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Statues Are Not History
“You can’t erase history.”
That’s what you’re bound to hear at least once if you discuss the removal of statues, which has happened lately in high profile instances in the U.S., U.K., and Belgium (to name but three countries).
A statue of Christopher Columbus has been removed in Virginia, one of King Leopold II in Antwerp and in Bristol, in the U.K., a statue of the little known (outside Bristol) slave trader Edward Colston was gleefully removed from its plinth and tossed into the harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest. Since then, the likeness of slave trader Robert Milligan has also been removed in London.
All this has brought about an important discussion — what do we do with our statues and memorials for undesirable people? There may be an even trickier discussion to come — what do we do with the statues of people with a more complex legacy that can be debated, someone like Winston Churchill, for example?
But what we also need to ask is whether statues even teach us anything about our history.
Edward Colston
Here in the U.K. the removal of the Edward Colston statue has caused much debate around “erasing history”, but what history did his statue teach us?
