After temporarily removing Christopher Columbus statues from Chicago Parks, on August 12th, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the “Project to Assess Memorials and Monuments in the City’s Public Art Collection.” Members of this project will form an advisory committee with local artists, academics and public officials to promote “racial healing and historical reckoning” for the Chicago community through final recommendations for existing and new monuments.
This announcement represents a dramatic reversal from earlier in the Summer of 2020, when Lightfoot sent in police to protect a Columbus statue as protestors tried to topple it. The Chicago PD used chemical agents and batons on protestors to disperse them, even grabbing the bicycles protestors were using as shields and throwing them at the group. Now, however, Mayor Lightfoot is calling for healing and reckoning.
If Lori Lightfoot and other mayors truly want to reckon with the history of white supremacy and heal from it, these statues would be removed from their cities permanently. More importantly, why can’t Mayor Lightfoot come to these conclusions on her own? Why does it require committees and recommendations to abolish these monuments toward ostensible “racial healing and historical reckoning” when racial suffering has long been and is still happening?
Often we forget the ways that even our most “progressive”-seeming politicians are mired in white supremamcist logics in the name of “history,” “heritage,” and appealing to bipartisan voters. When cities like Chicago put colonizers and Confederate generals on pedestals, they venerate violence. Lightfoot is responding (or rather, failing to respond) to years of white supremacist logics inscribed in the make-up of every “progressive” U.S. City.
Christopher Columbus, for example, routinely cut off the ears, noses and tongues of both Spaniards and Native people, and endorsed selling 9 and 10-year-old girls into sexual slavery. Robert E. Lee punished enslaved people when they attempted to escape by first lacerating the flesh on their backs with whips, then washing those wounds with brine.
Pedestals are not selective in what they memorialize; it is these heinous acts as much as any others which are uplifted on granite and ensconced in bronze when these statues to historical “heroes” are erected.
After all, the violence of Columbus and slave masters was recognized in their time. Columbus’s brutality was condemned by members of his crew, and nineteenth century abolitionists decried the violence of slavery. Lee himself referred to his treatment of enslaved people as “painful discipline.” If even these white people could name these criticisms, certainly the cruelty of conquest and enslavement was not “normal for the time” when viewed from the perspective of the Indigenous and African people subjected to it.
Lightfoot must know that violence and racism are inextricable parts of what is being celebrated and enshrined by these monuments. At the same time, a statue’s meaning is not static, and representations of men like Stonewall Jackson and Juan de Onate have ballooned, shifted, and transformed beyond their initial resonance. Columbus statues exist across the United States, even though he never set foot in North America.
Monuments to the Confederacy—a polity that lasted only five year—can be found as distant from its 11 member states as Wisconsin, Idaho, and even Ontario. These memorials commemorate much more than their historical counterparts accomplished. They evoke a false nostalgia for an imaginary idea—held by both white racist and purported liberals—of a past when violence in service of white domination was supposedly acceptable.
If reckoning with historical facts suggests that these statues should be taken down, racial healing requires it. The violence that these statues generate against Black and brown people is not abstract. These monuments are part of an urban infrastructure that is violent and deleterious to Black and brown people.
Public health scholars have found a striking but consistent narrative of systemic suffering that explains the ways racism and discrimination affect health. Public health scholar Arline Geronimus coined the “weathering hypothesis” which suggests that Black people experience early health deterioration or “wear and tear” (allostatic load) on their bodies.
The cumulative impact of marginalization, economic adversity, and social disregard by American society can cause disproportionate physiological deterioration. This means that the perpetual exposure of Black and brown people to educational and residential segregation, economic injustice, state-sanctioned violence, voter suppression, stereotypes in popular culture, racial slurs, and now the monuments to oppressors being protected by police are psychosocial stressors that directly influence adverse health outcomes.
The veneration and protection for these monuments are a public show of support for white supremacy and, simply, for a lack of care for Black and brown people.
In the midst of a global pandemic that is disproportionately affecting communities of color (ala COVID-1619), activists place their bodies in harm’s way to fight for racial equality in numerous ways. We are watching as their health and interests come under attack by police officers protecting statues idolizing oppression. These monuments ought not be protected in the name of white supremacy while their existence does “wear and tear” on some bodies, especially when protection takes the form of breaking and bruising other bodies. The health consequences of these monuments are both slow and fast—due to the pernicious effects of racism that founded and maintains every institution (and statue) in this country.
Neither reckoning nor healing will come from a drawn-out discussion behind closed doors.
A week out from the U.S Presidential Election, Lightfoot must know this. Racial healing and reckoning starts with not only seeing these monuments as sites where both visible and invisible harms are actively perpetuated; but also with having honest conversations with the Black and Brown politicians that represent us.
If harm reduction and accountability are the goal, the statues should not only be removed immediately, but Lightfoot must also contend with why she desires to uphold white supremacist logics during one of the biggest Black Uprisings of the 21st century. This ought not be up for debate, because the damage on Black and brown bodies is still occuring, regardless of Lightfoot’s new committee.
Suggested Readings:
Chris Kabal, “Health, Equity and the Narrative of Place,” National Academy of Medicine
Chelsey R. Carter, “Racist Monuments Are Killing Us,” AnthroSource
Allison Mickel, “Your View by Lehigh professor: Columbus is still killing people. Take him down,” The Morning Call
NBC News, “The Toll Of Racism On Black Americans’ Physical And Mental Health | NBC Nightly News,” YouTube
Chelsey Carter is an MPH/PhD candidate in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation project examines how Black people with neuromuscular diseases (like ALS) navigate healthcare spaces and experience care by healthcare institutions in post-Ferguson St. Louis,
Missouri. Chelsey’s scholarship has been recognized and funded by the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation (NSF), the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society and the The Spencer T. & Ann W. Olin Fellowship for Women in Graduate Study. Before graduate school, she received her bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with a minor in Spanish, receiving high honors from Emory University, where she was also a recipient of the Majorie Shostak Award for Excellence in Ethnographic Writing and the Heart of Emory award. She can be found tweeting random anthropological musings on Twitter at @AudreTaughtMe2 or posting pictures of her dog Nala on Instagram at @AudreTaughtMeToo.
Allison Mickel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and Assistant Director of Global Studies at Lehigh University. She is an archaeologist and cultural heritage scholar who received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University in 2016 and her BA from The College of William and Mary in 2011. Her research focuses on how local communities have impacted and been affected by the long history of archaeological work in the Middle East. She has excavated in Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, and the United States, and is now undertaking an ethnographic project centering on two new private companies in Jordan advocating for the recognition of local expertise and fair labor conditions on archaeological excavations. In addition to her scholarly work advocating for more inclusive archaeological practice, Allison Mickel is a leader in community organizations pushing for equity and inclusion in the Lehigh Valley, including POWER Lehigh Valley and Lehigh Valley Stands Up. Follow her on Twitter at @llisonmickel for a potpourri of content on Allentown politics, 90 Day Fiance, and public anthropology.
