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on behalf of all of us at the locally based inly owned bookstore in miami florida and in partnership with miami book fair it's my pleasure to welcome you to a virtual evening to discuss "smashing statu," published by our friends at w.w. norton and company. erin is the author and her writing has been in "the new york times." to moderate the conversation, we are joined by ariel vavar who is a journalist who has appeared in "the new york times" and many other publications. he is the a harvard professor. screen and please order your

copy of smashing statues from books and books below by pressing the green button. we appreciate each and every order and the generous donations from viewers and everywhere. and now without further ado. i'd like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage. hi, wow. so, thank thank you all so much for coming dr. thompson is written a really timely and compelling book and you should all buy it first. she's terrific writer. so the book is just a pleasure to read but more importantly i think her book lets us peer behind the bronze and guilt surfaces of the statues that adorn our public squares and let's just see the people who made and paid for them kind of gets us into the heads of the politicians ideologues and yes grifters who put them on a pedestal and let us hear the voice is the communities on the losing and these public

displays. i forget which mythical figure turned human beings to stone but dr. thompson does the opposite here she turns stone back to flesh and she doesn't in a way that gets past the often simplistic takes that so many of us heard in the aftermath of george floyd's murder. so let's just kind of get into it here. you know, you're you're a scholar of and much of your past research has focused on antiquities. looting private art collecting and fakes. how did you come to write this book? well, it's essentially because my girlfriend makes really good negronies, so i had a couple of those very tasty cocktails and and open twitter. so don't tweet after drinking unless apparently you want to feel and i saw a video of the toppling of a statue of columbus in front of the sea palsy have a saint paul state capital. and i jokingly wrote a tweet

about that tweet went viral. and i've got you know denounced by tucker carlson for leading armies of nihilist at topple statues blah blah. so what was consult with the pre was without getting in trouble and it was something like as someone who studies the deliberate destruction of cultural property, which is one of my specialties. i just have to say next time. they should use chain instead of rope because it'll go faster and i actually ended up interviewing the organizer of that particular protest my forte profile him in a chapter and he ensure me it came down mighty quickly. he didn't need any advice for me and i got to delve into the complex reasons why he thought it important to do this protest this act of civil disobedience as the prosecutors in minnesota ultimately termed it when

sentencing him to community service. and but what was interesting to me was? not so much the treatment all the arguing that went on in the comments of the suit. there are thousands of them and people would say some things like well what's wrong with columbus anyways, or it's it's somehow uncivilized or unhuman to tear down statues at all. like this is something that people don't do and i thought have have none of you ever, you know, ripped a photograph of your ex from the fridge before this is very human tendency and and as someone at my phds in ancient art history, so practically everything that i study is a classicist was at some point toppled and thrown into a pit by people who wanted to forget about it. so this i wanted to explain how changing statues is something that happens really any time regimes shift any time communities come to a new understanding of who is and who

should be in power and america has just been exceptional and having a long period of stability of statues so to speak because we have had a very dominant model of who should run the country for a long time. and now that we are starting to really have shifting questions about who should be in power. it's not really no wonder that. these debates are crystallizing around monuments. and this really is perfect segue to my next question. i mean, let's let's quantify here about 170 public monuments came down in the united states in the year after george floyd's death about a hundred of those were monuments the confederacy and about 70 were monuments to other historical figures like christopher. columbus has america ever bore ever before senior period when so many monuments came down so quickly. no, not at all. i'm there were periods of questioning monuments and after dylan ruth's massacre and charleston in 2015 and after the

deadly unite the right rally in charlottesville in 2017, and those also were periods in which debate focused a lot around naming and flags. so you saw a lot of removal of images of confederate battle flags from state flags. but the statue still stayed in place or were even more protected so there was a sort of backlash to protests of the enactment of laws to protect monuments from being moved. so this is something that in quantity is unprecedented, but again, not in human history just in america and also if you want to talk about statute removal, it's it's happened all along. so one of the things that i am happy to have written about in the book is a number of instances in which statues were removed because they offended people with the power to remove

