On Monument Avenue, Liberal Illusions About Race
Come Tumbling Down
The fall of Confederate statues gives rise to a new
type of progressivism.
By JOHN F.
HARRIS
06/11/2020
04:30 AM ED
Altitude is
a column by POLITICO founding editor John Harris, offering weekly perspective
on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
The famed
Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, will soon be bereft of monuments. The
statues of Robert E. Lee and his fellow Confederate legends are coming down,
and many people surely wonder: How the hell did this take so long?
The answer
is more complicated than people who think of themselves as on the side of the
good guys in American history might suppose. The fall of old statues illuminates
the rise of a new brand of liberalism amid the traumas of 2020.
Monument
Avenue’s statues were erected in the capital of the Confederacy in the late
19th and early 20th centuries by people who were the very definition of
reactionary. That generation of civic leaders believed in the fiction of the
Lost Cause. Their campaign sought to deny the centrality of slavery to the
Civil War and to rehabilitate the reputation of Confederate leaders as tragic
but honorable figures.
But the
statues stayed up so long because they were tolerated by people who by most
definitions would qualify as progressives. This includes, in recent decades,
African Americans serving in the top jobs of the city and state. They believed
the racist past evoked by the statues no longer mattered much because it had
been defeated by racial progress, by modernity, by the Winning Cause.
Now, it
looks like this, too, was a kind of fiction.
I lived in
Richmond as a reporter in the early 1990s and know the statues well. I was a
northerner now living in a Southern city I enjoyed immensely, and used to
stroll often past the towering figures along the grassy median of Monument
Avenue. There was Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, Jefferson Davis, as well
as the more obscure Matthew Fontaine Maury, “the pathfinder of the seas.”
Why did I
tolerate, and even, at times, take friends to see the statues? It wasn’t that
the legacy of the Confederacy didn’t offend me. It was that the statues
depicted a history that seemed functionally dead. They also seemed like a
joke—and the joke was on the very racists who had erected them in the first
place.
My time in
Richmond overlapped precisely with the tenure of L. Douglas Wilder as the
nation’s first black elected governor. He was one of the most beguiling
politicians of his era, electric in personality, fiercely independent and
forever jousting with his fellow Democrats. Wilder’s achievement, powered by an
ideologically moderate cross-racial coalition, didn’t occur in New York or
California. It happened in the Old Dominion. What better evidence that the
Confederacy was spiritually dead, 125 years after its actual death? Current
history had routed earlier history. The statues seemed little more than a
tourist attraction.
What has
become steadily more clear over the years—and crystallized dramatically in the
national reckoning over the murder of George Floyd—is that the history the
statues depict is not dead. The throngs of protesters on Monument Avenue in
recent days gathered precisely because they know the symbolism of the statues
is very much alive—toxic and radiant. For now, the statues are covered in
graffiti. Soon, after what seems likely to be short-lived legal and logistical
hurdles, they will be gone.
Joe Biden
in recent days has said that for most of his 77 years he believed the country
was steadily transcending prejudice, and that Barack Obama’s election as
president seemed to validate this view. This month’s events, he said, have
jarringly asserted the durability of hatred, how under the wrong conditions “it
comes out from under the rocks.”
This is a
more consequential statement than it may seem at first blush. The Biden
assumption is essentially the same one that animated traditional, temperate
liberalism for the past half-century or more. It held that the earnest efforts
of enlightened white people and the achievements of exemplary black people were
gradually cleansing America of its original sin of slavery and systemic racism.
The new
assumption is that the achievements of an outstanding few have only glancingly
improved the daily hardships of the many—seen in the disproportionate numbers
of minorities in economic distress, in prison or facing death from Covid-19 or
police brutality. When it comes to racial history, the nation can’t steadily
push it to the margins. It must attack it frontally, and examine its pathology
as one would a tumor. The aim of progressivism is not to make race gradually
less consequential but to insist that it be more central. This is the opposite
of what progressives of Biden’s generation, and the generation after that, grew
up believing.
One person
who is not much impressed by the epiphanies many people are having over the
Monument Avenue statues is Wilder himself. He’s 89 now, and after leaving the
governorship served as Richmond mayor. Since he was a child, Wilder told me in
an interview on Monday, “I knew what the statues meant,” though the invoking of
a Civil War past was less meaningful than the present of “colored only”
sections of 20th century streetcars.
For most of
his career, Wilder said, his view was, “Who in the hell is ever going to care
about those monuments?” Even now, what Wilder sees as the easy symbolism and
virtue-signaling of taking them down elicits a shoulder shrug, compared to the
substantive burdens of financial and educational impoverishment that plague the
descendants of slavery. Against those problems, he said, “Tearing down statutes
is not the heart of the issue.” On substance, he said, “There’s an absence of
leadership at all levels.”
As it
happens, Wilder’s biographer, Donald P. Baker, has lived for more than three
decades on Monument Avenue. “The longer we lived here, the more they offended
me,” said Baker, now 87. Understood in context, the statues were less about the
Civil War than they were monuments to Jim Crow, erected by the same politicians
who were codifying segregation at the turn of the 20th century. The streams of
people, white and black, making gleeful pilgrimages past his home to celebrate
the imminent demise of the statues suggest, Baker said, “You can’t overestimate
the importance of these events.”
Tim Kaine,
a former Democratic mayor of Richmond who then became governor and is now in
the U.S. Senate, said he never believed the statues were a joke, but he
tolerated them as an invitation to humility—an emblem of “pain” that reminds
people that leaders who were esteemed in their own time were “horribly wrong”
as judged by history. His answer, like Wilder’s, was not to take statues down
but to add new ones—such as the statue of tennis legend and Richmond native
Arthur Ashe, which was erected on Monument Avenue in 1996.
He now
recognizes that response as inadequate. “It’s like scale falling from my eyes,”
Kaine said of this spring’s protests. The problem with the statues isn’t what
they say about the past, “It’s what they say about people and our values in the
present,” and the vision they suggest about “a troubling future. ... Are we
ever going to be equal?”
Doug Wilder
in the days after his 1989 election as governor shared the cover of Time
magazine with another big story: The fall of the Berlin Wall. Tyranny and
racism alike were crumbling in what seemed like a triumph of hopeful
liberalism. Tyranny, like racism, is proving a good bit more durable. And
progress, it’s now clear, doesn’t travel on a pleasantly steady path, but one
that veers in violent and unpredictable ways.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário