Tearing down statues feels good but does little
As we rid our landscape of Confederate heroes, we are already embarked on a campaign to dethrone another tainted historical figure, Christopher Columbus.
Recently in New York, two statues of him have been vandalized, and as we observe Columbus Day today, a national holiday that for most of us is just an excuse to take a three-day weekend, some cities have used the occasion to officially rename it “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” in atonement for the many wrongs inflicted upon Native Americans.
Perhaps this also is an opportunity to ask ourselves how the removal or destruction of statues that few people ever noticed benefits the African Americans and Native Americans who are disproportionately poor, sick and lacking in opportunity.
Progressives delight in dealing out symbols, pressuring high school sports teams to drop mascots that are deemed offensive to Native Americans, and prevailing on towns and cities to rename streets in black neighborhoods after civil rights heroes.
These symbolic changes are an easy way to compensate people for centuries of mistreatment, and they might make us feel momentarily virtuous when a plaque comes down or a street sign is changed. But the exhilaration of racial expiation can degenerate into ordinary vandalism — as is the case of the recently beheaded statue of the Confederate soldier in Columbus, Ohio.
It is time to ask ourselves whether we have gone too far with this iconoclasm and accomplished too little.
One paradoxical result of this effort to exorcise the demons of the past could be only to anger people who may have some vague tie to these symbols but probably didn’t spend a lot of time or emotion venerating them until someone came along and branded them as racist. Perhaps their resistance to change might simply have come from the fact that they just liked their town square the way it was. People will fiercely defend even something that they never especially valued if you threaten to take it away.
Five decades ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan caught hell for suggesting that the issue of race in America had become so contentious that it might benefit from what he referred to as “benign neglect.” Perhaps he meant that there may be a limit to how much force-feeding of racial awareness people can absorb before they begin to resent it.
When I listen to the endless racial consciousness raising on national news media, I wonder how many people like me just tune out the moral indoctrination as it leaves us feeling powerless in the face of monumental wrongs that seem never to be addressed. The record of white America is full of sins for which we could atone, but at some point remorse mutates into self-flagellation.
One thing is sure: The effort to obliterate every trace of the ignoble chapters of our history will do little for those who suffered the most, except fleeting satisfaction that will inevitably give way to the enormity of the struggle that they must wage every day.
As for those Americans who have seen those symbols removed, we should not expect deeper racial sensitivity.