On June 30, 2015 the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, VA, was tagged “Black Lives Matter.”
Tag on the Statue of Robert E Lee, 2015. Photo: Charlottesville Police Dept.
In the ensuing protests against Confederate memorials and other racist statues, only 60 or so came down. Five years later, the protestors in the streets after the murder of George Floyd remember. And from Birmingham, AL, where a Confederate statue came down to Philadelphia where the statue of a racist cop was removed, the monuments are falling. Because these are not “just” statues, they are part of the apparatus of white supremacy. Once more, white people, this is on us: take down the monuments!
WATCH: VIDEO of Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo bronze sculpture lifted off then driven away in truck overnight. It looks as if he’s waving goodbye @FOX29philly pic.twitter.com/hTxH7dqato— Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) June 3, 2020
Recall how long this war has been going on. What was called the “war on statues” began in decolonized Algeria in 1962. It spread across Africa and culminated with the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town in April 2015. The decolonizing project crossed over the Atlantic and instigated the statue removal movement in Charlottesville and then across the United States. Last November, statues of conquistadors were dethroned in Chile.
Old Targets, New Tactics
In this rapidly-changing moment, old and new tactics and goals are emerging for the monuments movement. In Richmond, Virginia, protestors tagged statues like that of J.E.B. Stuart (below, a Confederate hero who served under Lee), which was also the model for Kehinde Wiley’s nearby sculpture Rumors of War, notably left untouched by protestors.
Photo via Eric Perry NBC12 (@ericpnbc12)
In a targeted act of erasure, the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization that funded so many of the Confederate memorials, was set on fire. Are you outraged? As long ago as 1963, James Baldwin warned America: “the fire next time.” If the statues had been removed, maybe there would not have been these fires.
LOUISVILLE, KY – MAY 29: A statue of Louis XVI missing his right hand in Louisville, Kentucky. Protests have (Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)
In Louisville, a protestor removed the right hand of Louis XVI (above). The tag on the statue reads: “All Cops Uphold White Supremacy.” The action and the tag condense a historical understanding of sovereignty in plantation culture into a single image. Let’s unpack this work. The king’s surrogate in the plantation was the overseer, whose hand could be raised to punish or kill. By condensation, sovereignty became white supremacy.
JB Du Tertre, “Sugar Mill with Overseer,” detail, from Histoire des Antilles (1667)
Like the king, the overseer had two bodies: his own, and a second one that never died and never slept. This second body became the emblem of white supremacy. It was, in effect, a statue that sustained the racialized surveillance of the plantation.
In Louisville, Louis XVI as the emblem of white supremacy continues to survey what Black geographer Kathleen McKittrick calls the “plantation future,” which is to say:
“a conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city sectors”
Kathleen McKittrick “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe (2013): 2
It is entirely consistent that a protest against police brutality would target the statue of the colonizer king. The tag on Louis’s base understands that the cop and the prison guard are the plantation futures of the sovereign-overseer. Removing the hand of the king is an act of what Christina Sharpe calls “redaction,” a gesture that erases in order to make it fully clear what there is to see.
The Cop-Overseer
Attempting to make Frank Rizzo’s statue fall, Philadelphia. 5-29-20.
It was, then, no coincidence that on the same day, protestors in Philadelphia were attempting to overthrow the oversized statue of notorious police officer Frank Rizzo. Given Rizzo’s long history of racist statements and actions, Black Lives Matter had targeted the statue in 2016 and most residents agreed it should be moved. But it wasn’t. The statue resisted efforts to topple it and city authorities rushed to clean it the next day.
Statue of Frank Rizzo removed, June 2, 2020. Photo: City of Philadelphia
Having said that removing the statue was not even in his top 100 priorities, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney reversed course overnight on June 2 and had the Rizzo statue removed. Now it’s clear to Kenney that the statue represented “bigotry, hatred and oppression.” And that this is just a beginning. Finally, a North-Eastern city takes a lead on this issue.
The statue issue has long revealed the hypocrisy of white liberalism, condemning the South while leaving its own hateful monuments in place because they are not actually Confederate monuments. Bill de Blasio in New York failed to take down the Roosevelt Statue and the Columbus Monument, or even to remove a marker placed on Sixth Avenue to commemorate a parade for the fascist Marshal Pétain of Vichy that was only installed in 2003. So now the focus is again on New York. Can the city step up?