them from the halls of congress etc. but also i start with the book with the fact that the very first metal statue put up in america the very first equestrian statue lasted only seven years before we tore it down. it was a statue of george the third put up in 1770 in downtown new york city and then as soon as the declaration of independence was red newly proud rebelling americans tore the statue down it was made out of lead, so they melted then as soon as the declaration of independence was read, newly proud rebelling americans tore the statue down. it was made out of lead. they melted it into bullets and used those to fight the king's army. >> i love that story. it's so well toward in the book. it's worth of price of admission alone. what a wild story. melted down to make the bullets that would be fired on the british, correct? >> yeah. they talked about how there

would be melted majesty fired at the king's troops. >> if this is unprecedented in american history, where do we have to look in world history to find something roughly equivalent in terms of the number and speed of the statues coming down? i'm probably sending you back to grad school here. where do we find this, or do we not? is there something singular about this? >> i think that it is singular. because there are certainly lots of instances of massive statue removals, like in former soviet states with the independence from the soviet union, iraq with the fall of saddam. any type of big transition of power, you can look at the very satisfying videos of blown up swastikas and hitler at the close of world war ii.

i think what we are seeing in america today is there hasn't been a regime change. we haven't yet arrived at the idea of who do we not want anymore and who do we want? we are seeing more arguments and discussions about statues rather than, that one is off, this one is on. as angry about the rights and living conditions of minorities and w so we are many more arguments om and discussions about statues rather than, all right, that ons is definitely off. this one is off. r r >> what was different this time? surely there were periods in american history database let's take the late 1960s for instance when large numbers of protesters were angry about the rights and living conditions of mine ortiz. >> there is a book by the authos karen cox who complements my book in looking at the history

of protests against confidante o monuments up until about 2017. she finds some people discussing in the late 19th century, any time we would walk through this city square we would have something sharp to scrape away at the statue of john c. calhoun to show we didn't accept the statue.. student protest nszs '60s and '70s that would paint messages on kvtd statues, et cetera. but i think in that period there is more of a focus on adding net statues, like let's increase tha representation in monuments. and there was a hopefulness of -- of that by adding countermonuments you could change the way that the public space operated.so but i think in the last few

years we've been realizing somet of the monuments to continue to have -- to encourage harmful behavior to solidify people in their hatred and adding new ro monuments is not enough. p we have to address the ones that we have. >> i see. so i think, you know people f watching the takedowns on tv probably remember the most dynamic eye grabbing images, the images of mobs yanking them done with ropes and throwing them in rivers. you point out 80% of the st monuments were moved by public officials.ep did that figure surprise you?uld what to what extent do you think it's significant that public officials. >> it's hugely significant if

you look at the headlines you think all the monuments were destroyed by -- by, you know, irrationally acting mobs and a o lot of people including in the applies well we should -- maybew we should move monuments but it should be exact discussions not in the hand of a few angry ry people. i as i pointed out in the book the majority of 80% of the monuments removed have been done so officially. many -- for different reasons, some because the officials agreed that the monument should not be there. others to put it into storage to protect it. more importantly, to me it was learning how often monuments --w sorry.

my camera has turned off.ce one second while i switch. >> we can still hear you.l so. >> okay. >> that's good. >> how often monuments that were torn down in 2020 had been the e object of peaceful petitions, other sort of protests. for sometimes not just years by decades people's entire lives. and there was just simply no wal of those complaints being heard. it's not surprising to me. but if people lose all hope that there to be a peaceful way of resolving their activities that they will turn to acts ever civil disobedience. >> the book tells so many crew cader putting up confederate stats some charltons, racists. was there a story in the research that really surprised or that change your understanding of what you thought you knew about the f history of these monuments? >> oh, man, how long do you have? there are so many of them.

