“What I forget is better than whatever they remember.”
— Yasiin Bey (2016)
The police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, to name a few, led to uprisings and protests throughout the United States and around the globe. According to recent data, the current movement may very well be the largest recorded in U.S. history, with up to 26 million people participating. In these protests, confederate monuments have been frequently targeted in response to the public devaluation of Black life. This has resulted in their widescale defacement and destruction by anti-racists, which, in turn, generated white backlash from confederate proponents. However, more recently, other iconic American monuments have also been selectively targeted.
Monuments to Cristóbal Colón, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the figureheads of Mount Rushmore are now more frequently being included in conversations as symbols of white supremacy, antiblack racism, and settler colonialism. For many, this crosses an uncomfortable line. Yet, such discomforts only reveal an unsavory truth: confederate monuments do not have the sole purchase on racism within this country.
In fact, I have argued that a four-dimensional model, which captures historic, aesthetic, ethical and political considerations, could help individuals identify the myriad reasons why the meaning of a monument might become contested. When the public meaning of monuments, across such a wide spectrum, suffers a breakdown, it becomes necessary also to interrogate the possibilities offered by such a grassroots movement. In my view, it becomes necessary to advocate for the continued destructuring of our public.
Within the United States, such a public can only be clearly understood when situated with a racist and colonial order. For instance, when discussing monuments, the public most commonly identified is one whose audience is whitewashed and whose history is one-dimensional. This is why Rebecca Solnit argues: “If you took your history lessons from the street names and the names of bridges and buildings, rivers and towns, you would believe men, mostly white Protestants, did nearly everything that ever mattered.”
Why has this oversaturation of whiteness in our publics not been equally condemned by those committed to antiracism? Moreover, given that the total number of monuments in this country are in the thousands, why is there such outrage when monumental figures are discovered to have had troubling histories? At the heart of this issue is the fear of recognition. If one truly looks at this country, one must recognize that its political order, whether instantiated from the events in 1492 or 1776, is based on oppression and dispossession.
This is most commonly seen in the usage of slippery slope fallacies, where people passionately argue that if one tears down a monument to one racist then all would fall. But one only fears a slippery slope if one is worried that one’s heroes will give cause for them to fall off their pedestals.
It is this historic deflection that protects such monuments. It is this willful blindness that allows for the continued defacement, destruction, and death of both Black and Indigenous people and their own monuments. As the historian Nick Estes so eloquently put it: “tearing down a statue is not erasing history. Putting up a statue on land whose original caretakers you can’t name is.” Such naming and re-membering is key.
We must re-member that the function of monuments is not merely symbolic, but actually requires material investments and maintenance by municipalities, states, and the federal government. Thus, when political orders invest in monuments, they are also investing in histories and publics. As Paul Farber has noted: “Monuments are statements of power and presence in public. They are often designed to appear permanent but they require resources to keep them in mint condition and mindsets to hold them up.” It is in this way that “permanence” is manufactured and curated.
White monuments thus require an asymmetrical allocation of resources, which mirrors the exact same processes that allow other racist structures to function. This is why Frantz Fanon so forcefully argued in The Wretched of the Earth that monuments are part of the structural “backbones” of colonial orders, of worlds divided into black-and-white: “A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip. That is the colonial world” (15). The segregation of public life requires constant maintenance so that people and histories do not meet.
Moreover, these monuments do the work of reminding both the colonized and colonizers alike of what is being maintained by these public works. This is why Fanon argued that “all these conquistadors ensconced on colonial soil, is a constant reminder of one and the same thing: ‘We are here by the force of the bayonet…’” (ibid, 43). Statues and monuments are thus indicative of historical violence and the corresponding erasure of such violence, in the maintenance of state history.
This is why Plymouth Rock is often celebrated as the onset of immigration and not settler colonialism and genocide. In addition, when histories are told from below by Black and Indigenous people to fill historical voids, such information is occluded as being “un-American.” What matters here, then, is not history or public facts but the entrenchment of dispossession and the protection of colonial foundations, which also functions to obscure political realities. Or, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously stated in “The Souls of White Folks”: “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” (18).
Thus, we return once again to the current protests. If monuments are maintained as public reminders of white supremacy, antiblack racism and settler colonialism, then it is no wonder why such objects are so heavily policed. If official history is in any way challenged, then, the state easily calls for the police or federal agents to protect the material remains of whiteness. However, protests that are broadly affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement are directly challenging the protected status of such monuments.
Even as words and imaginaries, such as vandalism or iconoclasm, are bandied about to decry acts of supposed censorship and historical erasure, one cannot help but remain cynical. More manufactured outrage is produced to condemn the amending of monuments than the conditions that produce the need for such revisions. For instance, Enzo Traverso writes, “Indeed, it is interesting to observe that most political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists outraged by the current wave of ‘vandalism’ never expressed a similar indignation for the repeated episodes of police violence, racism, injustice, and systemic inequality against which the protest is directed.” That there have not been equal calls to address systemic violence, of which these figures are emblematic, speaks volumes to how normalized it is to overvalue stone above black life.
This dual process of over- and de-valuation is also why white monuments are being defaced or torn down. Defenders on either side may work to clarify their positions. They can fight the good fight for history or antiracism or beauty. But what must be understood is that resisting removal of these problematic figures can also be read as defending the same political orders that preserve positions of white power from challenge or assault.
This dynamic is most clearly visible when it comes to the desecration of Black memorials and sacred Indigenous land. These monuments are hardly defended by white interests. While slaveholders and racists are meticulously cared for by the state, memorials to Emmett Till and Fred Hampton, as well as Indigenous sacred sites, repeatedly reigned upon by a barrage of bullets and Saguaro cacti, are destroyed wantonly. This is not a coincidence. When only white monuments are continuously defended, what is protected is not history, but whiteness.
Moreover, when the murder of Black people and the destruction of sacred Indigenous sites fails to make this country lose face, certain lives and histories are once again devalued. How then are we to understand defacement? The loss of public respect is one type. However, there is also an additional meaning of the word. To deface an object or person typically means to spoil its appearance.
A monument is typically deemed unspoiled when it is free of any unofficial markers or symbols. What is implied here in such an assessment is that an unblemished monument is more valuable or truthful. However, is it not the case that white monuments too often circumvent “complicated” histories by avoiding the sordid details involved with their figures or their erection? If this is the case, one can only understand defacement by interrogating how the inclusion of historical facts spoil one’s appearance. Here I would argue that street historians, artists and activists instead reveal histories in their practices.
For instance, let us reexamine the 1983 death of Michael Stewart. He suffered police abuse at the hands of the New York City Transit Police, who brutally smashed in his face. This act was, literally, defacing. Police spoiled his appearance and at the same time revealed the high levels of violence that Black people and communities suffer under such racist conditions. By custom, this killing was only made public through the actions of Stewart’s family and community artists. In fact, it was this incident that inspired Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Defacement. But not all acts of police violence or racism have the fortune of being captured on canvas or camera. Why not, instead, remake the entire city so that this defacement is visible?
Or, to return to the Robert E. Lee Monument pictured above, monumental defacement speaks to the truth that black lives cannot matter in publics that memorialize leaders of an antiblack confederacy. This also holds true for other monuments to white supremacy or state violence. Thus,when activists turn towards monumental defacement, they are connecting historical violence with the police murders that help maintain an all-American racist order.
Graffiti, rather than being an act of vandalism or historical erasure, is instead more akin to artistic restoration; it reveals and make evident finer details that have been previously hidden from public view. This is not to say that racism is not already obvious to oppressed communities. When police commit extrajudicial killings, or are acquitted or were never arraigned, a racist order is already visible. However, what monumental defacement does is to make such publics more aligned with this reality.