Memory matters
The removal of the Rizzo statue shows that who and what is, and is not, remembered does matter, as an extension of the thought experiment “Black Lives Matter.” In a lyric essay published via social media, Oglala Sioux poet Layli Long Soldier was prompted by George Floyd’s murder into a reflection into the “old, yet very present energy” of historical accounts.
White liberals have mostly argued that monuments are history and removing them would erase that history. This view consigns history entirely to the past. The monument as past artifact becomes history just by virtue of not being from now.
But for McKittrick and Long Soldier, they are absolutely “now.” And they defend and project a certain vision of the future as settler colonial white supremacy. For Long Soldier, history does not take stone form:
“we remember who we are from our families, from this land, from stories within the community, and from our senses. Yes, from our senses, we remember what’s stored within us already.”
Layli Long Soldier, “On The Murder of George Floyd: For George Floyd, his family, and for all who are deeply affected” (June 1, 2020)
Her “we” is that of the Indigenous community, not mine. But as she often does, Long Soldier does “ask you, warmly, to return to accounts from our Lakota ancestors.” I take that “you” to be the non-Native reader, who needs to reconfigure their understanding of how past experience can be passed on.
She turns to a reflection on the history of the American Indian Movement, founded in Minneapolis. An early AIM-related action was the spilling of blood-like paint over the doubly-racist statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History in June 1971.
Roosevelt Statue Tagged. Photo: Tyrone Dukes/NYT.
The tags read “Return Alcatraz,” referring to the Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island. And “Fascist Killer,” meaning Roosevelt. Six young Indigenous people affiliated with the National Indian Youth Council carried out the action. They’ll be in their 70s now.
The American Museum of Natural History has found time to furlough more than 450 employees already. Let’s make it one more and finish the antifascist action from 1971. Bill de Blasio, reverse the weak decision from 2017 and take this monument down. Along with all the others.
Kwame Nrumah in "Transfigured Night" by John Akomfrah.
Kwame Nkrumah in “Transfigured Night” by John Akomfrah.
In transfigured night, hear the poet Milton sing “Hail, horrors, hail.” In this disjuncture, in the break and in the wake, the voice of Kwame Nkrumah comes: “We face neither East nor West, we face forward.” We, the would-be decolonized, was his formula in that betrayed beginning of Bandung, whose spirit continues to inspire. His phrase was as resonant for feminists in Iran as African American activists. To face forward is a positioning against racial capitalism, a setting of direction toward the dismantling of its infrastructures. Toward imagining decoloniality.
This place will document my efforts to face forward in order to engage with race as infrastructure, looking at monuments, museums and other display as constitutive of urban form under racial capital. By the same token, the segregated and unequal distribution of services and infrastructure within cities also requires what Shane Brennan has called “visionary infrastructure,” on the model of Grace Lee Bogg’s visionary organizing.
And Nkrumah’s voice comes again in Transfigured Night, reminding his listeners that they are free. But they’re not and he knows it and so do they. He’s asking them to remember the future. That time when there will have been what he called the “total liberation of Africa,” when the infrastructures of racial capitalism have been erased.
Forward is, then, at once a direction towards possession of the self, which is what freedom has meant in the Atlantic world; the formation of a communal sense of being decolonized; and a relation to time that is neither the progress touted by white liberalism nor the revanchism of reaction but a cosmology that relates human and non-human over the span of many lives. That’s not yet. Decoloniality is the future to be remembered.
Frantz Fanon in Accra, Ghana, 1958.
Then Fanon’s words appear: “O my body, make me a person who asks questions.” What questions does the body ask? In Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah’s two-screen installation Transfigured Night (2015) at the New Museum last summer, where I was thinking all this, it is asked: how did this narcoleptic state happen? How would the disalienation, Fanon’s term, of the body, yours or mine, happen?
Here are some of my questions, now. Has there not been a certain narcolepsy since 11/9, a certain sheltering in place, a certain discombobulation under the constant stream of tweets, executive orders and deregulation that has made it hard to know which way I have been facing? Against, yes. Forward, not always. Is it not now past question that no single moment, whether of voting or direct action, is likely to shift the global direction to authoritarian white nationalism? The city feels restive. Movement in the shadows. An awakening, or better, re-awakening is at hand.
Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”
On the screens now, monuments. Lincoln. Washington. Visited by the heads of decolonized states in Technicolor archive footage, the remembered brightness of past possibility. Transfigured into the blue-steeled glass of the corporate present. Figures still face forward but Washington’s “liberty” and Lincoln’s “emancipation” are no more present than Nkrumah’s “decolonization,” specters all. But specters return, they are the future, they remember it.
What, then, of the Indigenous whose land was taken for these monuments, whose loss is the infrastructure across the Americas? The territorial acknowledgement has become widespread, as it is in Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. As those countries’ histories suggest, it is not enough. Land redistribution in South Africa was one of Trump’s racist panics in the past election. White nationalists cheered, globally. What, too, of those Cheyenne-Arapaho writer Tommy Orange calls “urban Indians,” seven out of ten of the Indigenous population?
Still: John Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”
Akomfrah ends his installation at what he calls “beginning”. His figure, an African elder, faces forward to the emptiness of gentrified Seattle. The material infrastructure of white supremacy. Race as infrastructure is a set of assemblages that articulate colonial race theory, history as colonial destiny, and the exploitation of labor, made “normal” by what Fanon understood as “the aesthetic of respect for the established order.” The museums. The monuments. The new housing developments with their token “public art” and “parks.” It needs to be articulated as an assemblage, together.
At the foot of the towers, from Luanda to London, Cape Town to Charlottesville, global cities are still networked by what Fanon saw to be “a compartmentalized, manichean, immobile world: the world of statues.” Stone colonialism looks down on people and claims dominance, hierarchy, history, via white supremacy, whether from its towers or from a pedestal. They look down. We look forward. The statues are a weakness, too obvious, too contemptuous. When they fall, it is just the beginning.
Their strategy is still to compartmentalize, to contextualize and to prevaricate. They say: Let’s think about adding a sign? Maybe another monument? A conference? Doesn’t this statue have “artistic merit”? Forward gets past the statues to the world they immobilize.
The opposite of stone colonialism is what the 19th century revolutionaries in England called “the mobility.” Counter to the world of statues, Fanon dreamed of running. Get Out wanted to escape the Sunken Place. It’s Fallism, but it’s more than falling, it’s movement. Forward movement.
Third International Eugenics Conference exhibit on Roosevelt
The NYC Monument Commission was a failure. It delivered a hot mess of recommendations for more: more bureaucracy, more signs and “>more monuments. This is called an “additive” policy. Without a commitment to anti-racism and decolonial practice, none of it makes sense. The missed opportunity is that a good faith anti-racist, decolonial project could show people of all backgrounds, including Italian-Americans, why the monuments must fall.
This is not trivial. While liberals want to make the racist president fall, they can’t even agree to take down statues of racist presidents. That’s why the monuments matter, as the white supremacists have long known. White racism remains “deniable,” even when said out loud, as the latest Trump scandal shows. It works as a particular structure of feeling, invisible to those on the “inside” (known as white) but all too real to those excluded. The monuments are palpable, immensely material nodes in the network of white supremacy.
What I’m arguing for is precisely an “art”–including museum practice, education at all levels, and activism–that takes decolonizing and anti-racism as its first principles.
In what follows, I examine
how the report comes to decide to do nothing in the case of the President Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
how the Memorial visibly incarnates concepts of racial hierarchy and was designed to be part of the Museum’s advocacy for eugenics
how that agenda is an active part of the anti-immigration movement today
how an anti-racist approach might offer a positive means to make the monuments fall.
TL; DR? Skip to the action section at the end!
Before beginning, I want to note that the Commission was often divided and many members would probably agree with much of what I’m going to write. Somehow, the status quo always prevails, even when there is an exact divide as in the case of Roosevelt. Mayor de Blasio opted for no change in all cases, except for the statue of Marion J. Sims–a decision that now has to be reviewed by the community board and then the Public Design Commission, so don’t expect to see a removal any time soon.
