What does it mean to tear down or destroy a statue?

Confederate statues and statues of other historical figures, including slave traders and Christopher Columbus, are being toppled throughout the U.S. and around the world — an outgrowth of weeks of protests over entrenched racism in the United States, reignited by the killing of George Floyd in police custody.

This follows years of debate about public display of Confederate symbols, following the 2015 murder of nine black church congregants in Charleston, South Carolina, by a Confederate-flag-bearing white supremacist, and the deadly clash in 2017 between white nationalists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Art historian Erin Thompson, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has spent her career thinking about what it means when people deliberately destroy icons of cultural heritage. Late last week, she answered questions about the statues.

Q: What are the some of the issues that arise when we talk about statues being torn down?

As an art historian I know that destruction is the norm and preservation is the rare exception. We have as humans been making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art, and since we started making statues, other people have started tearing them down... So it’s not surprising that we are seeing people rebelling against ideas that are represented by these statues today.

Q: I feel as if the reflexive instinct for a long time has been to preserve anything that can teach us more about history. Is that not the case?

I think a lot of people assume that since I’m an art historian that I would want everything preserved but I know that preservation is expensive. A couple of journalists in 2018 did an amazing investigation for Smithsonian magazine and found that in the previous 10 years, taxpayers had spent at least $40 million preserving Confederate monuments and sites.

Q: You mentioned that we’re seeing people rebel against the ideas represented by these statues. Are there other aspects of tearing a statue down that people may not immediately understand?

Throughout history, destroying an image has been felt as attacking the person represented in that image. Which we know because when people attack statues, they attack the parts that would be vulnerable on a human being. We see ancient Roman statues with the eyes gouged out or the ears cut off. It’s a very satisfying way of attacking an idea — not just by rejecting but humiliating it. So it feels very good in a way that is potentially problematic. I’m certainly not advocating for the destruction of all offensive statues in the U.S., in part because it’s very dangerous. Protesters have already been severely injured tearing down statues.

Q: What do the attacks on statues in recent weeks tell us about the protests themselves?

The current attacks on statues are a sign that what’s in question is not just our future but our past, I think, as a nation, as a society, as a world.

These attacks show how deeply white supremacy is rooted in our national structure — that we need to question everything about the way we understand the world, even the past, in order to get to a better future.

Q: What’s a statue?

I think a statue is a bid for immortality. It’s a way of solidifying an idea and making it present to other people. So that is what’s really at issue here. It’s not the statues themselves but the point of view that they represent. And these are statues in public places, right? So these are statues claiming that this version of history is the public version of history.