Everyone present in a talking circle would have the
opportunity to share what is in their heart as they gaze
at these objects. (We’d need the usual ground rules:
no interrupting, a respectful silence between each
intervention.) We’d break into small groups and
return to the larger circle. In so doing, we’d enact
anew the hard work of democracy—a strange enterprise,
in the words of political theorist E. E.
Schattschneider (1975), devoted to the “socialization
of conflict.” For that is the deepest promise of museums:
that in the presence of objects and those who
seem so unlike us, we can together learn to encounter
one another and the world around us on new terms,
and like young children playing with a newly discovered
toy (Winnicott 1971), rediscover the profound,
life-transforming mysteries of the Self and the Other.
These critical processes of refashioning the public
square through civil debate and the work of objects,
I suggest, cannot be achieved solely through the
physical relocation of Lost Cause iconography. They
require the intervening mediation of serious, innovative
works of art, compelling us to perceive the
bloodied American historical landscape through new
eyes. Consider the newly opened National Memorial
for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama,
commemorating the horrific murders of more than
4,400 victims of lynching. As visitors descend into
this unbearably painful memorial space, they pass
underneath 816 metal columns, marking the counties
in which the Equal Justice Initiative has documented
acts of lynching. These suspended oxidizing
slabs are themselves latter-day reliquaries, honoring
our martyred fellow citizens while evoking dangling
corpses, inescapable reminders of the nation’s fartoo-long-untallied
legacy of white supremacist violence.
Might these uncanny metallic hulks also be
read as the transmogrified traces of Neo-Confederate
statuary, gathered from public squares across the
nation, melted down and recast, in effect, as ritual
intermediaries or structural operators, suspended
somewhere between signifiers of perpetrators and
victims? Walking through the memorial enacts in
microcosm the difficult terrain we must now traverse
as a nation, through serious reflection and critical
self-examination. We must acknowledge both the
whispered, enduring presences of the silent icons
that long normalized violent white privilege and the
long-obscured presence of the tortured and the
abused. Simultaneously, we must enact, through our
moving bodies, the possibility of emerging from our
long, common nightmare into an alternate, rejuvenated
space of compassion and equal justice.
References Cited
Auslander, Mark, and Bryce Peake. 2016. “Viral Soundscapes
in the Public Square: The Confederate Flag Visits
the U.S. Capitol.” Centre for Imaginative Ethnography.
Available online at http://imaginativeethnography.org/
viral-soundscapes-in-the-public-square/
Bann, Stephen. 1999. “Shrines, Curiosities and the Rhetoric
of Display.” In Visual Display: Culture beyond
Appearance, edited by Lynne Cooke and Peter Wellen,
14–29. Seattle: Bay Press.
Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the
History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Schattschneider, E. E. 1975. A Semi-Sovereign People: A
Realist’s Guide to Democracy in America, second edition.
Boston: Cengage Learning.
Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. Oxford: Pen-
guin.
racist monuments are killing us
Chelsey R. Carter
george warren brown school of social work
washington university in st. louis
I am both professionally and personally exhausted
with discussions over monuments and whether they
should be removed from public spaces in United
States cities. Often, as anthropologists we become
engrossed in thought experiments, epistemological
theorizing, and cultural relativistic historical reframings,
attempting to apply this kind of thinking to
understanding human responses to pressing social
issues such as the removal of Confederate monuments.
There are deep fissures between the factions of
people interested in preserving history and those who
support removing racist monuments from public
spaces, and these camps cannot simply be brought
together through academic discourse and roundtable
discussions. From here, as some of my colleagues
have outlined, the challenge of staying attuned to history
while also understanding the problems that
expanded commentary
Museum Anthropology, Vol. 41, Iss. 2, pp. 139–41 © 2018 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/muan.12182
monuments present for people of color, especially
black Americans, becomes an epistemological enigma
for scholars. But it should not.
As a black woman, every time I pass a Confederate
monument I am offended. I am not only reminded of
my ancestors who gave their lives fighting for my freedom,
but I am insulted by the fact that the city and
country that I love continue to honor a violent faction
of the country that devalued my life. More important
than how monuments provoke me affectively, the
perpetual assaults are unequivocally deteriorating my
health and shortening my life span. What follows is a
brief attempt to enhance this “keep them or chuck
them” argument and offer a more palpable contribution
to this discourse that focuses not on history but
on corporeality.
As a black feminist activist-scholar focused on
medicine and health disparities, I am often hesitant to
harangue my students and colleagues about the intersections
of racism and health. Nevertheless, public
health research reveals a striking and consistent narrative
about the ways racism and discrimination
affect health—a narrative that is often obscured after
people learn that race is a social construction. Black
Americans have higher mortality rates than white
Americans for 12 of the 15 leading causes of death in
this country (Cunningham et al. 2017). Sociologist
David Williams has shown that black Americans not
only get sick at younger ages but also have more severe
illness over their life spans (Williams and
Mohammed 2013; Williams et al. 2016). While poverty
and low education (both of which overwhelmingly
plague black communities) contribute to this
phenomenon, race has been shown to be a key determinant
of a person’s allostatic load.
Allostatic load is the cumulative “wear and tear on
the body” when individuals are exposed to chronic
stress over a long period of time. This “wear and tear”
or weathering means that black Americans experience
premature aging, chronic stress, and faster health
deterioration than whites. This deterioration spans
an individual’s lifetime but also across generations
(Bailey et al. 2017; Cunningham et al. 2017; Geronimus
et al. 2006). Researchers have found that black
Americans have higher allostatic load scores than
whites at all ages, and these scores increase with age
(Cunningham et al. 2017). Geronimus and colleagues
(2006) found that black women in particular bear a
larger burden of allostatic load than black men, white
women, and white men. The reasons for increased
allostatic load are numerous and interrelated. They
include neighborhood segregation, conscious and
unconscious bias, internalized racism, institutionalized
discrimination, systemic racism, environmental
stressors, and psychological trauma.
What does all of this have to do with Confederate
monuments? Everything. Black Americans’ perpetual
exposure to educational and residential segregation,
economic injustice, state-sanctioned violence, political
exclusion, stereotypes in media and popular culture,
racial slurs, and negative imaging in the form of
monuments are psychosocial stressors that lead to
deleterious health outcomes. Social epidemiologist
Nancy Krieger has shown that for people of color, discrimination
is “embodied inequality” (Krieger 2012).
Both Clarence Gravlee and Krieger outline how race
and racism, as social inequality, become biology and
quite literally have the power to make us sick (Gravlee
2009; Krieger 2012). The evidence exists and is beginning
to demonstrate that contemporary and historical
power imbalances that marginalize black
Americans cannot be diluted into new paradigmatic
traditions but instead must be recognized as social
constructions that are harming bodies. Thus, Confederate
monuments are not simply history or heritage;
they are quotidian and tangible reminders of black
people’s illegitimacy, inferiority, and insignificance in
the United States of America.
In August 2017, three days after a deadly white
nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, President
Trump tweeted: “Sad to see the history and culture of
our great country being ripped apart with the
removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”
The removal of these monuments is another step
toward liberation for black people, but the president
of the United States is “sad” about their removal.
Does the president understand that the people who
were protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E.
Lee from Emancipation Park were white supremacists,
white nationalists, neo-Confederates, Klansmen,
and neo-Nazis? Protests against the removal of
Confederate monuments by such groups are
unequivocally racist. Racism not only deteriorates
health but is also the reason black Americans are still
dying younger than white Americans. The perpetual
assault of racist messaging, images, and symbols
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140
contributes to this reality. Is the preservation of monuments
more valuable than black people’s lives? “Discrimination
is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in
every waking moment of their lives to remind them
that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in
the society dominating them,” Martin Luther King Jr.
once said.
Although I am immensely exhausted, I fervently
believe that organizing and movement building is
necessary to develop a communal consciousness of
the perils of symbolic monuments. How can we
change our culture so that people recognize the
dangers of these monuments? Clifford Geertz wrote,
“[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern
of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of
inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms,
by means of which men communicate, perpetuate,
and develop their knowledge about and attitudes
toward life” (Geertz 1973, 89). If symbols have the
power to communicate, perpetuate, and develop
human knowledge, we must create new symbolic
meanings that are not focused on maligning specific
groups of people. Is a Confederate monument
worth preserving if it yearly weathers a black student
during frequent fieldtrips to Emancipation
Park? Is a Confederate monument on the steps of a
courthouse in Virginia worth preserving if it contributes
to the historical trauma and stress that a
50-year-old black woman endures as she seeks justice
for her son who was slain at the hands of the
police? I would hope not. I would hope that as a
culture, as a human race, and as a nation we instead
choose to value health equity and ameliorating the
health of all people more than historical symbols
that sanction hatred, bigotry, and racism.
REFERENCES Cited
Bailey, Z. D., N. Krieger, M. Agenor, J. Graves, N. Linos,
and M. T. Bassett. 2017. “Structural Racism and Health
Inequities in the USA: Evidence and Interventions.”
The Lancet 389 (10077): 1453–63.
Cunningham, T. J., J. B. Croft, Y. Liu, H. Lu, P. I. Eke, and
W. H. Giles. 2017. “Vital Signs: Racial Disparities in
Age-Specific Mortality among Blacks or African Americans—United
States, 1999–2015.” Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report 66 (17): 444–56.
Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York:
Basic Books.
Geronimus, A. T., M. Hicken, D. Keene, and J. Bound.
2006. “‘Weathering’ and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load
Scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States.”
American Journal of Public Health 96 (5): 826–33.
Gravlee, C. C. 2009. “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment
of Social Inequality.” American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 139 (1): 47–57.
Krieger, N. 2012. “Methods for the Scientific Study of Discrimination
and Health: An Ecosocial Approach.”
American Journal of Public Health 102 (5): 936–44.
Williams, D. R., and S. A. Mohammed. 2013. “Racism and
Health, I: Pathways and Scientific Evidence.” American
Behavioral Scientist 57 (8): 1152–73.
Williams, D. R., N. Priest, and N. B. Anderson. 2016.
“Understanding Associations among Race, Socioeconomic
Status, and Health: Patterns and Prospects.”
Health Psychology 35 (4): 407–11.
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