1. Complexity
Roosevelt Memorial. Photo by An Rong Xu
How did the decision to keep the Roosevelt Memorial, protested by the American Indian Movement as long ago as 1971, get taken? The key principle for the commission in relation to evaluating monuments is “complexity,” which receives an unlikely definition:
acknowledging layered and evolving narratives represented in New York City’s public spaces, with preference for additive, relational, and intersectional approaches over subtractive ones. Monuments and markers have multiple meanings that are difficult to unravel, and it is often impossible to agree on a single meaning.
This watered down version of the deconstructive principle of undecidability makes little sense. Complexity is the interpretation of how complexes work: a situation with multiple, intersecting elements but not a synonym for unintelligibility. Nor is it endlessly relative: in given situations, one vector is often determining. If monuments were really so unintelligible, it’s hard to imagine why so many of them have been built, let alone why people are so keen to defend them and why the Commission wants more to be built.
2. Making Race Visible
Here’s how this works in practice. While half the group clearly saw the Memorial as depicting racial hierarchy, “complexity” resulted because:
Some Commission members pointed to art-historical interpretations of the two standing figures as allegorical, representing the continents of the Americas and Africa, emphasized by the animals in relief on the parapet wall behind them. This analysis included evidence that the sculpture was meant to represent Roosevelt’s belief in the unity of the races. In this interpretation, the figures are in no way abject.
This statement is remarkably tendentious. Roosevelt’s 1905 speech on race made it clear that he believed in a limited equality of opportunity for both the “forward” (meaning white) and “backward” (meaning Black) “races.” But as the terms indicate, he did not for a minute think the “races” were equal. Historian Theodore Dyer noted in his 1980 book on Roosevelt and race that the president believed in “Anglo-Saxon racial superiority to American Indians and American blacks.”
Now, it is enough for someone to have an alternative point of view for there to be deadlock. Note that we are not discussing Fox News here but a sophisticated and widely-recognized group of art world luminaries and other professionals. But critiques of “race” or colonialism were not the priority of the majority who declared their
paramount values [to be] art, public space, and civic discourse
Paramount for whom? To what end?
Roosevelt from below
Let’s look at the Memorial itself. In the two splendid photos by An Rong Xu above, it’s clear that the animals on the wall–we are, after all, at the Museum of Natural History–have no visible connection to the Memorial. The strikingly disproportionate scale of the figures discredits any idea that these figures are equal or unified. That’s even before the racialized stereotyping of the Indigenous and African figures are considered. And note the absurdly over-muscular and newly hirsute body of the Emperor-President as well. The contrast is unmistakeable and intentional.
The Commission’s claim that sculptor James Earle Fraser meant for the figures to represent the continents of Africa and America is advanced only in a Metropolitan Museum catalog entry to another sculpture without reference or documentary support. It is unconvincing. While there are well-known precedents for the Four Continents, like Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s 1872 group sculpture, The Four Parts of the World Holding the Celestial Sphere, I know of no precedent for a two continent sculpture before 1939.
On the other hand, New York City knew well Daniel Chester French’s famed sculptures of the four Continents on the Custom House downtown (1903-07). His America was a group in which an allegorical female figure actively dominates Indigenous figures: by that analogy, Roosevelt would be America and the two figures his dominated subjects. And that surely is the right way to see the sculpture. The group depicts Roosevelt dominating an African and American Indian as representatives, not of continents, but of “races.”
Daniel Chester French “America” (1902)
This analysis suggests why the Commission is so reluctant to act: if Roosevelt must fall, what is the case for French? Perhaps it’s a better sculpture in formal terms. But does it make sense that this vision of America trampling Quetzlcoatl underfoot is outside the New York Museum of the American Indian? And if so to whom?
3. Eugenics and Immigration
Display of eugenic sterilization at AMNH (1932)
Why did the AMNH want a statue of Roosevelt at all? Because Roosevelt epitomized the eugenic, imperial racism the Museum wanted to promote. The Report suggests:
Approximately half of the Commission: believe that additional historical research is necessary before recommendations can be offered.
Direct information linking Roosevelt, the AMNH, the Memorial and eugenics is, in fact, widely available: here is a summary.
The AMNH was a bastion of eugenics under the long directorship (1908-33) of Henry Fairfield Osborn. In 1916, Osborn wrote the preface to Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (later much admired by Hitler):
Race implies heredity, and heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government. Conservation of that race, which has given us the true spirit of Americanism, is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country
Environmental conservation was not, then, the “good” side of the AMNH in contrast to its “bad” racism: they were part and parcel of the same race politics. Roosevelt supported eugenic principles, saying in 1914
I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done.
