The debate is well known: What should happen to monuments that depict people who oppressed others, such as slave owners or colonisers? Should they be torn down or left standing? Renee K. Harrison, Associate Professor of African American and US Religious History at Howard University, has some answers and ideas – but also wonders: why isn’t there a monument for all the people who suffered under slavery?
I always get this question: Should monuments that are problematic or not progressing toward a democratic society be removed, destroyed, or preserved? Do we keep them, or do we remove them? I always hesitate to answer that because I am in two camps on this topic. Personally, I think it depends on the circumstance. Does the situation at hand call for removal or preservation? Is a monument’s existence offensive to a group at a particular time and location in history? What is the cost? And when I say cost, I am not referring to fiscal cost; I am talking about soul-cost, the weight and toll on a given community, and the soul-cost to individuals, communities, and a nation over time. I think it’s up to a given community to decide on a monument’s removal or preservation.
If I think about this as a historian, I say they should remain. We usually talk about memory from the context of looking back and bringing what has been hidden, maligned, untold, or what has been told with an intentional erasure of certain parts of the story. When we participate in telling stories that have been omitted while erasing dominant stories, we still lose the narrative. As a historian, I suggest we need all of it. All of it is a part of our cultural memory. So, the monuments that are harmful cause societies to be built on a premise of supremacy, harm and hate; those monuments need to stay because we need to tell that story. We need to remember what human atrocities took place. And we also need to bring the stories of those harmed to the forefront. Those stories, the full breadth of the American story, must come to the forefront so we have a fuller story. In that sense, when I look at a monument of a particular person or event, I look at the full breadth of the American story.
Patriotism for one group can be cultural pride and preservation, and human harm and exclusion to another.
Yes, and what I think societies have done is only tell the patriotic story from the version of those who have defined what patriotism is, and that has been the problem: Patriotism for one group can be cultural pride and preservation, and human harm and exclusion to another. Therefore, we need the full breadth of the story about a monument. The whole context of that story laid at the altar of that monument.
So, what is the problem with the way it is being addressed at the moment? You said that context is needed, so how should the subject of memory culture be dealt with, especially when it comes to Black history? Should it involve more people?
I think that more people, those that are in all the camps, those who want to preserve a particular monument because of its patriotic and heroic past, should be in conversation with those that want to tear down that monument because of its racist, imperialist history, and those in the middle need to be in that conversation as well. Then, what may happen, what I have found in my teaching, is that when that happens, a monument’s story is more nuanced because we hear varied and diverse versions of the story, all of which are true. Now you have a fuller story. I don’t think it should be just one person, group, or cultural perspective telling a single story. Take, for example, the recent symposium in Berlin, you have many people telling the story, so you need everyone in the room simultaneously, pushing against each other to get the whole story. And hopefully, in that human exchange, we then start to say: “My way of seeing history needs re-examining and re-contextualizing because I now hear other voices talking.”
You said that a lot of people are already talking about the subject. So, who is currently talking about memory culture? Is it just an academic subject or should the general public be involved in the discussion and decision-making process? How inclusive is the process?
I don't know if it's that inclusive, and I can't speak for the whole because I don't know what's happening in different countries and regions. I know I'm a part of a group that's talking about it - a group of lay church and religious people, community activists, artists, everyday people, academics, professionals, scientists and politicians are in this conversation. Now, whether we can move the needle, what our collective demonstrates is that we can have a conversation. So, answering your question is difficult because it depends on whether a group is willing to work as a broad coalition to push talks forward about monuments and memory culture. What I find right now is that it's happening in the academy, and the academy is reaching out to different parts of society. That's how I came into the conversation: I wrote a book, and while writing, I engaged people already doing the work.
In your opinion and experience, what are the differences between the US and European countries as far as memory culture is concerned?
