The Trump administration announced this week that it would be restoring two Confederate monuments in Washington.
One, a statue of Confederate general and likely Ku Klux Klan member Albert Pike was torn down by protesters with ropes and chains during the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. The other, the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, originally commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was removed on the recommendation of an independent commission in 2022.
At a moment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mass round-ups, thoroughgoing assaults on civil rights and welfare, and an ongoing U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, the return of Confederate statues may seem a minor insult atop grave injuries. The struggles to keep our neighbors safe, to protect imperiled people are without question more urgent.
The monuments, however, are more than a symbolic, base-baiting distraction. They are part of the architecture of President Donald Trump’s re-whitening of America. They must fall again.
Monuments to racism license racist violence. White supremacists, for their part, know this well.
When hundreds of far-right extremists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” they saw the removal of Confederate statues as a material challenge to white power. Affirming a renewed Trumpian era of unconstrained white supremacist organizing, the deadly Unite the Right rally had been called under the banner of protecting the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee, which had been ordered for removal.
Trump infamously used the statue protest to launder white supremacist violence. “Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” the president said. “The press has treated them absolutely unfairly,” he said of the neo-Nazi rally attendees.
An Act, Not a Symbol
It is for good reason that Black liberation movements have taken aim at statues of Confederate generals, slavers, and colonialists across the globe for decades. These monuments not only symbolically but also physically inscribe white supremacy into the nations’ infrastructure.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, “Nearly 20 percent of the country’s 2,300 original Confederate memorials were erected on courthouse lawns, the majority of these between the years 1900 and 1920 — the height of Jim Crow.” Counties with the highest number of Confederate memorials also had the highest instances of lynchings.
“The law of white supremacy and the statue were right next to each other, creating an infrastructure,” Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of visual culture at New York University, told me in a 2023 interview. “It makes sense to respond, as protestors found obvious after the murder of George Floyd, by taking down Confederate and other racist statues, not just to remove racist iconography but to disrupt that infrastructure with a view to replacing it.”
As Mirzoeff noted, psychiatrist and decolonization theorist Frantz Fanon called colonial regimes a “world of statues.” As Fanon put it, “The statue of the general who carried out the conquest” is part of “a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world.”
The removal of statues is not a symbol of decolonization, but an act of it.
Battle With D.C.
The conservative claim that monument removal constitutes an assault on the historical record is so tired and weak that it deserves little of our attention. Suffice it to say that Trump’s administration has done more to defund and decimate historical research and education than any in recent memory.
What’s important here is that the work of towering statues in town squares, presented without context, do not offer insight into history but freeze historical norms in place. This is precisely Trump’s revanchist aim.
The same week Trump’s administration announced the monument restorations in D.C., the president raged on social media about his desire to take federal control of the city, invoking racist dogwhistles about youth crime.
The battle with the capital is relevant to the statue issue.
Nearly half of D.C. residents are Black and the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, is Black. Most of the city’s statues are, like most of the nation’s statues, white men; this is the vision of control Trump and his followers want to entrench.
The last time D.C.’s home rule was revoked was by Congress in 1874, in a backlash to a previous congressional decision to grant the local vote to Black men in 1867. Home rule was only restored in 1973.
Obliterating Black History
Confederate statues themselves were acts of historical erasure, mostly constructed decades after the end of the Civil War, either during post-Reconstruction Jim Crow in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in a second wave of Confederate statue construction in a backlash to civil rights gains in the 1950s and 1960s.
Precisely when Black struggle threatened the permanence of white supremacy, supporters of Confederate ideology scrambled to affirm white supremacy to be as solid as marble.
Meanwhile, actual historical records of the work of Black leaders in the Reconstruction era were regularly destroyed.
As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “When recently a student tried to write on education in Florida, he found that the official records of the excellent administration of the colored Superintendent of Education, Gibbs, who virtually established the Florida public school, had been destroyed. Alabama has tried to obliterate all printed records of Reconstruction.”
Today’s Republicans are doing the same: restoring Confederate statues to erase the traces of the vast 2020 rebellions and what they represented, and taking an ax to historical research and education that reflects the truth of America’s foundational and continued white supremacist violence, and the struggles against it.
Du Bois’s description of the post-Reconstruction “propaganda of history” against Black people since emancipation serves as an apt description of today’s work of white backlash: “one of most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion.”
The currently empty plinth in D.C. where Pike’s statue once stood offers a richer lesson in U.S. history than a renewed, restored monument ever could. It tells a history of white domination and resistance to it — but it is precisely that history of resistance and attempted breaks from white supremacy that Trump’s administration seeks to erase.
The protesters who felled Pike graffitied and burned the bronze figure; the restored statue will bear no marks of their action.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