Osborn unsurprisingly campaigned for a Roosevelt Memorial at the AMNH as soon as the president died in 1919. He gained his greatest success in helping pass the Immigration Act of 1924 that severely limited immigration, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe. This Act inspires the current administration’s opposition to immigration, leading to Osborn’s race theory being quoted on the front page of the New York Times this weekend. In other words: this is not over.
In the context of rising fascism and support for race science and eugenics, the Third International Eugenics conference was held at the AMNH in 1932. Osborn’s keynote was a jeremiad against birth control and for what he called “birth selection.” He repeated that environmental conservation was a key part of “improving the race,” meaning white people. His address noted six “overs” in the then-present:
Over-destruction of natural resources….Over-population…with consequent permanent unemployment of the least fitted. I have reached the conclusion that overpopulation and underemployment may be regarded as twin sisters
In short, his proposed solution for the mass unemployment caused by the Depression was eugenic birth selection, including forced sterilization, as the exhibit made clear (see image above), noting that over 15,000 enforced eugenic sterilizations had been performed by 1932 in the United States, including a small number in New York State. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927 in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, there would ultimately be over 70,000 such sterilizations in the US.
Good examples of birth selection were on display at the Eugenics Conference as well, such as the all-white membership of Congress. Notably, there was a display of the eugenically desirable “pedigree” of Theodore Roosevelt.
Third International Eugenics Conference exhibit on Roosevelt
In case there is any doubt as to the connection of the Memorial under construction at the AMNH to this chart at the time of its display, a sculpted bust of Roosevelt is placed at the top left.
And the AMNH Trustees said as much when the Memorial was opened in 1936, just after Osborn had died:
For more than sixteen years the late Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn had given his time, energy and thought to produce a structure, which he felt would best memorialize Theodore Roosevelt. …The trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, who will later control the operation and maintenance of the memorial, have pledged themselves, …, to carry out the educational purposes laid down by their late President Osborn for their guidance.
Central to Osborn’s life work was the racist hierarchy of eugenics, the control of immigration, the deportation of unwelcome migrants, and the enforced control of human reproduction. It is impossible that the Trustees meant anything else.
4. Eugenics Now
Nor are these eugenics solely a thing of the past. This week it emerged that University College London has been holding a series of eugenics conferences, calling for the “phasing out” of “populations of incompetent cultures.” These events are funded by an unpleasant US-based outfit called The Pioneer Fund. This group was founded by Wycliffe Draper, a collaborator of Osborne’s. His nephew Fairfield Osborn was a founding director and continued to work with Draper until they split in the late 1950s.
Today, the Fund supports white supremacist Richard Spencer, who was active at Charlottesville, and it continues to promote old-fashioned Jew hatred.
But it’s not just the lunatic fringe. The continuance of eugenic ideas occurs every time someone calls someone else a “moron” or an “imbecile,” which were categories of eugenic deficiency. Or when Donald Trump says “laziness is a trait in blacks.”
Trump is adept at the art of racialized provocation. The day after his “shithole” remarks, he appeared to the press in front of a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt.
Trump and Roosevelt
There is no danger that Roosevelt will be forgotten or erased from history if his statue is removed. The point is rather that his statue is part of an active network of racialized signification. Which is to say: how does race have meaning? It connects. It links Trump to Roosevelt via the idea of the dominant Hero, whiteness, and white supremacy.
5. Why Everyone Should Want the Monuments to Fall
In the Commission Report on the Columbus Monument, the 1891 lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans is cited to explain why the Monument was needed. Indeed, this period saw the notorious “one drop” rule in Louisiana, meaning that a person with any non-“white” descent at all was considered “colored,” to use the terminology of the time. In 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a segregated railway train in New Orleans, leading to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld “separate but equal.”
It was in this intensely racialized context that the Columbus Monument was erected in New York. The claim Italian-Americans were making was to be “white.” And it’s not hard to understand why, given the then-ongoing violence of white supremacy. But that is no reason to sustain the argument today. Without even considering Columbus’ devastating impact for Indigenous peoples–though of course in a wider frame we should– present-day Italian-Americans and other “whites” should not want to be white in the manner of 1892. And that’s what this Monument means. But it didn’t work.
