In the wake of the George Floyd protests, we are seeing protesters around the world, from every tribe and tongue, rise up and dismantle monuments to human oppression. Monuments to slave holders are being defaced and beheaded, toppled onto the ground, and thrown into the water. Just as we cheered when the Berlin Wall came down, and when statues of Fascists and Dictators around the world have been torn down, so now people are cheering the forcible removal of racist monuments from public lands. What should we do about this?
These removals upset many, especially those who see themselves as upholding history against revisionism, and upholding traditional values against anarchy. In particular, many in the Southern United States (the part that broke the American social contract and rebelled against the duly elected government of the United States in the 1860's) object that these statues have nothing to do with racism or slavery, even though they celebrate people who were racists and owned slaves. Rather, they represent an historic era of "States Rights", and certain vision of public virtue, and the value of local rights and freedoms over and against national intrusions. And perhaps this is true for a minority of people, when they experience these monuments on public grounds.
But, if this was true for the majority of people in the Southern States, then surely we would have seen a flowering of public virtue to protect the God-given rights of each and every Southern person, black and white. We would have seen black children and white children growing up together, embracing each other, and forming families and neighborhoods and communities together, all across the South, under the benevolent gaze and approval of these statues. If this vision of public virtue was real, certainly we would have seen an un-hindered movement toward black civil rights after slavery, where blacks were given equal justice and equal opportunity under the law, and in the court of public opinion. Surely these monuments would have helped catalyze and inspire such a movement toward justice.
But, alas, this is not the case, is it? It seems to be, in actuality, just the opposite. And the previous paragraph was sarcasm because there is no benevolent gaze from these statues. At least not for Black Americans. All of these public monuments to racist slave owners have been ineffective at best in helping produce a virtuous society. At worst, as is suspected, these actually stand as monuments to injustice and actively perpetuate the oppression of Black Americans and other People of Color. Perhaps there is a whole underground movement of Southern whites who brandished the Confederate flag and displayed posters of Robert E. Lee to inspire them to fight boldly for civil rights for Black Americans. But I am not aware of it.
But let's take the commonsense view that, on balance, these racist monuments seek to create a cultural ethos that perpetuates injustice and Black oppression. Should we then just let the mobs come and deface public property, and throw the statues in the junk pile? Well, I don't think this is the wisest solution, nor the most effective use of public resources (although if we wait too long, it may be the only solution we give ourselves). On one hand, I think that if someone owned slaves, we don’t have publicly displayed monuments dedicated to them; We don't use their names for public buildings or streets or locations; We don’t put their visage on our money; And we don’t use their image on our stamps.
On the other hand, I’m not saying destroy them or throw them in a river. I don’t mind if private citizens want to collect their statues and put them into into whatever private institute or museum they want. We have freedom of speech after all. And there is a difference between publicly funded and displayed art which is intended to highlight exemplars of civic virtue, and privately funded and displayed art which voices whatever values the artist or collector wants to be voiced. When we publicly exhibit art which features people who made their fortune while relying on slave labor, we are implicitly displaying slaveholding and abuse of people as a public virtue.
As a culture, we need to stop confusing the removal of statues, the changing of names, and the lowering of flags with removing people and events from history. Just because we remove public funding and public space from celebrating them does not mean we stop learning about them in the classroom or library. So, I’m not saying to exile these people from history or deny their many contributions beyond owning other humans. They should be in our books. We should study the documents they left behind.
But I would not shed a tear or have a single qualm if every statue was removed to private property, every portrait was placed in private museums, and every face on every bill was changed out.
So here's my modest proposal:
Let's privatize racist monuments and let the free market take care of it. Before all these statues and monuments get destroyed and defaced because they celebrate people who owned other people, and killed people in defense of owning other people, let’s put them in a big garage sale. Private collectors can buy them and put them in private museums dedicated to whatever they want to celebrate. Then local municipalities make tons of money off the sales that can be put into social programs and infrastructure development. Speaking of which, we can even sell off the names of streets and parks named after racists. Monetize all of it.
But we should do this sale soon, before people get even angrier that we are using public space and public money to celebrate people who embody values and economic arrangements contrary to our national values, and decide to remedy that the way mobs typically remedy it when they are sick of what the statues represent.
And if we privatized all these racist statues, I'm sure we would get a mix of collectors. Some would, no doubt, buy them and display for the purpose of providing a detailed account of American History and the key players and events in that struggle. But I am also sure that some would collect them for less noble reasons. But then their money would be extracted from them to use for public goods when they bought the statues, purchased the property, built the buildings, and hired the workers to staff their museums.
This would allow them to take their trinkets of oppression and segregate them into their own private property, where they could get "separate but equal" treatment alongside all other private museums. They would not at all be silenced, but would be able to participate in the free market of public speech and advertising. Really, this idea would be a win-win-win for everyone. But it really needs to be done quickly, before the torches and pitchforks arrive on public land demanding we only celebrate people who embody our stated American ideals of liberty and justice for all.
And then this leads to the truly thorny problem that many of the Founders of our Democracy were slave owners, including our first President, and the person who coined the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Should we also sell off the Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument to private collectors? I confess I do not know what to do about that. But perhaps we could honor them most by honoring the Democracy they put in place, and put it up for a National Vote about what to do with these Monuments.
That's my modest proposal.
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