There exists a semiotic symmetry between those who paint over Black Lives Matter street murals and those who would pull down statues. Both react to public displays of collective values. And collective values have shifted over time. They are, of course, bound to do so. Similarly, and inversely, there exists a semiotic symmetry between those who erected the confederate statues in the early twentieth century and those who tag police unions with agitative graffiti, in that both seek to impact the public discourse, and that opposite factions view them as defacement.
I do not want to make a claim or delineate any stance, except that if we are doing statues, Ulysses S. Grant deserves a statue. He inherited a slave, William Jones, and manumitted him within less than a year. He sometimes displayed a disregard for human life in his battle tactics, refusing to retreat or surrender when it might have mitigated casualties. Neither of these can outweigh how he feverishly worked to destroy the institution of chattel slavery in the United States, and presided over one of our largest leaps in civil rights. There is no time or will to exhaust that discussion here, and no need to subject an audience, captive or otherwise, to it. He is not emblematic of the discussion—no figure is. They are each a case unto their own.
Public statues matter some; they are a side dish. But the discussion over who belongs in glorified effigy and—more often—who does not distracts from the issues of the wealth gap, lingering colonialism, and languid education. The powerful people who profit off the status quo would love to direct public attention to topplings of sacrosanct (replaceable) iconography. But statues did not bring us into the street in the midst of an infectious pandemic. No bust deprives Indian reservations of Internet and Postal access. In first grade, teachers told me that when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, everyone thought he would fall off the edge of the world! In ninth grade, we read Lost Cause-sympathetic novel The Killer Angels. We need to stop deceiving ourselves. We can only cycle into higher consciousness and conscientiousness if we shed our fear of impressing reality on the impressionable, if we have the open forums of reconciliation for which our society has pleaded consistently, if we admit our whole—i mean whole—history.
—Lucas