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On June 21st 2020, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) announced plans to remove the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt. While the summer of 2020 was marked by numerous confrontations of slave owners and violence memorialized in our cultural landscape, the AMNH was quick to articulate that the removal was not due to Roosevelt’s character but due to the “hierarchical composition”.1 Indeed, Roosevelt not only is elevated above the two men on either side of his horse, but the composition draws the viewer’s eye up to his face, following his gaze over Central Park in New York City. The two men, one Native American and one African, are representative of the two continents Roosevelt bridged during his presidency but are fundamentally positioned in a way that prioritizes the White, American perspective. The implications of such a design are not merely aesthetic, but they speak to legitimizing White, American authority.
Several hundred miles south of Roosevelt’s contested statue, The Three Soldiers statue emerges out of the capitol’s brush on the National Mall to commemorate the Vietnam War. The bronze figures stand pensively – larger than life – dressed in fatigues and draped with weapons. The statue made history for being the first to depict an African American on the National Mall yet the figure stands behind the White figure, who dominates the composition. For a conflict that saw disproportionate numbers of Black Americans drafted and injured in the war, and restricted from government support after returning home, the centering of White visuals is a jarring physical manifestation of White supremacy in our commemorative landscape. Reading deeper into the history of the monument, its erection was act of opposition to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial which many conservative politicians viewed as inappropriate. In many ways, Lin’s memorial design was subverting and challenging the traditional personified depictions of conflict that had historically centered White heroism – something that The Three Soldiers solidifies in bronze.
While these two monuments are distanced physically and temporally, while also commemorating starkly different events, they are connected in the shared centering of White experience. This visual centering, seen in the Roosevelt Monument and the personified Vietnam War on the National Mall, reinforces limited personhood on our commemorative landscape. Kirk Savage has written extensively on how the prioritizing of White memory and visuals in the wake of the Civil War reinvented notions of Whiteness and belonging, that rested primarily on the exclusion of Black commemoration from the public sphere or the characterization of the Black body in select memorials.2 This legacy has manifested in an imbalanced and revealing visual landscape across the United States that is not passive but instrumental in legitimizing inequity and power. Many people argue over what to do with such statues between putting them in museums or destroying them bit by bit but all arguments and the visibility of the conversation speaks to these seemingly passive objects and the embodied experiences they provoke.
The increasing attention and national discourse surrounding these monuments and memorials – from the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt to the Robert E Lee Statue in Richmond, VA – is revealing a gradual shift in recognition of the past. Unquestioned, usually White, statues are active actors in propagating and defending a social order that protest, art, and interrogation radically challenges. A challenge for us committed to undoing structural harm and erecting progressive solutions is to confront and question the monuments in our own cities.
Monument Lab has created a worksheet to doing just that. Whether through this guide or through your own curiosity, challenge yourself to locate seemingly passive manifestations of power and memory throughout your landscape. The two monuments discussed briefly here are not alone in upholding violent systems and deserve our honest reckoning if we are to create something better in their place.
![Grabbed this image from @johnkharrison of #BlackLivesMatter and #georgefloyd superimposed over the Robert E Lee statue that should get removed real soon now. I spent a fair amount of time in Virginia in my 20s and the Confederacy crap always felt backward](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49986737846_1a4e44cb00.jpg)
1 “Addressing the Statue”, American Museum of Natural History, June 2020. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/addressing-the-theodore-roosevelt-statue
2 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (Princeton University Press, 1997): 186.