The 1924 Immigration Act set the annual quota of any nationality at 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States in 1890. According to eugenic theory, there is not a single “white” European “race” but rather three. The eugenically preferred “Nordic” race is truly “white.” Distinct were Southern Europeans–mostly Italians for practical purposes–and Eastern Europeans, meaning Jews. The 1924 Act intended to promote Nordic immigration and limit that of Southern and Eastern Europeans.
The results of the Act were dramatic. From 1901-1914, 2.9 million Italians immigrated, an average of 210,000 per year. Under the 1924 Act, only 4,000 per year were admitted–a 98% decrease. These restrictions did not end until 1965 and Attorney General Sessions has cited the 1924 Act as an inspiration for current attempts to limit immigration.
In short, while Italians in 1892 certainly had a case that they had been violently subjected to white supremacy, their perhaps understandable attempt to join its ranks by means of the Columbus Monument did not succeed. Today, no one questions the “whiteness” of Italians and all Europeans are considered “white.” But this is not a club that anyone should want to belong to.
Just as several Italian-Americans advocated at the NYC Commission hearings, anti-racist Italians should support removal of the Columbus Monument. An anti-racist campaign would connect Italian-Americans to a different history, the long arc of justice. But prominent New York leaders like Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio have made it clear they want no part of this anti-racist rethinking of whiteness. The majority of the Commission followed this lead.
6. Action
All the monuments are connected. The Columbus Monument made the claim that Italians were white in the moment of legalized segregation. Roosevelt’s support for eugenics was why Osborn and the American Museum of Natural History wanted a memorial. The same people supported the 1924 Immigration Act that cut Italian immigration by 98%. In short, the “whiteness” these monuments embody excludes almost everyone and perpetuates systemic and hierarchical racism.
The monuments must fall not because people were bad then and we are good today but because the racism they embody is still active and growing.
Building more monuments or putting up signs is not a substitute for the long and difficult work of anti-racism. Anyone can say “I am not a racist.” The question is “what are you doing to end racism?
The Commission thinks that action should be taken in regard to monuments if there is: “Sustained adverse public reaction (two years of more); and/or Instantaneous large-scale community opposition.” So let’s give it to them.
Today hearings were held in Manhattan for the Mayor’s Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers. It was a real New York occasion, with dashes of radical politics, establishment equivocation, blunt force and moments of pure eccentricity. Anyone who wanted could speak for three minutes in randomly assigned slots. Despite being called for the day before the holiday at 10am, about 100 people attended with a good sprinkling of local media.
The Commission hearing 11.22.17
As luck would have it Decolonize This Place organizer Conor Tomàs Reed went first and called on the commission to remove the Columbus monument at Columbus Circle, the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the American Museum of Natural History and the Marion J. Sims memorial at 103rd St. As Reed said
These three monuments serve as a daily reminder of colonialism, indigenous genocide, and white supremacist eugenics. That they are familiar landmarks in this city shows just how much we have inured ourselves to the horrors that they celebrate.
Decolonize This Place
This bracing challenge was soon countered by a succession of “proud Italian Americans” declaring undying love for Columbus and that any attempt to remove the monument was an outrage. One speaker from the Knights of Columbus claimed opponents were like the KKK because the Klan were (he claimed) against Columbus in the 1930s. These statements were undercut by a young Italian-American activist from SURJ who pointed out that Columbus lived about 350 years before Italy was a nation; spoke only Catalan; and served the Spanish monarchy. But no politician could have missed the vehemence and belligerence of the opposition to any change whatever, even adding a sign.
If most of the discussion was about Columbus, in nearly four hours of testimony, very few Indigenous voices were heard. One exception was Robert Borrero of the International Indian Treaty Council, who spoke with dignified restraint about Columbus’s brutality to his own Taino people.