>> one that really -- what sort of -- sort of pops to mind when i -- foremost. i >> well, we were previously about stone mountain. so i had actually never heard of stone mountain before i started writing the book. but it's the world's largest confederate monument, carved starting in 1914 by a skupter po gus tom berg lan known for carve karvel mount rushmore but he waf hired to carve a head of lee. but he proposed multiple figures sweeping across the mountain did so because he got paid per figure, a proportion of the total price. he wanted to glorify the confederacy in order to make some more money. and he ended up really promising much more than he could provide. so he collected all of this s

money without really karvel l almost anything. he only finished the head of lee after spending the equivalent of several million of today's dollars. they fired him and hired another skupter and blasted the head of lee. so it's lr lost one down, one to go. o >> this was a sculpture doing figures of lincoln -- there was no ideology willing back bone. he was looking to sort of cash in.

sculpting e union leaders, lincoln in particular. he was gunning for the -- beingo chosen to do the lincoln monument memorial, so hard thisr he named his son lincoln. he didn't get chosen. he was down on his luck when stone mountain came up. >> one of the most surprising and sort of counterintuitive pieces, passages for me was your argument that many confederate monuments were designed to keep white southerners in poverty by discouraging them from joining labor unions, end quote and t finding common cause with black people. can you talk a bit about the evidence that led to you that . conclusion? it's not something that people would pick up on right away thinking about the monuments. how did they actually -- the

silent sentinel statues maybe you can describe those a bit, what did they communicate to white southerners about their place in that -- in the political order? >> yeah, well, i sort of see this as me asking a series of stupid questions and tracking them down. of the questions is do these monuments honor people's artists? because that's a defense of vi confederate monuments encapsulated in heritage not hate. so they're about the heritage of the people who fought in the civil war, not about hating anybody. so i started to look at what people said about these monuments as they dedicated them. there are a lot of historical newspapers that are digitized.d. and they love to report at length all the speeches given at the dedication of the monuments. and i saw that what was being praised about confederate soldiers at the dedication of monuments -- because the vast t majority of confederate

monuments are not a named general but the unsnoen soldier, and the duty to self-sacrifice, obedience who is paying for the monuments who wants to make this space it turns out many confederate monuments especially from the turn of the century up until around world war i were paid for by factory owners, mine owners, chile collar entrepreneurs who depended on the low paid workforce. and they praised the working class men for accepting a life of social saturate fiks. in the hopes that they had be better employees. not just in general i also found often you see a confederate u monument with the dedication speech go up in reaction to unionization efforts.it

the case is most clear in what i write about in bhirmg confederate monument which went up in two parts, nine years apart, both in reaction to a strike and both times the strike was organized interracially. it was really appealing white working class families to say don't cross the color lines in hopes of improves your lives. you should pay attention to us, your betters and keep things as they were. one of the speeches even talks about descendants of confederate veterans you are working as they did to combat ac the hideous specter of racial ec equity. >> keep people divided along racial lines they won't t recognize they share economic interests.

is that sort of the message? and i'll ask the next question realize going might sound a little fake.? but i think dechgss are important. so i'll ask. why do civilizations put up statue. it ridiculously stupid. i want to dw get that out therek why do we put up statues? b what is the work they are supposed to do. o >> statues are community selfies.et showing ourselves aso at our best angles, really about the future not the past.h, they are to show us what we think should be honored, give us ideals, give us aspirations to make life better for ourselves in to it future.ha they are to show us who we

should emulate. so i think when we have a et certain type of person honored in monuments to the exclusion of others, then that makes it hard for everybody, especially in such a diverse country as america to see themselves on monuments. that's really to me a waste. shouldn't which be encourage everybody to live better lives rather than saying, you, over en there you cabinet really do much just be happy earning low wages and pay attention to better r people. >> politicians, including a certain former president have said that to remove a statue so to erase history. do you agree? when trump was going on about how he needed to create a national statutory garden of --. there is a national executive ap order to this.

