It was Black Lives Matter that led me to thinking about whiteness and white sight. The gateway was the monument, about which I had written as long ago as 1995. In 2017, when BJP100 activists pulled down a Silent Sam Confederate memorial in Durham NC, days after the fascist rally at Charlottesville, I coined a phrase: “all the monuments must fall.” It is the strike against statues.
This week, as it was revealed that the British Museum is in talks to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, I say it again—all the monuments must fall. And as the Lebanese Uprising had it, “all of them means all of them.” The work of the strike against white sight is to un-dehumanize those excluded from and by white sight, meaning to bring to an end all processes of dehumanization. If only one set of humans, who call themselves white, can be Heroes, or great men (gender intended), then everyone else is dehumanized. Removing all monuments clears the ground as a first step in this un-dehumanizing.
BJP Activists with Silent Sam, Durham, NC (2017). Photo: Rodney Dunning via Flickr.
Monumental White Sight
In 2014, following the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown—and so many others—I marched with and followed Black Lives Matter. When St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the grand jury proceedings that had filed to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown in November 2014, I downloaded the archive because here I had something to contribute. Analyzing the photos, I saw how prosecutors had used the time in which they were displayed to circulate a document to the jury giving the police version of events. I posted my account of the murder, showing that it took place in less than a minute.
The piece went “viral,” as we used to say. An unexpected consequence was a wave of invites to speak at colleges, art schools and universities. At almost all of these events, it was painfully clear that a person identified as white was for the most part talking to other white-presenting people. Together with some suggestions from Black colleagues, it was clear that I needed to engage with what I have come to call white sight. But how?
Charlottesville made it all too obvious. From the flurry of social media activity around my blog post came the idea for a collaborative syllabus, which went up a few weeks later in 2017 and was updated in 2020, under the title All Monuments Must Fall. No one was claiming to discover the issue, which historian Kirk Savage among many others had highlighted in the case of the Confederate statues.
What I thought had become newly visible about monuments was their role as a material database of white supremacy. Stored in plain sight but denoticed, the monument could be re-activated, as it was at Charlottesville. The shock generated by the statue rally revealed that even in the most radical person, there’s a little liberal, who believes that things get progressively better. More importantly, statue removal created a tear in white reality, a continuing and ongoing strike against white sight.
Torn White Reality: Statue of Robert E. Lee Removed from New Orleans, LA.
Photo: author.
The Strike Today
Much of my own book details and describes these histories. In the case of statues, there’s also Erin Thomson’s important book and the ongoing work of the Monument Lab in rethinking what public memorials can do. My question is different: how can the strike against statues today continue to unbuild white sight? What have we learned?
First, the statue is not an example of whiteness. It is its very form. In the aftermath of the Haitian revolution (1791-1804), it was Apollo, specifically the statue known as the Apollo Belvedere, that defined this form. In the United States, the defeat of Black Reconstruction led to Robert E. Lee becoming the “the highest type of manly beauty,” in the words of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Davis was extolling the 1890 monument to Lee in Richmond that was finally removed in 2021. That’s why Charlottesville mattered so much to the white supremacists.
Statue of Robert E. Lee Charlottesville, VA. Photo: Lee Wilson (detail).
Second, it follows that the strike against statues is central to unbuilding white sight. Sometimes, as in 2020, there are rapid gains. More often, it’s slow and painstaking. On December 24, 2022, the military academy West Point quietly announced that its Confederate symbols would be removed, including a monument to Robert E. Lee and “an image of a hooded figure with the words ‘Ku Klux Klan’ written below.” It took so much to set this process in motion and it still needed two years to accomplish. Let’s not make the mistake again of thinking enough has been done or that the remaining statues do not matter.
Third, that “slowness” is part of a sixty-year decolonization movement. In 1961, Frantz Fanon described colonialism as “the world of statues.” It was not a metaphor. The next year, victorious Algerian revolutionaries began removing French colonial monuments from their country. The movement known as the “war against statues” swept down Africa before breaking against the racist wall of apartheid South Africa in 1975. The 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa re-ignited statue removal worldwide. Last November, the statue of German colonial governor Curt von François was removed in Windhoek, Namibia. Statues across the Caribbean and Latin America continue to fall.
Fourth, such removals show that statues form a distributed network, like the Internet, rather than a centralized one like the electrical grid. Each monument “works” by itself to sustain white supremacy. For that reason, all the monuments must fall if we are serious about eliminating white supremacy. That’s why prominent mainstream figures like art curator Paul Preciado in 2020 and journalist-turned-sociologist Gary Younge (2021) have also argued that all the monuments must fall. Younge points out that all statues of people—not public memorials like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—should fall because they are inherently conservative. Monuments embody the Hero doctrine promoted by Thomas Carlyle that underpins colonial visuality: great men, and great (white) men only, can “see” history as it happens.
Fifth, to take all colonial and racist statues down is to go back to the anti-fascist future already mapped out. Allied forces in Germany ordered to be “destroyed and liquidated” by January 1, 1947:
“any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive the German military tradition, to revive militarism or to commemorate the Nazi Party.”
Note how extensive this directive is. It was not limited to explicitly Nazi materials but covered the German military tradition in particular and militarism in general. This far-reaching policy was only one of nine major denazification initiatives, involving legal assessment of five million people. Planned Nazi museums were also liquidated.
A Thought Experiment
Were one to apply these denazification standards to other racially-motivated conflicts, such as the US Civil War, let alone colonialism, the outcome might be different. It would no longer be possible to defend Confederate memorials as “heritage” because the Directive understood that the “tradition” of racialized hierarchy is always violent and cannot be otherwise, so it must be “liquidated.” Nor would the canard of the erasure of history stand scrutiny when it is the memorializing of racial hierarchy that is to be removed.
There’s still much to be done. In early 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on Confederate monuments:
Although there are 723 live monuments in SPLC’s database as of January 20, 2022, there are more roadways (741) honoring Confederates than there are monuments. Together with schools (201), counties and municipalities (104), parks (38), buildings (51), holidays (22), military bases (10), commemorative license plates (7), bodies of water (6), and bridges (6), these places do important cultural work to reinforce white supremacy.
Add to these the work needed to remove names like Columbus, other conquistadores and assorted racists and that is what it takes to unbuild this component of white sight. The rationale for this work is clearly anti-fascist. That is why the far-right has devoted so much time to making that term toxic. Monument removal is the kind of contribution to decolonizing that people identified as white can make.
During the Nazi period, poet and politician Aimé Césaire of Martinique connected colonialism to fascism in his now-classic 1950 Discourse on Colonialism. Following writers like W. E. B. Du Bois before the war, and Jewish intellectual Simone Weil during it, Césaire declared:
“Before mass crimes were tested in Europe, they were first tested in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa. To dehumanize a race, to destroy it, to make it disappear from the surface of the earth is already inscribed in the colonial genes of National Socialism [Nazism].”
Imagine combining the 1947 denazification Directive with Césaire’s anticolonial definition. It would read like this:
“To be liquidated and destroyed: any monument, memorial, poster, statue, edifice, street or highway name marker, emblem, tablet, or insignia which tends to preserve and keep alive notions or practices intended to dehumanize a race, to destroy it, to make it disappear from the surface of the earth.”
This surrealist-inspired montage understands that “culture” was for five hundred years (1450-1975) nothing but colonial war.
The general strike was once intended as a means to prevent world war. While Second International members celebrated their anti-war strike resolution in July 1914, days before it would collapse when hostilities began, Rosa Luxemburg sat on the stage with her head in her hands. Repeatedly urged to speak, she refused, knowing what was to come. Her refusal was what the artist Claire Fontaine calls the “human strike.”
Claire Fontaine, Strike, (K. font V.II) (2005), White florescent tubes, blue gelatin, steel wall mounted or free-standing frame, movement detector and circuit-breaker. c. 650 x 170 x 150 cm. [Detail].
The general human strike
Taken together, these components suggest that the counter to white sight, which I call visible relation, is not flat and two-dimensional. It not an “image” at all. It is a layered, stratified set of experiences, positions, spaces and temporalities. As in the digital Photoshop document, some of these layers are present but not ordinarily visible. Others remain in opacity. To strike white sight is to refuse to live in the monocultural monodirectional space imagined to be (white) reality. The feminist theorist Verónica Gago calls this process “de-invisibilizing.” Removing all monuments makes visible this de-invisibilizing. It enables further action—what the museums call the “slippery slope”—and it’s the work of this project to support all such actions.