One of my best friends, Julian, and I walked down Atlantic Avenue in the foggy summer heat, blinded by a red sunset and slowed by tourists who had finally begun to trickle onto the island. We stopped for a moment to notice something new:
“Dude, did you know we had a monument to Christopher Columbus in Wildwood? What’s that about?”
A conversation about statues and monuments followed, but much of the talk revolved around the fact that we didn’t actually learn much about the atrocities that happened under Columbus’s tenure in America. He was a slave trader, a man known to torture and mutilate dissenters, and a man who was seen as deeply immoral by the decrees and standards set by then-Queen Isabella I. He was a man of courage and immense skill who opened up half the world to European expansion; but in school, we only learned of the “positives” and not of the grave human cost that came with his discovery of the new world.
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Woodrow Wilson is another dead man making rounds in the press.
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You’ve seen the headlines. Confederate statues are toppled, schools are being renamed, dedications are being rescinded. In many of these instances, I have no problem with the decisions being made. The Confederacy stands for nothing less than the division of our country and for the supremacy of the white man over all else. The Confederate constitution was largely similar to ours, save language that says slavery can never be abolished and that the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress.”
Leaders and fighters for such a cause have no place in our country, save for museums and history books. To enshrine something in a public center is to say: this is something we celebrate, this is someone we admire. There is nothing to admire about the Confederacy, and it is better to topple these statues than to even appear as if we support them.
Woodrow Wilson is another dead man making rounds in the press; Princeton University is removing Wilson’s name from a prominent school within Princeton. Wilson was governor of New Jersey, president of the United States, and president of Princeton, but he was also an ideological white supremacist, extreme even for the time. Which version of Wilson are we choosing to honor when his name stands above a diverse student body as someone to look up to? I, until this new controversy, had no idea that Wilson was a thorough white supremacist. I was taught most of the good, and little of the bad.
Many of the reactions that young people have to these statues and venerations are tied to the reality that we don’t learn a full perspective of these men and women in school. We never learned that the pilgrims, shortly after the famous Thanksgiving story, “seized coastal Wampanoags to be sold into overseas slavery or to be trained as interpreters and guides.” We learn of Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, but not his racism. We learn of Columbus’s courage, but not his cruelty. When we see statues and commemorations held to these people, it’s easy to then think that the public at large also does not realize the fullness of these people’s evil; it’s easy to think that we are romanticizing them in ways that is neither truthful, honest, nor right.
And in a sense, we aren’t. We aren’t giving our children a fair understanding of these people. Before we have a conversation about preserving the statues of troublesome, complicated leaders, we need to have a conversation about how we remember, and especially how we teach, the past. As my Gordon College professor Dr. Nicholas Rowe said in a lecture on these things, “within the American context we have not dealt with our trauma. We simply haven’t.”