Thus, one would be simply mistaken if one thought the defacement or toppling of monuments was not also a direct challenge to public history and state legitimacy. Or, as Navid Farnia argues: “When protesters set fire to buildings or when they topple Confederate, Union, presidential, and conquistador statues, and every other monument to racism, colonialism, and genocide in between, they are resisting both the racist order and the history undergirding it.”
Resistance requires confronting all monuments to white supremacy. Acts of re-membering must be combined with acts of dis-membering. This brings to the fore the question of national celebrations and the monuments that serve as their backdrops. In particular, it brings us to the feet of The Six Grandfathers (Thuŋkášila Šákpe) and Hé Sápa (Black Hills), on occupied Očhéthi Šakówiŋ territory.
More typically known as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, this monument to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and the lesser Roosevelt, directly reveals the ongoing violence necessary to maintain not only stone carvings but also colonial orders. The existence of Mount Rushmore is a tangible marker of the breaking of treaty law insofar as the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 guaranteed that the Black Hills would be, as stated in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980), “set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named” (375). Given that this claim has never been renounced, how can one not see the irony when proponents worry that their monuments will be erased even as they simultaneously erase this inconvenient fact. As Vine Deloria, Jr. argued in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto: “America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreement despite the fact that the United States government signed over four hundred such treaties and agreements with Indian tribes” (28).
Mount Rushmore then is not a matter merely of history or just compensation for stolen land. The Sioux Nation have already made it clear, along with many other tribal nations in the Land Back movement, that land reparations and honoring treaty obligations are the desired outcome. Thus, recognizing that the protesters on the ground are, in actuality, land and treaty defenders gives a more accurate representation of the political relationships involved and the demands being articulated.
Yet, when it comes to racism, many people act as if the only connections between the confederacy and the U.S. government is a war. Or when it comes to monuments, they act as if the only connections between Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore is their sculptor and not an ideology. White supremacy is inexplicably always located elsewhere.
This perspective is best represented in the recent comments made by both President Donald Trump and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. The latter has been particularly adamant that Mount Rushmore will remain undamaged and unmoved under her watch. Ironically, there are many points in which I agree with Noem. The removal of white monuments would allow the United States to “be remade in a very different political image.” This is because the “organized and coordinated campaigns” of both Black Lives Matter and the Land Back movements are not only calls to contend more truthfully with the nation’s founding and its current practices, they are also demanding that the nation be restructured.
Thus, those who see the removal of Mount Rushmore, or their return back to the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, as an erasure are in some ways right. It would erase the existence of a broken treaty but not its history. Histories of enslavement, genocide, land dispossession, colonialism and imperialism, which are each represented by the four presidents would still remain, even if they remain unrecognized publicly. As Chairman Harold Frazier of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe stated: “Visitors look upon the faces of those presidents and extoll the virtues that they believe make America the country it is today. Lakota see the faces of the men who lied, cheated and murdered innocent people whose only crime was living on the land they wanted to steal.”
This theft is however denied since it would challenge the legitimacy of U.S. governance. Take, for instance, the language used by Trump in his Executive Order regarding monuments. This order is in direct challenge to the monumental defacement by protesters that “our” history should be both celebrated and defended in public spaces. He argues that: “These radicals shamelessly attack the legitimacy of our institutions and the very rule of law itself. Key targets in the violent extremists’ campaign against our country are public monuments, memorials, and statues. Their selection of targets reveals a deep ignorance of our history, and is indicative of a desire to indiscriminately destroy anything that honors our past.”
Within this order, Trump rightly centers both the “legitimacy” of monuments and the state as that which is being targeted and thus in need of defense. This is further supported by Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore in which he argued: “This monument will never be desecrated —these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed, their achievements will never be forgotten, and Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.” Whiteness, forever and ever, Amen!
This impassioned defense of American legitimacy and its political order requires a constant denial of history and moral accountability: “We will state the truth in full, without apology: We declare that the United States of America is the most just and exceptional nation ever to exist on Earth” (ibid). I argue below that this declaration of exceptional justness requires a theodician attitude. It requires historical truths and faults to be obscured so that American goodness can be confirmed.