he said they can't be in modern style. they have to be traditional representational style. but one of the people listed in the order is columbus, why i found deeply ironic because we don't have have any contemporaneous portraits of columbus it would have to be a speculative representation. that never happened.d.monund i thought the idea to take down a monument is to erase harts, what i say to that is monuments are not how history is it taught. monuments themselves erase history by positing certain narratives and ignoring others. something i talk about in the book is how northern civil war memorials hardly ever even on acknowledge the existence of african americans, despite an incredibly high percentage of ce black men fighting in the union army. instead, if they acknowledged s their existence they're depicted in sort of rags, kneeling, receiving emancipation as a gift rather than as happened in reality fighting -- or risking

their lives to free others. so to take down this -- what gn history is that erasing? it's erasing a very particular d picture of history design to enforce social norms. i'm not saddened. i think that history doesn't get erased until you erase all forms of communication of knowledge.' and if you are walking around in your community and you think, oh, i'm not sure who is is that guy on that horse over there, you'll know that not all statues do a great job of communicating any information whatsoever. >> i think you interviewed when you interviewed the indigenous n activist make forsha he said that tearing down history, no we're exposing. he said the tearing down statues was a historical reckons which i was i thought was effective way to put it. >> just to say that he is a very interesting perspective'

he had tried to get the statue removed peacefully for decades but didn't want it torn down in the story.y. he wanted it to be on display ih what he terms a hall of shame with information about why it was there, the role columbus ol played, the role of add las vegas of columbus in america, et cetera.de so he wasn't given a choice besides this -- sort of desperate act versus a conversation. >> this leads perfectly to my next question.um others support of the of the thn removal of monuments that no longer community values but say they should be preserved in mums but rather than destroyed. in the museum the a argument goes the retrograde monuments tr can be interpreted by panels or art that diffuses or counterprograms the statute.ed

the statue -- even in these approaches. i wonder if you could tell us about what happened at the o houston museum of african american culture after it took k in the spirit of the confederacy statue and how that affected your view about the extent to which oppressive works of es statuary can be disarmed. to >> i think taking down a statue doesn't erase history but o lessens honor. if you are concerned about history you can think what -- how else can we display the statue to learn not just about the history it purports to represent but the history of its use a monument, et cetera.rs a lot of people seem to flay like a duh answer. put it in a museum. but i don't think this is as e sample an answer as one might i think rich first of all storage is expensive display is it press expensive. preservation is expensive who is paying for all of this? a lot of museum professionals i talk to are kind of like, you know, we're not america's attic

for racist stuff that we want to hide or america's strategist racism reserve there's not the role of museums.ec so really change people's minds or open people's mind to different perspectives to not pp have a museum gallery become a site of appreciation of the b martyr dom of a statue, et cetera, you have to do a lot of work and so i decided in the book to profile the houston museum of african american culture which is the only african-american institution to have rehomed a removed monument so far.t what they did is take a lot of steps to ensure that this s monument didn't exert the power it was designed to have. because it's a powerful monument, a beautiful gilded statue of an attractive person, winged, nude representing the ideals of confederacy.

his body draws you in. so they put in a closed courtyard, surrounded him with sculptures to know he is being watched. they have made other artist works that call it into question. they have a symposium.tr they have a goal, not just we an don't want to destroy history. no, they want to use the statuef to get to a better promotion. use the emotional pull and he boomerang and around. >> and did you a great job of

explaining how complicated this was. p i think was it the museum the e statue was to damn beautiful. like it still exerts a sort -- its influence even if surrounded by in deprogramming. but in the end i think he makesr the decision to -- to keep it, r right, he says i like to keep the evidence. b another great line. i like to keep the evidence so people can't live in denial. but you make the point that this -- a lot of work has to go into getting it just right. it matters whether the museum is sort of run and managed by people coloring in this case versus white folks have it out there as token display about their ownership and management matters as well as the -- the w immediate visual context. is that? >> yes, and i just want to say with, you very kindly said t earlier that he was i was a good

