggesting that the statue was the property and responsibility of a private organization.

Shouldn’t they pay for its recovery? If my yard were vandalized I, not my city, would haveto pay to fix it.

Don't forget about the local government wrangling over the wording for a new plaque. Not a private organization.

According to this BBC article, the statue was public property.

 

[wareyin]

I've never mentioned a single thing about Robert E Lee, Jamie Lee Curtis, or Lee Harvey Oswold. Nor have I asked why people can still purchase Morrissey's albums (not that they should want to, he's dreadful!)

I was poking fun at certain things that we often blindly enjoy without much pause for thought. The point being: are we now going to actually reevaluate the other people in history, and in culture, that we celebrate? Quite rightly, nobody celebrates Jimmy Saville anymore, and some people are mixed regarding Michael Jackson.

It's much broader than all of that, though. We celebrate all kinds of things that are cemented within a dubious history, or within a dubious philosophy.

Kind of like seeing people wearing Che Guevara shirts.

In this thread, in which we are discussing the pulling down of not only Colston's statue but those honoring Confederate soldiers such as Robert E Lee, you consistently want to whine about people buying Morrissey's music, or paying to enter a Jack the Ripper museum, or now buying a Che Guevara shirt.

We can't stop people from liking fashion or art that you don't like. That's never going to happen. All you are doing is trying to water down the actual protests with silly complaints about t-shirts and Tower of London memorabilia.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

I don't care about 'art' but they're historical artifacts in their own right. Frankly, it doesn't matter how good they are.

And the same argument about "workaday" pieces and unknown producers can be made about most ancient statues as well. Most statues of kings, emperors and gods would have been made by unknowns as copies, or even copies of copies.

In my local history museum, where I used to volunteer, we had all kinds of historical objects. Like plaques with the names of the local firms that built a gasworks that was demolished. They weren't artistic but they did have a context in local history.

These statues will have even more historical context than most now, if they get pulled down in protest. They tell a story and should be preserved in museums.

They deserve the chance to be preserved in museums if there's enough interest.

How many expensive, well lit, and properly staffed museums full of assorted racist ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ memorabilia do you think the market will bear?

 

[Arcade22]

FWIW, Sadiq Khan has commissioned an equality committee to assess the statues and monuments in London. That's just London, and is an example of something that should have happened a long time ago - changing the system to move it towards being less inherently biased.

So are they going to mandate that statues reflect the ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic and sex composition of London? What about "affirmative action" for statues and monuments?

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

And, sometimes, that carries over into bias against racial minorities. That's unfortunate, but it happens.

Therefore the correct response is to shrug and say "yes, I understand that racism is inherent in the system, but that's just something you're going to have to learn to live with I'm afraid! What can you do?"?

But, what do you think? Are mobs with ropes a good offsetting factor against the tyranny of the majority? Are mobs with ropes a good way to ensure equality? "The majority is against us! We must rise in revolt!" That's not going to end well.

The evidence certainly seems to suggest that after centuries of being marginalised and ignored the past few weeks of taking direct action may be instrumental in effecting positive change.

The other team has ropes, too.

Yes, and when they brandish them, the system falls over backwards in support. See, for example, Ahmaud Aubrey.