So, when I arrived in Washington, DC in 2010, I took a lot of walks around the city with a colleague’s son. One time, we went to the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall; it was our first stop. When I reached the end of the tour, I saw the last exhibit: the shoes. The shoes took my breath away. That is what monuments should do. The memorial arrested me; I couldn’t leave because I kept thinking, “There were people who wore these shoes when they entered the chambers.” We left and walked the mall, and I began looking, like seeing all the monuments to these great white men. And I asked myself: “Where is the monument to those who built the city?” “Where is the monument, the preservation, the acknowledgment of their blood, sweat, and tears; their labours, ingenuity, and talents?” I see the atrocities of what happened during the Holocaust Museum in the US. I see it in the shoes. But there’s nothing on the National Mall about the atrocities of American slavery. My colleague’s son asks me, “Why don’t you write about it? And that moment began the quest to write the book Black Hands, White House: Slave Labor and the Making of America.
And this is what I found to answer your question; the difference between European countries and their national cities is some of their recognition and memorialization of the past in ways the United States national city has missed the mark. Lawmakers in the nation’s capital have not recognized the labours of and atrocities committed against Black people and put them into a monument as a form of cultural memory. Slavery existed in the US for over 250 years, and no memorial on the National Mall exists. Now, a museum but not a monument explicitly created to honour those who played a role in building this country and who were held against their will. Nothing. That one trip to the Holocaust Museum took me to the Holocaust Museum in Berlin. I know that the Memorial to the Murdered Jews is not the answer. Still, what is clear when I traveled from the shoes in the US to the massive dark-grey cemented blocks in Berlin, I said to myself, ‘Here are community people, here are scholars, here are activists, here are people with money, and the government participating in that endeavour to tell the story of its past. So that means that Europe, Germany, and more specifically, to some extent, gets it in a way that the US does not. When I make the case, look at Germany, I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s there. And when I look at the other eight countries involved in the slave trade, only those erecting slavery memorials are doing so with intentionality, and it’s a testament to how they have enshrined cultural memory.
You said that some monuments are strongly influenced by patriotism and by how people define patriotism. And who do you think defines patriotism? And do you think that influences how statues and memorials are created in the United States?
Yes, and I think they are also defined in terms of white supremacy and white nationalism. The idea that whiteness is what is seen as the crescendo of human existence. Those who ascribe to this kind of superiority and entitlement do so to promote their version of themselves and their cultural story at the exclusion of others. In a sense, they are saying to society, “Why should I promote those I have deemed inferior? Why should I enshrine a memorial to them? Because monuments are about reverence, right? You do it because you are venerating the person or group that has done something to further your cause or engaged in something you deem good and patriotic to enrich the nation. In some ways, I think patriotism in its early form was defined as being white, nationalistic and a particular way of being American. So much so that the American Revolution happened. So, there was something about the need to carve out a different path or identity apart from anything outside what was defined and seemed supremely white and nationalistic.
The monuments are built from the premise of patriotism, white nationalism, Christianity and patriarchy.
Historically, monuments were built from the premise of patriotism, white nationalism, Christianity and patriarchy. That’s the crux of it. You know that because when you walk the National Mall in Washington, DC, that’s what you see. White Christian male shrines. And men of valour who have gone to war or are considered the great thinkers of the time. So, to some extent, the challenge is for everyone involved in cultural memory to be engaged in a feminist enterprise of cultural memory because it’s not just about inserting a woman or a Christian person of colour into the narrative; it’s about critiquing the narrative that deliberately omits certain groups—and promoting a particular ideology of what it means to be an American and the notion that what it means to be an American is to be a white, male, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant Christian fighting for self-preservation. And so that means that the task for us engaged in cultural memory work and monument building is not to replace something with something else but to expand it; tell the whole story. It has to be a feminist interfaith project because if it’s not, we’re just replacing the same ideas with different people.
So, with that said, what does it mean now to talk about this more broadly? For me, it means critiquing, which is a feminist act, the existing order and rearranging and reconceiving that order so that it represents more of the common good.
August 2023