writer. but i feel like i was getting to put together all the dynamite ideas and quotes given to me by john guess the buy mike fors ake shchlt, randall wints, the mayor of birmingham >> i want to jump in with an a audience question. practical question, how long did it take to write this book? >> i sold the book proposal in august 2020 and submitted the manuscript in march of 2021 nd which is ridiculous. >> that's very fast. >> but. >> you have to sort of like drop everything and just focus on this or able to multitask and write a full. >> no, i was doing anything else.nd but i -- it was -- every single moment of my time that was not spent with my kids. >> gotcha. ti >> to the extent that all of my

social interactions, it was during pandemic so i had my friends and family in the a bubble. they heard a lot of -- it was af real period i was writing the stone mountain chapter which has a lot of klan involvement okay today's klan facts and my family was like, why? >> it took over your life for those months in many ways not surprising. >> still very urgent to write. i was in the middle of the countryside in vermont for the pandemic. i had family members who are, le you know immunocompromised. i couldn't go to protest. i was outside of my city. and the -- it felt like something i could do. >> let me ask you this. i think whether it's sort of u liberal activists taking ab down confederate statues or r conservatives banning library books in curricula about america's long and ugly historye of racism, the country seems to be in all-out war about the stories about its past.ne

and there are critics saying the fights are more about performance than substance. there is a “washington post” al article you site in one of the footnotes for instance, bearing the headline rovers s controversial memorials are g surprisingly easy to pull down fixing the world that built them is harder. as one black activist put it about the removal of theq confederate monument quote we are making the courthouse look more equitable without reckonint with the institutional racism in that takes place inside. so in your research for the book did you fine the removal of the statues serve as a quick cathartic release substituting for real change?i or did you find the takedowns launched sustained forms of o collective action. >> first to challenge something you said at the beginning, i don't think that debates with about monuments of the past are a particular feature of the present.ck i think they are just able to happen more in public.

because one side is not winning so heavily.. so, you know, i quota letter re that fredrick douglas wrote to a washington newspaper after the t day after the dedication of the freedman memorial complaining g about the representation of a black man as more like an animal than a man. so people have been spotting the issues in problematic statues since they went up.. it's just the voices have been effectively squashed through very concerted campaigns to shape what vision of history gets taught, especially to e american school children. so in the early 20th century, the united daughters of the confederacy, a confederate heritage group which do things like stamp unfair to the south n in textbooks that they thought for example attributed the ng war to slavery rather than

states rights. so i think what we are seeing now is not suddenly new complaints or new defenses. it's just a change in o perceptions and sort of coming out to public because one side is not so successfully tamped down on all of the complaints. >> sure. at >> and yeah, so i think i have yeen a lot of analysis of statue protests with commentators thinking they knew what protesters wanted from it.ou but not a whole lot of people asking protesters. which is why i wanted to talk to mike forshap he has had a life of direct attention of caring for indigenous elders. and unhoused people, protesting oil lines, et cetera. he is risking his -- his d reputation, his freedom potentially. he didn't have a criminal record at all to do what might seem to

be a highly symbolic gesture of' pulling down a statue. but he explained it as a way of making more visible the -- the people who had been silenced who weren't present on the court -- the statehouse lawn had been, whose histories had gone expressed and ignored. he has passed the ropes to indigenous women and took down o the statue in memory of indigenous women whose cases ve aren't prosecuted or solved as often, ignored. his question essentially being why are we paying more honor, more visibility to this hung of someone who never set foot in north america versus people who are living right now?g so, sure, maybe in some cases taking down qb -- shopko chopping the head of columbus in the middle of the night doesn't

mean anything or lead to lastinb change. but in other cases these removals have -- or even the nc debates, the lack of removing have led to really interesting ongoing conversations about thew values that a community wants to see represented. >> sure. so we have a couple -- we have s two audience questions here t around the same theme. i'll read one and summary the other. this person writes i believe ay that all sculpture is artistic as well as sometimes al irrelevancic and ta representational they should be preserved regardless how inappropriate they may be. they may be seen by someone over the years.er the argument is essentially like do these statues have artistic value separate and apart from politics shouldn't the artistic value continue to have certain merit and argument for preservation?

