A statue has fallen. Not as it should have done, taken down in response to decades of earnest appeals and petitions, but brought crashing down by demonstrators. And here is the problem. Now that Statue Wars 2.0 have begun, with their own Pearl Harbor moment at Bristol’s docks, the global anti-racism movement that has coalesced under the Black Lives Matter banner risks, in Britain at least, being blown off course.
That danger comes because Edward Colston’s three-day dip in the harbour, and much that has followed, has shifted the debate on to what, for the government and the newspapers that support it, is familiar territory; terrain on which they have fought previous campaigns.
Those who hope and believe that this moment could bring about real social change have to confront a difficult question. If forced to choose between a proper national debate on racism or the statue wars, which is it to be? Of course, there should be no binary choice here. But I fear there might be – and the former has to be prioritised over the latter.
This is not to say that the process by which we reassess and in some cases remove statues of slave traders and other men who did terrible things should stop. But it is to say that allowing the statues issue to get in the way of the anti-racism debate would be a mistake, and would empower objects that we mostly ignore.
At the heart of London is the perfect arena that shows how inert and invisible statues are most of the time. There are seven statues within Trafalgar Square. One of them – obviously – is Lord Nelson, 170 feet up on his column. But who else is standing there? How many of the people who argue that the removal of any statue, anywhere, at any time represents an “erasure of history” have used the statues at the very centre of our capital city to learn some of that history?
Yet in 2000, when the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, proposed that some of the statues in Trafalgar Square might be moved, the legions of the outraged rushed to their defence; presumably having first Googled the statues to work out who the hell they depicted.
Part of the problem is that heroic figurative statuary is a dated form of memorialisation. What tends to energise our imagination in the 21st century are not bronze effigies of the great and the good, but innovative public art. Take the beloved Angel of the North: Antony Gormley’s colossus speaks to the industrial innovation and coal mining heritage of the north-east. But imagine how sterile and potentially unloved it might be if, instead of Gormley’s angel, there stood in its place a heroic depiction of one of the great industrialists of the region – some super-rich Victorian with mutton-chop sideburns and, inevitably, some views and possibly actions that some of us would find objectionable?
Even in Trafalgar Square, crowded with memorials to Lord Whatshisname and General Thingamajig, the most talked-about memorial is actually the fourth plinth, created to house a heroic statue of some future worthy, but now used instead as a temporary exhibition space for modern art capable of saying something about now rather than then, about us rather than our ancestors.
We do need to rethink who is memorialised in our public spaces. Bristol is a better city without Edward Colston. But statues are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The real conversation has to be about racism and how we confront it.
David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster