For future readers of this blog [if any] the death of G Floyd during arrest by police in the USA sparked off a wave of protest about racism including some demos in Britain. As part of the protest, the long campaign, beginning in the USA, to pull down statues of people implicated in the slave trade or colonialism reached a point of action when protesters in Bristol pulled down a statue of a certain E Colston, a local slave trader. He was also a philanthropist in the sense that he gave lots of money to Bristol charities - hence his commemoration in a statue and in the naming of various buildings (not for much longer).
Moore's piece goes like this:
Watching the statue of Edward Colston pulled down was beautiful.[just the sort of symbolic politics the new petite bourgeois favour]...Before my daughter went off to the protest in London, we had a conversation about direct action. The visceral thrill [!] of pulling down fences at Greenham Common in the 80s remains with me, as does being caught in various riots – kettled before they used that word.It's what Parkin said all those years ago -- the thrill of being in a relatively anomic crowd, feeling licensed to act collectively, a bit seditiously and 'spiritually' as lofty motives are amplified. The working classes know all about this at football matches, of course. Normally it's festivals for nice people, but none of them are running.
Why does the statue of a slaver being rolled into the water mean so much? Well, all those saying it should have been done another way can read the recent local history. Councillors in Bristol have been debating whether to remove the statue for years. There was a weird compromise proposed that another plaque be put up noting Colston’s enslavement of an estimated 84,000 Africans, of whom 19,000 died, and that, as a Tory MP, Colston defended Bristol’s right to trade slaves. This plaque met with objections, less “offensive” plaques were suggested and, meanwhile, there he stood, offensively. It was direct action that brought him down....In this country, the reckoning with the days of empire happens mostly on a cultural level.
What strange sort of a superstitious hauntology sees statues and people as the same -- 'he stood, offensively'? Just on the actual recent issue, perhaps nothing happened to the statue before because only a minority supported its removal? This has been dealt with by arguing that no-one is pressing to restore these controversial statues, here or in the USA, so it must represent the will of the people, somehow. Churchill was only spray-painted so far.
It will be interesting to see what happens if people pull down statues of Nelson or Drake.
Removing Nelson's statue has been proposed by the egregious A Hirsch in the Graun once or twice (eg in 2017) (she also mentioned Colston, and Rhodes, of course):
[He was] a white supremacist. While many around him were denouncing slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it....used his seat in the House of Lords and his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he counted among his closest friends.... Nelson’s column... does include the figure of a black sailor, cast in bronze in the bas-relief. He was probably one of the thousands of slaves promised freedom if they fought for the British military, only to be later left destitute, begging and homeless, on London’s streets when the war was over.
Drake went on a slaving voyage with Hawkins early in his career (some BAME people in Plymouth apparently do not feel safe now when seeing his statue on the Hoe).
The whole issue is a classic case of opening possibilities of expansion in an infinite signalling of virtue. People will compete to find copy. Gladstone has been mentioned as belonging to a slaving family. So has D Cameron. Jefferson and Washington too, of course -- Dickens found it incredible that Jefferson would sell off even his own children borne by slave women.British workers in textile factories in the Industrial Revolution were complicit in slavery since they used American cotton (except when they boycotted it). Anyone eating sugar or visiting the Tate galleries is guilty. So is anyone drinking Brazilian coffee or enjoying samba or maracatu. And there were the Greeks of course...
Moore contents herself with just a little extension for now:
No mention of wage slaves yet, but otherwise, this one will run and run...
We play out our identity politics in sad postcolonial denial. Brexit, of course, is the ultimate form of identity politics for those who decry such things.
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