>> maybe. a lot of confederate monuments p were actually mass produced. especially delightful to learn that the same factories would make both union and confederatel monuments so they'd look exactly the same except for details of the uniform. if you look at videos, for example, of activists pulling down a confederate monument in durham, north carolina, you'll see they tied a rope around its neck and yanked on it and it kind of bent in half because it's very thin metal. so a lot of these mass produced fairly cheap statues i'm not too sad to see. it's like throwing away old dvds. i know this is a heretical viewpoint but i think about all of the things that have been an allowed to decay because they weren't thought as important asa these monuments.

there was a really interesting 2018 magazine investigation that found over the previous four years, american taxpayers spent at least $40 million to preserve confederate monument sites. l whereas there's all sorts of african american or indigenous sites and historical landmarks and monuments that have essentially crumbled away e through lack of funding. so if you're going to say artworks should always be preserved, we do have a limited amount of funding, so sure, but let's have that preservation dollars be spread around more equally than just public c monuments.ou >> your comment about how complex decisions about monuments can be, you write at m one point should we honor only perfect people? if not, how much imperfection he should we tolerate? who should make these decisions and how? towards the end of your book yo

offer some advice on how communities should go about deciding whether to put up or remove a monument. could you tell us how you think that should work in an ideal world and how to improve on they way we make these decisions nowo >> well, the way we make these decisions now is very limited ii who gets to participate in them. when you hear public monument, you might think there's some um sort of public participation and you'd really be surprised how little there is, both when theyo come down and when they go up.at monuments are usually put up byt very small groups of people.t even new monuments even today. so, for example, after the death of ruth bader ginsburg, governor -- then governor cuomo announced a couple of days later, all right, brooklyn is getting a statue of the great ruth bader ginsburg. and i think she's great.ei but i thought wait a minute, shouldn't there be more

discussion in this community of whom they want to honor? and so statues have often like a this been air dropped into communities, sometimes against their will, and are now often also plucked from them without enough debate.he so something that i feel strongd about especially after writing this book and doing this nt research, these debates u shouldn't just be about the character of the work represented but they should be about investigating how this monument has been used as a monument.. who put it up, what were their motivations, what did they want the monument to do, what s messages do they want it to communicate and how has it beenr used since?n has it continued as stone mountain continued to foster hatred? the ku klux klan was revived not once, but twice on the slopes of stone mountain in association with this project to do a confederate memorial.

or has it been changed. the lincoln memorial, for instance, was put up in a very questionable, i would say, way.d the dedication ceremony was segregated.ch but it has been transformed by its use as a rallying point for various marches, a backdrop forw speeches, so i think it's much different now than it was. so in some ways it might seem le like a complex project, but as i said you can really look into historic newspapers.s. there's a lot of digital archives online. you can figure out what people l said they were doing when they put these things up, and people, especially in the early 20th en century, are often surprisingly candid about things that they would not be saying today. and just think about, you know, is this an object that's encouraging us all to come to a better future or are we hanging on to it through some sort of inertia. >> and are there communities that are actually using this

more democratic process you described?ke because it seems like in the as examples in the book, the le political action surrounding' this has more been a reaction to it and you have legislatures particularly in the south t enacting laws that say don't touch our monuments, don't move them and creating these almost impossible to clear criteria orv even laying a finger on them.al so are there places that you look to as hopeful examples of community involvement in deciding what the public visuale space looks like?r >> it's hard to find, because there are some states that have passed laws to really protect monuments, remove them from democratic discussion j whatsoever, and then in states where that hasn't happened, ag there's very often just a lack of procedure for raising questions about the monument. but i will say that just a few weeks ago, new york city finally

took down a statue of theodore roosevelt and there's a large number of public hearings and public discussions that resulted in that removal. similarly, boston took down a copy of the freedman's memorial and again after a large number of hearings.f t so these types of debates take r lot of effort, take a lot of time, take a lot of expense, f frankly, but i think is worth it. again, somebody who cares what happens with this particular hunk of metal, but to come he together as a community is really important, especially in these days when we all keep ' talking about how america is fractured and we don't talk to h each other. tco well, if we're willing to talk to each other about statues, i think that's a really good place to start. >> you talked a little bit also about the idea that statues that

just sort of contain just one figure, that we're all supposed to put on a pedestal and worship, at least in a civil a way, worship or honor, that in itself is limiting. i may get these terms wrong butt in some places there are a pl little more abstraction and a little less figuresome, so more people can see themselves in a work so it's more open to different sort of readings. you said america needs new monuments to honor ideas and actions that would have horrified the makers of those older monuments' so i'm wondering at what point -- it's tricky, though, right?om it's so abstract and if everyone sees what they want to see, what does that honor? at some point you are taking sides, right? so i wonder if you could talk about how more abstract monument might lend itself to more open readings, like the vietnam veterans memorial, say, but als how do you still have it mean something and not just be like i

see an airplane, you see a bird, i see the face of jesus. how do you strike that balance? >> i actually that the vietnam veterans memorial is a perfect example of this type of aw extraction where people can read into what they want. you can see that as an unquestioning honoring or an anti-war statement. it really depends on how you come to it. but it does raise emotion. it's an emotional experience to visit that. and that type of heightened state which leads us to ask in questions is what i think monuments can do. so most american monuments, especially traditional style don't want you to ask questions' they want you to feel a vague patriotic thrill and keep livins life as you're living. but i think monuments that are m bit more confusing that don't speak history to you can lead to more debate about what america should look like.eb and it's tricky, though. i thought at first i would have

like a whole chapter about what monuments should look like and then i was like, you know, i ow don't know. i don't know.w. i will note that a lot of current discussions about what e new monies should go up are sort of just replacing the person on the horse. all right, let's take robert e. lee off the horse and put on somebody else that's a better model. but i think as you put it, th nobody is perfect. even if you found a perfect ha person, that person wouldn't represent every single person who might look at them.or i i so i think it's time to think creatively about monuments, rather than struggling to keep i two models. that really hasn't worked.ny >> and i should ask our host here, how much more time do we t have?

i know that we're running up against the end here. can i ask one more question? let me see if there's anything else -- >> we have some time, so no rush. >> so let me ask you at least y one more question here.li you don't gloss over complicated cases where you have statues of columbus where italian americans draw a lot of pride. native americans see him as a catalyst for genocide. and you talk about the mu minneapolis columbus statues.d how do you negotiate these s discussions where different groups -- marginalized groups. we clearly don't want to honor racists' given immigrant groups that may have been at one point at loggerheads who take different meanings from the columbus monument, what is the discussion

that should be had if an italiae american community feels honor and a native american community that sees something very different?in >> it has become over the course of doing this research surprising to me that there is not more sympathy felt by those who are defending columbus statues because they're saying give us -- like leave us columbus. we've been a marginalized, discriminated group. we know what it's like to be rejected by america and felt d like we're less. that's the same feeling that many indigenous people are be saying that columbus is reminding them of. so why resist so intensely -- why perpetuate the same experience?he and i also think that columbus is maybe not the best figure to cling to in terms of representing italian american identity. so many of the statues of

columbus in america went up starting after the 1924 immigration restriction act. so many italian americans have their roots in immigration shortly before this. there's a lot of discriminations a lot of essentially regarding italians from southern italy as nonwhite, as lesser, as not fit for any intellectual labor, et cetera, et cetera.ff there are a lot of efforts to restrict immigration, so that act passes in 1924. worries are assuaged about a wave of immigrants and the task turns to assimilating the -- to making them into american, not italians anymore. and columbus is sort of a symbol of the assimilation of the argument that italians can be of service to america, just as columbus had been, and more deeply an argument that italians should count as white, which was

