For 125 years the statue of Edward Colston
Stood in the center of Bristol
Three decades of attempts to have it removed through official channels
Resulted in humming and hawing and hand-wringing and ultimately
Dead ends
In 2014, a poll of locals found that 56% of people wanted it to stay
When the system for maintaining our shared public spaces fails
And a monument to a proud slave trader is allowed to stand
In the center of a town, getting older and grander by the year
Sinking his rotten roots deeper and deeper into the ground
The people, I would argue
Have a right, even a moral duty
To tear it down
And to roll it without fanfare into the nearest fucking river
And this is exactly what they did
On June 7th, 2020, against the explicit wishes
Of the democratically elected council and the majority of the city
This is not, despite what you may think or may have heard
"A complicated issue"
White Britain doesn't have the privilege of saying
There is a gray area here
Not anymore
We have been living comfortably in the grey area
For hundreds of years
And failing to do the bare fucking minimum for the people
We have transplanted over here against their will
It is hard
To not feel more than a little cognitive dissonance
When your country tells you that
Racism is a thing of the distant past
While a monument to a professional racist
Stands towering over a major city
With his chin resting lazily in his fucking palms
It took me way too long to figure out
That equality and fairness
Do not always equate to treating everybody exactly the same
Or to insisting that groups with competing interests
Work together to come to a compromise
Why should a group
Whose primary interest is disempowering white supremacists
Be forced to compromise with groups
Whose sole interest seems to be to impede that progress?
I have very little problem, it turns out
With saying Group A are allowed to take direct, destructive action
While Groups B through KKK are not
When it becomes clear that Group A are right
And everybody else is completely fucking wrong
And believe me when I tell you
That it pains me to say that on some level
Because I spent my twenties like many people do
Trying, in vain, to piece together a coherent Euclidean worldview
That looks the same from every angle
Trying to understand where everyone was coming from
Arguing that "morality is relative"
And that "good and evil are primitive ideas"
And that
"There is no right and wrong
Besides the laws we agree to as a collective
And-"
Blah, blah, blah
Fucking undergraduate, entry-level, bullshit
To hear myself today argue that property damage
And vigilante justice can be
Perfectly acceptable means to achieve particular ends
And are, in fact
Sometimes the only way to get justice
In a system as fucked up as our's is
Goes against everything I used to believe in
The thing is, the young man who would tell you with a straight face
No less that
"There is never an excuse for violence
Or for taking the law into your own hands"
Did not realize at the time that that attitude came from a position
Of never having to so much as raise his voice to be heard
From knowing that almost everyone in a position of power
Looked and sounded like him
He had never had to try and communicate his experience
Of being alive to someone who saw him as different and alien
His needs had never been anything other than
Inherently sympathetic and justified
And by arguing that
People should be able to fight for their rights
While in the same breath
Denying them the right to fight
He was more than a product of the system
He was a dedicated defender of it
While self-identifying as progressive
And liberal
And punk
Of all things
You know
At the bottom of everything
I think he was threatened
By the idea that someone might one day come along
And take from him what was never rightfully his to begin with
"The steady march of social change is fine
And good, and should be encouraged," he thought
As long as he is not caught in the path of it
As long as he's not disenfranchised
And inconvenienced in any way by it
Like if in the process of trying to have your voice be heard
The architects of your pain brought to justice
You so much as moderately delay my commute to work
Let alone ask me to do the emotional labor
Of recognizing my privileged position
Within an oppressive power structure
God forbid ask me to take some personal responsibility for any of it
Then fuck you
And fuck what you stand for
Which, of course, is a roundabout way of saying
"I support your right to protest up until the point
Where I become unable to ignore it"
Which, going further still
Is a roundabout way of saying
"I don't really respect your right to protest at all."
I am getting
Man, I need a fucking drink
I am getting way too wrapped up
In the peaceful protest debate
Which I did not intend to
Which, I think
Is a large part of why the people in power are addressing that angle
So they don't need to
Address the actual reasons
People are
Toppling statues
Ask yourself
What personal qualities do we encourage in this society?
To clarify, I don't mean
What do we teach our children?
To share and be kind
I mean: what qualities do we actively reward in reality?
The only way we can with
Power
And money
Dishonesty
Exploitation
Above all, a pathological lack of empathy
These are the traits our society fosters
We stop just short of selectively breeding for them
And the people who truly embody these values
The people most willing to lie or take advantage of others
Are the ones who rise to the top
By virtue of their willingness to seize and protect that power
By doing what others will not
They become the people who run our institutions
The people who plot our trajectories
They start our wars and they write our laws
And, not coincidentally
These are the people whom we enshrine in history
These are the people we erect statues of
Quote
"I do not admit that a wrong has been done
To the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia
By the fact that a stronger race
A higher grade race, has come in and taken their place
I do not admit it
I do not think that the Red indians had any right to say
'The American Continent belongs to us
And we are not going to have any of these
European settlers coming in here.'
They had not the right
Nor had they the power."
End quote
That was Winston Churchill
A de facto saint in British lore for his role in the second world war
And there is no doubt that Britain
Under Churchill's government
Played a central part in defeating Hitler and the Nazi regime
Who were directly responsible for the deaths of 18 million people
Compared to
I don't know
The four million Bengalis Churchill killed by taking their food away
During a famine
A people he said he, and I quote, "hated"
And blamed their slow, agonizing deaths
On them "breeding like rabbits"
He was a man who boasted of personally killing "savages" in the Sudan
And he got mad at others for their "squeamishness"
When they objected to his suggestions that they
"Shell uncivilized tribes" (his words, not mine) with poison gas
And remember that the others objected
Those were not universally held beliefs at the time
His own secretary of state for India described his attitude as
"Not quite sane"
And that he couldn't see much difference
Between Churchill's outlook and Hitler's
He couldn't see much difference between Churchill's outlook
And Hitler's
When talk of removing his statue was brought up
His defenders had the gall to say: "Nobody is a 100% pure"
As if "wasn't a literal white supremacist"
Is an unrealistic benchmark to hold our heroes to
And this
If you don't get it by now
Is just one of the ten thousand reasons
People are saying that black lives matter
Because, for decades upon decades
The response to criticism of this fucking cretin
Who was voted by our country to be the greatest Briton
Was to be told
With a patronizing pat on the head
That to take his statue down would risk us forgetting our history
As if the records of the British Empire's atrocities weren't
Bundled into crates at the empire's end
And sent to the bottom of the sea
That it would be akin to "photoshopping out our blemishes"
As if anyone has ever built a statue to someone
As a monument to a single one of their misdeeds
As if Winston Churchill
And Edward Colston
And Cecil Rodes
And John Mitchell
And Oliver Cromwell
And Horatio Nelson
And the Roberts Milligan Clive
And Baden-Powell
Were all uniquely complicated men who represent
The very best of what it means to be British
And so
I say
If you really don't think that we should take these statues down
If you are truly not in the least bit
Ashamed of these men and what they stood for
You should really take a moment and ask yourself why
What does that say about you?
And if the answer you get from your conscience
Is that these men deserve the symbolic power
We have bestowed upon them
Then why not double down
And put busts of these great Britons up in every town center
Their portraits
Hanging over ever shrinking
Dimly lit
Grey family dinner
As we limp arthritically into our country's next chapter
Stamp their names and the names of every wealthy descendant
Of every proud British slave owner
And slave trader
And war criminal
And concentration camp owner
On every street sign and bank note and home office letter
To do otherwise, you see, would be to allow us to forget
Who we are
Where we came from
That this
This
Is the foundation
On which we built
Our shameless nation
This
In the most literal sense of the phrase
Is us