Racism is Not About Statues

To hell with the Confederate monuments.

I’m no fan of most of them. And as many have now observed, they were funded and erected by late 19th or 20th century white supremacists. But to suggest they all need to come down in one stroke strikes me as a dangerous self-loathing impulse. I’m not saying they should stay. But rather that each one should be studied, reflected upon, analyzed, and plumbed for the gnarled wisdom it offers about the depths of our human nature and the insidious reach of white supremacy into the lives of “normal” people—then and now.

Put it this way: if you find something within yourself that you don’t like—some character trait… some habit—how do you get rid of it? Do you rip it out? Do you disavow it? Repudiate it? Try any of those things, and it’s likely to return, perhaps even stronger.

I’ve learned that things we don’t like about ourselves tend to be stubborn, deeply enmeshed in our being. Like the roots of a weed, try to pull them out by the leaves, and they disappear for a moment, only to pop up again, more deeply rooted than before.

This impulse to tear down Confederate statues strikes me as misdirected and ultimately impotent violence against the white supremacy that most of us liberal white folks still practice on a daily basis. I, for example, live in a beautiful, gentrified, intown community with great public schools and terrific restaurants and coffee shops. In many important ways, I am enjoying the fruits of white supremacy: my property values and wealth skyrocket so long as the economic and educational inequality between my community and the browner surrounding community remain high. That is, I have a financial investment in racial inequality. For me to actually fight white supremacy in its modern from would require me to move out of my neighborhood and align my life and my wealth with non-white communities and institutions. But which white liberals do you know who are moving out of our cultured urban enclaves to take on the risk to our finances, educational outcomes, and personal safety?

Conservative scholar Robert George wrote on Twitter last week, “Every statue of a slaveholder should cause us to reflect on the question: "To which grave evils of our own time am I blind or desensitized?"

It’s easy to rail against neo-Nazis and to loathe inert statues from our racist past. What is much harder is to disentangle ourselves from the white supremacy from which we personally profit and which we unconsciously promote.

So take down the statues. Pull at the leaves. But the root, I’m afraid, will remain.