Bring down the statues

Weep not for the bronze figures, placed on pedestals in parks and town squares, that have outlived their time in a position of privilege. When a community decides a statue no longer represents its values and, through orderly, legal process, should be removed, it has every right — no, every obligation — to unceremoniously bring that symbol down.

A figure of Robert E. Lee has no emotions, no aspirations. Living individuals do, and to those who descend from the enslaved people whom Lee and his Confederate troops went to war to keep in chains, the man’s formal canonization is an active, daily insult.

So kudos to the democratic process working in Charlottesville, just as it worked in South Carolina in 2015, when elected leaders there had the decency to remove the Confederate flag, sanely seen by millions as an emblem of racism, from flying on the state capitol grounds.

The mayor of Baltimore should have had more confidence in her city’s representatives to swiftly consign its four Confederate statues to a museum, if not to the scrap heap, rather than unilaterally ordering them removed in the dark of night.

The question now falls to other officials throughout this diverse nation, which purports, in every other breath, to believe in equal opportunity: By what moral logic can a city or town justify lionizing, as heroes of history, men who made their names by taking arms against their own nation to perpetuate man’s domination over man?

Here in New York, we must engage in honest and open deliberations over the bronze and marble figures that speak to us, that stand for us, in parks, in squares, in esteemed spaces like the Bronx’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans, where two such men are canonized.

Lee and other Confederate leaders are an important part of America’s story. They belong in our history books and in our museums.

That history is gloriously complicated, replete with complex figures, and must not be erased.

Granting reverence to a given figure in a common public space is another matter entirely. That is a collective value judgment made by the generations now alive.

The notion that surgically removing statues depicting enemies of the United States of America puts the nation on a steep and slippery slope to purging every installation that dares depict a slaveholding Founding Father is profoundly lazy thinking, loathsomely repurposed as provocation by President Trump.

First, because no one is calling for the Jefferson Memorial to be taken off the National Mall, or for the faces of Jefferson or Washington to be removed from our currency or sandblasted off Mount Rushmore.

Second, because the vast majority of Americans simultaneously understand that many of those we honor and revere were creatures of their times who held opinions we might now revile.

What distinguishes Confederate would-be heroes is that they have been esteemed for waging war against the U.S. when the Union determined it could no longer persist half-slave and half-free.

What distinguishes them is that, when lifted up, they give succor to those who would, through illegal and immoral acts, purge America of its defining pluralism.

Bring down the Confederate monuments. The sooner the better.