Statues, Statutes, and Mapping the Neo-Patriarchy
White sight practices a racializing surveillance via an infrastructure that relays between the statue, the state and the statute. In the current war of movement, that infrastructure feels unstable and can be challenged. In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd Uprising, white supremacy is now focusing on patriarchy as its means of redemption.
Redemption was the name given to the defeat of Black Reconstruction. Its symbol was the Confederate statue, connecting Jim Crow states to their white supremacy statutes. Statues are again a key pivot between the resurgent neo-patriarchy and white supremacy. They materialize the history and dominance of “great men,” extending beyond the Confederate memorial to presidents and generals, stressing patriarchy as the top note of white supremacy.
At the same time, the statue materializes the elite-base contradiction of far-right populism. The gilded one-per-cent rely on votes from the self-perceived disenfranchised “white working class, ” using its Sarah Palin-Marjorie Taylor Greene-Fox News anchors axis as handmaidens to its neo-patriarchy. These contradictions are blurred by mobilizing homophobia and transphobia in the name of “parents and families,” always considered to be the generic white nuclear-weapons era family.
As ever, there is violence, epitomized by the 146 mass shootings this year, a decentered white supremacist, patriarchal insurrection.
The visual activist question is if and how statues can be used to exploit and explode that contradiction, so as to destabilize the gerrymandered state-statute relation? The first step in this work is to know the terrain by mapping it.
Mapping Statues
There are so many statues of “great men” in the United States to reinforce and advance neo-patriarchy. The National Audit of the over 48,000 monuments in the United States conducted by Philadelphia’s Monument Lab showed that of the top 50 figures depicted all but five were wealthy white men:
Half of the Top 50 list (50%) enslaved other people. More than a third (40%) were born into family wealth. A large majority (76%) owned land.
Despite actions taken in 2020, Christopher Columbus remains the third most often represented person, behind Lincoln and Washington, while Jefferson Davis still sits at 13.
This map (above) shows that these patriarchal monuments are concentrated in the Northeast. Confederate monuments continue to network the South, as you can see on the Southern Poverty Law Center map below—confusingly, “removal” is light green, while “remaining” is dark green and red is “renaming.” By rough visual approximation between the two maps, it looks as if most Southern monuments still depict the Confederacy.
As the dense orange blur of white male landowning soldiers in the “liberal” Northeast suggests, there is a difference of degree rather than kind in the monumental landscape.
Mapping Statutes
Mapping the country by patriarchal statute reveals the national divide called for by far-right legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene. This neo-patriarchy/quasi-Confederacy advances by targeting bodily autonomy, reproductive rights and the right to self-determination.
As the ACLU map above shows, nineteen states have advanced five or more bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights from Florida and to Minnesota and New Jersey. Only nine states and territories have proposed no such bills, including Alabama and New York. Twenty have between one and five including California, Massachusetts, and North Carolina.
It’s broadly similar to the Center for Reproductive Rights map of abortion access, as you might expect, although Florida is an anomaly here.
Clearly, these maps are not completely accurate as a guide: Alabama is not likely to join an anti-patriarchy federation, and it might be hoped that states like New Jersey and Minnesota wouldn’t support the new patriarchy.
Mapping White Sight in Tennessee
Statue removal serves as an index of what’s happening. Consider Tennessee, where drag has been banned from public spaces, while the Nashville school shootings produced no legislative response, other than the now-notorious ejection of two Black state representatives.
There have been only a few Confederate statue removals statewide (see above), due to the 2016 Tennessee Heritage Protection Act. Like other such statutes in the South, this law was designed in the wake of the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests to protect the infrastructure of white sight.
Memphis inventively got around the Act by selling the land under statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the KKK, and Jefferson Davis to a non-profit, which then had them removed. Similarly, a statue of Forrest in Nashville was removed by the Battle of Nashville Trust, who pointed out that he was not present at the battle.
As I pointed out in an earlier newsletter, there is still a Confederate statue in downtown Nashville, framed by a copy of the Parthenon—white sight in action. The 2016 State statute protects the statue, which supports white sight. That’s how this works.
On the other side of the park, a monument hails James Robertson, the white settler credited with “founding” the city as “patriarch…and Indian fighter.” The classic liberal response would be additive: more monuments.
That’s already been done here. In 2016, the privately-funded (and oddly named) Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument opened in the park, commemorating the Tennessee women who secured the national ratification of the 19th Amendment when the state adopted it in 1920.
One of the women commemorated is Frankie Pierce (c.1864-1954), whose mother Nellie Seay had been enslaved. Alan LeQuire’s memorial makes it difficult to tell which of the women is Frankie Pearce. But how could it be done in bronze, other than by some form of stereotyping? That’s why figurative statues don’t work as part of abolition.
The suffragettes are marching toward the Parthenon, with the Robertson memorial to their right and the Confederate statue to their left. You could say they are surrounded. If the racist memorials all have to go—and they do—what should be done with the Suffrage Memorial? Sociologist Gary Younge is clear: all figurative memorial statues should go.
Rhetorically, this is a strong position and it keeps the question of public monuments and memorials open, rather than let it slide into the background, as infrastructures like to do. And “empty” plinths make powerful interim statements. Nonetheless, it’s time to explore the contradiction(s) and see what might come after white sight. Any such work would be prefigurative—meaning it would imagine on a small scale what might be done—locally-specific and bottom up.
Next week, I’ll start imagining what that might look like.
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