My reaction to the recent movement in the US to remove statues of men associated with slavery (like Robert E. Lee) was a sense of discomfort. It might not have been on the same level as when the Taliban were reported to have dynamited ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan 16 years ago, or the more recent destructions in Syria by ISIS, but still…
Nearly as disturbing was the demand made last week by an Ontario teachers’ group. The group demanded that the name of Sir John A. MacDonald be removed from schools in the province. We seem to have entered an age when destroying evidence of past grievances somehow rights wrongs.
Are tributes to slave owners, or defenders of slavery, offensive to African-Americans? Possibly. Maybe even probably. But does the removal or destruction of historical figures change that ugly past? I’m much less forgiving about dimwits who fly the Confederate flag, which is a modern attempt to celebrate the ugliness of slavery and promote white supremacy, and I would not be happy to see new monuments erected to glorify historical figures associated with race hatred. Removing those historical pieces, though, smacks of a belief that history can be revised.
Simply put, we do a disservice to ourselves by succumbing to the temptation to judge past actions with current standards. Most (and I wish I could say all) of us have learned that racism in any form is unacceptable and unhealthy, but we need reminders of how easy it could be to slip back into the ways of our ancestors. Heck, wasn’t nostalgia for a simpler (largely non-existent) time a big factor in the election of Donald Trump, whose Make America Great Again campaign promised to bring back coal mining, wash away environmental concerns, and reduce the role of government?
If we support a move to destroy visible evidence of practices we now believe to be abhorrent, how far do we go? Why not blow up the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg? It is a vestige of the oppressive tsarist regimes that ruled Russia for centuries. Or maybe take out the pre-Columbian ruins that harken back to Mayan and Inca practices like human sacrifice? What might have been lost if the Greeks had dismantled the Great Pyramid because they believed it to have been constructed by slaves? Should Alberta’s NDP government be working toward erasing evidence of the Ralph Klein era because he managed to offend so many during his time in office?
North America—Canada and the US most notably—doesn’t have a lot of historical artifacts. Our First Nations people weren’t builders of sprawling temples and stone cities, and when Europeans started arriving in large numbers they pretty much wiped out whatever the earlier cultures had created. And now we think we will make a better society by removing statues of old white men on horses or renaming schools named for Canada’s first prime minister because he approved the residential school system that ruined or damaged countless lives?
Better to shine a light on a problem than to pretend it didn’t exist, I say. If white supremacists want to protest, I’d sooner see them gathering in a town square around a Robert E. Lee monument than burning crosses in the front yard of some school teacher of African descent. If Canadian kids are learning history in schools named for Sir John A. MacDonald, we can turn that into a learning opportunity instead of thinking that changing the school’s name will somehow make for a better society.
Polls indicate that there is no great support among Canadians to see MacDonald’s name be taken off schools, and maybe that means that most of us don’t feel a need to judge people out of our history books by today’s standards. Personally, I wouldn’t be happy to see the building of new monuments to celebrate Robert E. Lee and it would not bother me in the least if no more public institutions were named after our first prime minister. But I think trying to undo the past does more harm than good.