Several African Americans testified to the scandal of Marion J. Sims, who did medical experiments on African American women without anesthetic, having a memorial. One flamboyant Jewish lady got the only laugh of the day when she concluded emotional testimony saying
Keep all the monument–except that Sims, I never heard about that, he’s awful
So if I had to bet, I’d guess Sims will be the token withdrawal. The co-commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, NYC’s cultural director, opened with a slightly lame PowerPoint suggesting alternatives to removal, like adding signs; commissioning art projects; or augmented reality apps. This seemed to be a clear signal of the Commission’s thinking, although radical academics like Audra Simpson and Jack Tchen are members and might be able to push for a little more. Perhaps the markers to Marshall Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, who directed the genocidal Vichy regime in Second World War France, might be quietly uprooted.
There are two more opportunities to intervene:
Monday, Nov. 27 at 10 a.m. — Bronx Borough Hall, Rotunda, 851 Grand Concourse, the Bronx
Tuesday, Nov. 28 at 10 a.m. — Staten Island Borough Hall, Room 125, 10 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island
Even so nothing will happen fast this being New York. The report will come out in December. The Mayor will then decide which of their recommendations to adopt. And then it all goes back to the beginning with the community boards and a multi-step process back to the usual parks and culture review board. So here we are, giving reform a chance. Expect to hear about a return to revolutionary tactics soon!
Roosevelt Must Fall
As for me, I spoke about the Theodore Roosevelt Equestrian Monument at the American Museum of Natural History. For the record, this is what I said:
Roosevelt Equestrian Memorial
“I would like to suggest to you that the Equestrian Monument that is part of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History should be removed because it visualizes systems of racialized hierarchy, which, while discredited, continue to do harm in the present. Additional signs or information cannot replace the visceral impact of visual materials, as advertisers and artists alike know very well. Certainly, that removal would need to be the start of an extensive repurposing of the Museum, which is long overdue. But given that the Natural History Museum is the most visited in New York, with over 6.5 million visitors, it cannot be right to leave a symbol of racial hierarchy in place.
Roosevelt died in 1919 and the New York memorial was at once proposed by Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History. That same year, the Museum Journal claimed to demonstrate a “relationship between [skin] color and achievement.” Osborn was a believer in Nordic supremacy, a theory which also entailed the decline of white dominance unless immigration was controlled. These theories unfortunately continue to have purchase today. In 1921, the AMNH hosted the International Congress of Eugenics under Osborn’s organization. It opened a Hall of Public Health to promote eugenics (the attempt to breed out “impurities” from humans, also involving forced sterilization) and the effort to control immigration that resulted in the 1924 Immigration Act.
Compare the “slope” on the three heads
The Equestrian monument was sculpted by James Earle Fraser, who had earlier made a piece called The End of the Trail, illustrating the eugenicist belief in the period that Indians would “die out.” The monument visualizes belief in racial superiority through the now discredited so-called science of craniometry—measuring skulls. The idea was that the perfect skull had a vertical forehead, which is hard to find in an actual human being, so the example given was usually a Greek statue. In the US this idea was widely disseminated in Josiah Nott’s 1857 Indigenous Races of the Earth. This work claimed that there are several distinct human races, visible in their different skull shapes more than superficial details like skin color. In this framework, a statue is not a depiction of a racist idea, it is a racist idea.
If you examine the Equestrian Monument, you can see that Roosevelt’s skull is close to vertical, while the African figure has a noticeably sloped forehead and the Indian has the most sloped of all. In short, the Monument visibly incarnates Osborne’s system of racial hierarchy, as the Trustees acknowledged at the dedication ceremony in 1936 (the sculpture was completed in 1939). Of course, Roosevelt’s towering position over the half-dressed African and Indian reinforces that meaning, derived as it was from Roman Imperial sculpture.
It’s true that most people have now forgotten the specifics of craniometry. But the racist term “slopehead” indicates that the false claim of cranial angle still influences present-day racist caricature, usually applied to people of Asian descent—it’s in the cult film Pulp Fiction for example, a Harvey Weinstein production, I might add.
So it’s not a question that people at that time had bad ideas and we censor the monument for that but that it actively visualizes and perpetuaties racial stereotypes today.
I’m second from the right, speaking. Photo: MTL+
Sources
Anon, “The New York Theodore Roosevelt Memorial.” Science 83, no. 2143 (1936): 75-76.
David Bindman, Ape to Apollo : aesthetics and the idea of race in the 18th century (London: Reaktion, 2002)
