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Daily thread for news/updates/discussion of George Floyd protests - June 14
This thread is posted daily - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.
A fascinating debate about our (Sweden) own colonial past have been brought up due to BLM protests in support of the US and bringing light to racism in our own society. (Affecting people who are not just black but what would in the US be called “white” like Sapmi or Slavic people)
Talking about Linnaeus and his classification of human “races” for example. And also how we benefited from the slave trade while still banning it (in a horribly Swedish move we didn’t ban “handling slaves for clients” so renting boats, keeping forts etc - just “slavery”).
So the whole “yeah ok he was relevant to our history but maybe a damn plaque about him being a shit at the same time? At least?”
The usual suspects locally have of course placed foots so far down their own throats that twitter could be called porn at this point.
What is different is they get fired :D
(And of course cry about not getting to be racist and still employed - “boohoo it’s fascism!”)
I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately. I'm absolutely for the removal of Confederate statues in the US. Preservation of history happens in museums and archives, not street corners where these statues sit. So then I got to thinking, we've also got massive monuments to Washington and Jefferson in DC and elsewhere. Both of them owned slaves, so should we stop glorifying them and tear down their monuments?
I've come to the conclusion that the answer is no. Unlike the Confederacy or its leaders, Washington and Jefferson contributed a lot of positive things to the US. Yes, they owned slaves, and we should never, ever forget that, but that's not what defines them in American history. Their names or images aren't evoked to scare or intimidate blacks in the way Confederacy leadership was/is. Now that being said, I think more emphasis on their slave-ownership needs to be taught in schools. People need to understand that while they did things worthy of praise and worth remembering, they had a dark side that can't be ignored. And that doesn't mean shrugging off their slave ownership with "yeah, but they were nice to their slaves", because that's just idiotic and doesn't absolve them of anything.
Likewise Linnaeus made a lot of positive contributions to science and that's worthy of praise and remembrance. But he also had some really fucked up ideas and views that also need to be criticized and remembered.
To be honest I really don't care.
Its statues. If someone spray paints "racist douche" on them that is so far down the scale of "problematic" that it pales in comparison with "systematic racism and a blindness for a racist past". If its pushed down ... again the historical art piece being damaged is annoying, but like most places it can be replaced in seconds.
What would be 1000 times more fun though would be a statue of Sally Hemings NEXT to Jeffersons statue flipping him off. Suggest it, collect cash for it, and see the "stop ruining our statues" people squirm.
Or just a sign "this is Jefferson, even if he did do a lot of good stuff and relevant stuff in general he was also a slave owner, and took one of his slaves - humans he bought and sold for profit - as a mistress. She had no say in the matter. He never liberated her, not even in his will after carrying many of his children" - added as a plaque to the statue.
I think a lot of what causes ire is not necessarily the physical statue, some of which are ugly (NBF in Nashville..), but the idea that they were erected in direct protest to the civil rights movements of the 60’s, among other older decades. Couple that with the fact that they seem to be government funded/supported and were lobbied for, makes it a still new and “Uncle Sam supported” wound in the eyes of some of our people here in the US.
I’m all for informational plaques. For museums having the best of the statues. For the information to be there for people to go and see and learn about.
We don’t really need to erect, on gov property, a statue of anyone, to be honest.
True although... I kinda like an old pompous king looking like the human embodiment of gout and syphilis as a statue. And then someone putting a plaque with the text “this dude murdered thousands, put the country in to starvation and then had the gall to demand a statue of himself. Urinal around the back”
I've done a bit of reading about Thomas Jefferson but it's hard to point to good things he did that someone else couldn't have done. Like okay, he was a good writer, but someone else could have done it, and it's not the writing that made the Declaration of Independence important. As the third president, the Louisiana purchase was an excellent trade and his pro-French reputation might have something to do with negotiating that. But is the Jefferson memorial there because he made a good trade?
But maybe I'm just too biased in favor of Hamilton and the Federalists. What are Jefferson's achievements that you think should be remembered?
I have no blessed clue, he was a pretty good tactician wasn't he? He was part of the founding father too so... fame by association? Wasn't he a president too? So I guess that's good or something?
(sry, US history when I was a kid in the 80's was "Revolution -> Slavery -> Trail of Tears -> Hiroshima -> The rape of Vietnam" so don't expect too much from me.)
If you mean a good tactician in war, definitely not. Jefferson was governor of Virginia during the Revolution and basically fled.
But he was good at partisan politics and as a founder and leader of the Democrat-Republican party, he was able to become president. So yay partisanship?
I guess. I’m sure someone with more interest in US history than me could fling in a few things about the dude since the best I can do is copy paste Wikipedia and tbh there is too much history already for me to go in to that niche rabbit hole
Aaaaanyway being a founding father etc etc seems as good a reason as any for him being made in to a statue as statues go. I mean what IS the base requirement for being made in to a statue anyway?
Usually, someone wants to pay for the art and the government agrees.
But I'm more interested in the history than the art. As a building, the Jefferson Memorial is a nice place to visit, but I learn more about history from reading history books than from visiting such places.
Yes. Well going back to the core thing - wouldn't it be fun with a plaque on his statue or a statue of Sally Hemings next to it?