There’s an argument that gets repeated a lot about the tearing down of statues, and it goes something like this: the extremists destroying statues are trying to erase history because ‘kids these days’ have grown up in “cancel” culture.
The argument is a tangled knot of misrepresentations, misunderstandings, myths, and clichés.
There are a lot of problems with how people talk about “youth today,” but most of them come down to the tendency for old farts to make that generalization on the basis of what we remember (or, more accurately, have chosen to remember) about what we were like as youth. Because, really, that is the comparison. People talking about “kids these days” are rarely people deeply-read in sociology, anthropology, history, let alone history of youth culture. That means we aren’t even pretending to know anything about what youth was like for generations prior to ours. A lot of the commentary of this kind is (and, to be honest, always has been) not on the part of the generation of parents (who have a lot of contact with “kids these days”), but grandparents—that is, people whose knowledge of youth culture is heavily mediated by TV and news.
So, at its base, it’s kind of a jerk move. It’s saying “Although I don’t spend a lot of time with kids these days, and haven’t read any studies about them, and am just relying on a small amount of data and a large amount of outrage media, I feel strongly that they suck because they aren’t as good as I like to think I was.”
Boomers’ outrage about “cancel culture” is exactly that. It’s based on a false comparison. The notion that kids these days grew up in a cancel culture is sort of true, but mostly irrelevant. It’s true that they grew up in a culture in which a public figure, artist, work of art and so on might be suddenly rejected, shunned, or even actively boycotted. If you want to call that cancel culture, fine.
It’s irrelevant as an explanation of anything because every American generation grew up in that culture. The internet made it different, of course, both better and worse. But the fact is that junior high and high school are cancel culture and always have been, with people cancelled for not being cool enough, or wearing the wrong thing, or getting on the wrong side of someone. And public figures, artists, and works of art have been cancelled for all sorts of reasons. Johnny Mathis had to leap back into the closet because his admission of homosexuality not only threatened his career, but led to death threats (in 1982!). Lenny Bruce was very effectively cancelled; Smothers Brothers was literally cancelled; many people in the South cancelled the Democratic Party for supporting Civil Rights; many of the people who complain about cancel culture cancelled “The Dixie Chicks;” Mohammed Ali was cancelled for quite a while; you don’t find a lot of statues for Longstreet in the South or any for Frederick Benteen anywhere.
So, the pearl-clutching about kids these days having invented cancel culture can stop.
“They’re trying to erase history” is a cliché being repeated as part of this argument, and I say it’s a cliché because I don’t think people are really thinking carefully about what they’re saying.
A statue is not history; a statue doesn’t even teach history. It could, in the right context (i.e., a museum), and part of the history would be why the statue was put up, and by whom. Statues aren’t for teaching history; they’re for identifying in-group heroes. Removing a statue doesn’t erase the history; it does erase the honoring of a particular figure in that spot. So, the question to ask is: why was that person honored in that spot at that time by that group? That’s the history we need.
And it’s typically for very specific political reasons important at that moment. For instance, honoring Columbus was about politicians getting the Italian vote . The large number of statues of Confederate heroes, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson put up just after WWI and during the 1950s had to do with celebrating white supremacy, the Confederacy, and slavery. That was the point. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington both owned slaves, (although they both criticized slavery) so statues to them were often put up in response to Brown v. Board. Like the comeback of the CSA battle flag, these statues and monuments were intended to send a pro-slavery, pro-segregation message.
Yes, there is a problem of erasing history in regard to those statues. But it’s on the part of the people who don’t know the history of the statues—why, for instance, is there a statue to a Confederate general in Washington, D.C.? That is, a statue to a traitor? Because the history of that statue is erased (although it’s pretty interesting). And the people who don’t acknowledge that many statues and monuments were put up to defend and advocate racism, such as the ones put up in counter-protest to the Civil Rights movement—they are the ones trying to erase history.
The Civil War was about slavery; a quick read of the “Declarations of Causes” makes that clear. To say it wasn’t about slavery, but about states’ rights is to try to erase history. (There are reasons that some historians balk at saying that slavery alone started the war—it’s more complicated than that, and has to do with the relation of slavery and slave state ideology, political rhetoric, identity, and economy, but no major historian says that the Slave States were seriously committed to the principle of states’ rights, let alone that they went to war for it. The Fugitive Slave Law makes that an impossible argument to make.)
Am I saying they should tear down statues for slavers and racists? Actually, no. I don’t think protesters should tear them down. I think city or state officials should remove them and put them in museums where their history can be told.
When I was young, my mother and one sister and I went on a driving trip. My mother took to calling historical roadside markers “hysterical markers,” since I would cry if she wouldn’t stop at them. My field is history of rhetoric; two years of my graduate program consisted of coursework in the history of rhetorical theory. I had one course in historiography as an undergraduate and two as a graduate student. I love history. A statue to Jefferson Davis isn’t erased by being put in a museum. Jefferson Davis isn’t erased by having his statue defaced or destroyed. History isn’t erased. It’s erased by pretending that isn’t a statue to white supremacy.
[A more scholarly version of this argument will be coming out in “Not Light, but Fire”: Activist Issues and Contemporary Echoes in Nineteenth-Century American Rhetorics, edited by Pat Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli.]