About three years ago, I posted about the statue of Albert Pike, located near Judiciary Square and City Hall in Washington, D.C., and said it should be removed for multiple reasons. D.C. city officials had asked through official channels for it to be removed but been ignored. (Minnesota's Indigenous peoples have also asked for the Columbus statue that was formerly at our State Capitol building to be removed through official channels as well, but that had also come to naught until their recent extralegal actions.)
The statue stood on federal land, despite the fact that it was right in the middle of the city, and was maintained by the National Park Service.
Yesterday the Pike statue was toppled and lit on fire by protestors who know all too well that he is not someone who should be represented with a statue anywhere, but especially in D.C.
Statues, particularly ones depicting a single human figure on a pedestal (sometimes surrounded by archetypal figures or other icons, as Pike was), are not about history. Statues are about making heroes.
It doesn't seem that hard to understand.
To quote David Olusoga, a historian and filmmaker who appears in a short video within the Guardian article linked above,
Heroic statues of individuals are a very dated form of memorilization. It's not something we tend to do very much in the modern world. ... What I suspect is that in the future, people will look back and be astonished that we ever tolerated living under the shadow of statues of men who were slave traders, or colonialists, or, in the case of Leopold of the Belgians, someone who committed genocide.
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After posting, I saw this quote from a historian named Nick Estes:
Tearing down a statue is not erasing history. Putting up a statue on land whose original caretakers you can't name is.
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