I remember conversations with my oldest sons when they were teenagers. There were two areas of discussion that bubbled up again and again:
*I considered some of the music they listened to denigrating to women; they disagreed.
*I didn't think any time spent playing first-person shooter games was time well spent; they disagreed.
Typically, their defense of either/both of these activities would be, "It's just a game," or "It's just a song." Meaning: It's not a big deal, Mom, and please stop trying to make something out of nothing.
My argument would typically go like this: Everything we do, eat, listen to, spend time thinking about, watch, read, everyone we spend time with, etc. leaves a residue, a trace, an imprint of some kind. Which is why it's important to consider what you do with your time, and who you spend it with. And while I don't think every second of every day needs to be productive and contribute to enlightenment or the gross national product, I do consider spending five consecutive hours playing a screen-based game where the goal is to murder other people—even pretend screen people—a net negative.
All of this is to say: I think it's important to pay attention—to the language we use; to the things we do; to the ways we spend or, worse, waste or kill time. To the details and matters and artifacts of our lives, and the things that surround us in the public sphere, which both form and inform us.
So I was heartened today when I heard a news item on the radio about a young high school athlete, originally from Ghana, who presented a thoughtful letter she had written at a recent school board meeting. Trude Lamb, the fastest girl on her school's varsity cross country team, no longer wants to race in a jersey that says "Tyler Lee," because of its reference to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. (Trude Lamb's school is Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler, Texas.) Lamb wrote that she no longer wants to compete for a school that was named "after a person who was against my people…." She asked the school board to begin the process of changing the school name to instead commemorate "someone we can all be proud of."
Later that morning, on a different radio show, I heard Nick Estes, a citizen of the Lakota nation and an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, talking about the current toppling of statues and monuments in a larger context of what constitutes justice for black and indigenous people. Lots of statues and monuments have been torn down or vandalized since the murder of George Floyd, including many monuments commemorating Confederate "heroes," as well as statues around the country that depict slaveholders; greedy conquistadores and other imperialists; or the founding fathers and their successors who promoted genocide, land theft, or subjugation of black and indigenous peoples.
Yes! Yes! Let's pay attention to these kinds of details, to the people and historical moments we commemorate and glorify because they're important. They leave a cultural imprint, a residue.
I bet we all have a personal list of fucked-up monuments and what have you that we would really like to see gone gone gone. Here's the top three on my list:
*Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego. This beautiful, waterfront park commemorates the landing of that sonofabitch Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo at San Diego Bay on September 28, 1542. Years ago, when I explored the Visitor Center at the monument for the first time with my youngest sons, I remember being nauseated and shocked to read those wall-mounted squares of information that you find in museums. I learned that Cabrillo, the first European to set foot on the west coast of what would become the United States, had noted that the indigenous people he met in pre-California wore jewelry made from gold. So he enslaved them; forced them to refabricate all their gold artifacts into doubloons; and compelled them to mine more and more gold so he could return to Spain loaded. The dispassionate way this heartbreaking information was delivered, coupled with the fact that the U.S. had a monument named after this criminal and that the park coordinated an annual re-enactment of Cabrillo's landing combined to settle this "monument" at the top of my you-got-to-go list.
*Can we do away with "celebrating" Columbus Day already? Forty thousand years ago, as a newly arrived college freshman, I wandered the stacks of Wesleyan University's Olin Library and came across a handsome volume, which was Christopher Columbus's Journal Of His First Voyage To America. Columbus's thuggery suggests he took a page straight out of Cabrillo's book. Or perhaps we can simply conclude that the European colonizers were entitled, violent bastards and we should stop commemorating all of them. They do not embody character traits that any decent human being would want to see echoed or emulated.
Anyway, from the very beginning of CC's Journal—and I guess we should be grateful for his brutal honesty—he outlines how his ships landed on a Caribbean island, where he and his men were greeted by the gentle Arawak people. I'm paraphrasing here, but Columbus wrote that they brought gifts of food and drink, and that the people were so gentle and without guile, that he understood immediately that it would be easy to enslave and kill them. Ever since I read that, I have loathed the idea of Columbus Day. Indigenous Peoples Day is a thoroughly appropriate substitute.
*Fucking Mount Rushmore. First, the site is sacred to more than 50 indigenous nations. In the late 1800s, the U.S. asserted claim over the area, a claim that continues to be disputed by native peoples. They have their own name for that site, and it is NOT Mount Rushmore, which was named after Charles Rushmore, a wealthy American businessman and attorney who traveled to the region to check titles on properties.
Second, the sculptor who carved the four faces into the mountain, Gutzon Borglum, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Third, the four stooges depicted on Mount Rushmore all have ties to slavery or Native American genocide or land theft. (Washington and Jefferson's slaveholding is well documented; Lincoln ordered the death of 38 Sioux patriots—who fought against white settlers and soldiers over loss of land and loss of access to food—in the United States' largest mass hanging ever; and Teddy Roosevelt appropriated and "nationalized" millions of acres of indigenous lands to create his legacy of beautiful national parks.
I don’t want to be unfair here. People are complicated, and Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt all did good things as well. Washington was courageous in battle and bravely took up arms against the colonizer England. We would do well to take note of many of Jefferson’s design innovations at Monticello; he developed ingenious ways of cooling interior spaces without air conditioning. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and Roosevelt, though misguided in his zeal, loved the beautiful lands of the United States.
All the same, I'm grateful to Trude Lamb, Nick Estes, and all the people thinking about which of our statues, monuments, names, and slogans glorify heinousness and immorality. They're all saying: This stuff matters. Let's pay attention to what we're doing and why.
Let's take our cue from Trude Lamb and begin commemorating people we can all be proud of, people whose accomplishments don’t come with an addendum that begins with But… and Too Bad They Also…. Those people exist, and it might well be hygienic for us, individually and as a nation, to spend time thinking about these people, their ideas, their actions. Off the top of my head, I nominate Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Day, and Rachel Carson. Going forward, I'm going to spend time thinking about this—all the extraordinary people who have acted morally, generously, kindly, thoughtfully, with the well-being of others, human and non-human, in mind and in heart.