Traditionally, theodicy refers to the many ways in which people have tried to rectify the justness of God with the problem of evil. The aim of such a defense is to vindicate God by demonstrating that belief in their exceptional goodness is still justified.
However, there are also political versions of this attitude. The defenses of both Noem and Trump serve as examples of theodician attitudes insofar as they maintain that evil or injustice only exist outside of the U.S. political system. To put this in perspective, the philosopher Lewis R. Gordon argues, “First, and foremost, North America and South America are founded on conquest. What this means is that legitimacy in the US context requires an act of theodicy, an act of writing away the evils of the system for the sake of the system” (380). Racism, genocide and land dispossession must be dismissed as external evils so that the legitimacy of the United States is maintained.
In practice, political theodicy turns any threat into the embodiment of evil. This is why Trump could so proudly declare on occupied territory, at the base of a desecrated mountain, the unimpeachable goodness of the United States: “Here tonight, before the eyes of our forefathers, Americans declare again, as we did 244 years ago: that we will not be tyrannized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” (op. cit.).
These “bad, evil people” are simultaneously treaty defenders, Black protesters, anarchists, and “far-left fascists.” In order to preserve colonial exploitation and police public order, political dissidents are painted as, according to Fanon, the “quintessence of evil” (op. cit., 41). But let us not think that Trump is the first to make such theodician claims. The “legitimacy” of the United States—whether liberal or conservative—has always been maintained through state violence.
Outside of this construction of “bad, evil people,” political theodicies also build and defend idols whose goodness must remain unquestioned. These figures are thus representative of systems that can do no wrong. However, in order to defeat theodician attitudes one must see the possibility of injustice in the very foundations of the American political order. One must know their histories.
This is also why monumental defacement must be supported. Under the four-dimensional model, one must be committed to reviewing the multiple meanings of monuments. However, in order to de-structure white supremacy, one must also be equally committed to suspending aesthetic, historic, and ethical considerations. Suspensions do not dissolve these dimensions, but they do shift our priorities.
Thus, one may ask: Does the beauty of a monument take precedence when it maintains whiteness and devalues Black life? Does the representation of white achievement take precedence over Indigenous erasure? Does the debate over moral offense—along with the perverse need to judge actions by the standards of their times, as if disagreements did not take place in the past—take precedence over the need to act now? To all these, I answer no. When it comes to the structures that take our breath away, what is needed is a toppling of a different order.
To alter the public face of a racist order is fundamentally an act of destructuring. It is for this reason that James Chase Sanchez and Kristin R. Moore argue, “Acts of vandalism and activism alter the perception of history, contesting our past and present, and illustrate that systemic racism pervades American culture from various viewpoints” (6). When protesters contest what legitimately belongs in public, they are also indirectly questioning the public order that maintains such monuments.
But we must also directly question. We must forcefully question. There is no need to be shy in our proclamations or actions if we are committed to structural transformation. Any form of restructuring must contain practices of dis-membering and destructuring. As Frantz Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks: “Man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom” (173).
In order to build the new, one must be first willing to pick up the brush or spray can. One must celebrate monumental defacement as creating, in Michael Warner’s words, “spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative” (86). Only in this commemoration can monumental defacement become a negative affirmation of our collective histories and shared humanity.
Dana Francisco Miranda
Dana Francisco Miranda is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Fellow for the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research is in political philosophy, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and psychosocial studies. His current book manuscript, “The Coloniality of Happiness,” investigates the philosophical significance of suicide, depression, and wellbeing for members of the African Diaspora. His most recent work has been published in The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives, theJournal of World Philosophies, EntreLetras, the Journal of Global Ethics, and Disegno: The Quarterly Journal of Design. He also currently serves as the Secretary of Digital Outreach & Chair of Architectonics for the Caribbean Philosophical Association