very unclear before.mi so by pinning a new identity on columbus, i say that he -- as a tool for assimilation was a knife, because he forced a lot of people to cut off a lot of parts of themselves that had been important, speaking italian, celebrating certain italian religious rituals and other cultural customs, et cetera, et cetera.ra there's a real attempt to fit ca in. and i think there's a lot wider range of italian heritage that' can be explored in a way. in a way that doesn't directly sort of remind other people of s the genocide of their culture. so i feel like get a little, ons give a little. >> we have an audience question here. have you seen the octavius valentine statue on the apron of

city hall in philadelphia honoring the 19th century de african american leader who's considered a martyr for voting rights, having been assassinated in philadelphia on election day in 1871? are you familiar with this statue? b any comments on that?rs >> i am not. but that's great.re >> what about the -- has there been much research or sort of social psychological research -- i think there's a lot of research on the effects of representation on children, minority children. but you write quite pointedly at one point in your book, one of i the things that's interesting is that though these statues have been taken down, they're not o out. most of them have not been melted down into something else like bullets or recycling, you i know. so they're still like in storage somewhere or being held in a warehouse where they might rear their heads again. q but you argue that shuffling statues around our cities is

like, this is your quote, is like moving an abusive priest to another parish. it may not be around as many potential children or potential victims but still in a position to abuse. you write not a single child gh deserves to grow up looking at a piece of stone or metal trying to convince them they are not equal to another americans. most people when they walk through a park don't even pay attention. do you get a sense of these ut statues being implicated in shaping children's understandina of who they are and whether they belong?he do you encounter any research specifically about statues as opposed to other kinds of representation? >> there is not enough of it for me to feel comfortable in the big discussion, not because it isn't there, but because not enough people have had the s

research funds to measure a statute specifically, but the research -- the preliminary th findings, the smaller studies, the theoretical discussions i found did point to seeing statues that -- especially those that honored someone who had a history of oppression, of people from the group you belonged to or statues that contained a stereotyped or racist vision of someone from the group you but long to has a slow but steady effect like microaggression in m the visual world. and i came across a lot of ng really moving and disheartening quotes from people saying -- like the freedman statue with the kneeling of a black man in washington, d.c. n

i don't want my kids to walk past this. every time i come to the park, my kid says, oh, daddy is up there. that's not the representation that i want to see.he so i think that i too often thought, eh, they're just statues, i don't pay attention to them when i'm walking. but i realized when writing the book that that sort of privilege of disregarding statues is verya much mine as the white middle class person and you can't extend that to everybody. >> sure, sure. so the last thing here before we wrap up, is there anything that you want readers to come away with after they have read this i book? and i hope they all will buy it and read it because we're just skimming the surface in this conversation. but is there something that yout want people to put down the book and think about and inform the way they act on or think about the monuments that they pass every day on the way to work or on the way to the park or toerever they're going?

>> yes. so i was only able to tell us stories about a handful of monuments in the book because i wanted them to be really oo engaging and full stories, but that left out literally thousands of monuments in the u.s.se all our communities have them. so i really hope that people o take another look at something they might walk or drive past every day, maybe do some c research, maybe do some thinking to themselves or outloud about whether or not that should be there because this has appeared where nobody has very clear ideas of what should be, so i think that gives an opportunity for everybody's voice to be as heard. >> just fascinating. thank you so much, dr. thompson. really interesting talking to you and i'll pass it back to on books & books. >> thank you both so much for a this conversation.

that you for moderating nk tonight's conversation and thank you again. thank you, everyone, who joined us tonight. don't forget you can purchase your copy of "smashing statues" online or in our stores. weekends on c-span 2 are a an sbelkt unit feast. every history tv documents america's story and on sundays book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span 2 comes from these television companies and more. including cox. >> cox is committed to providing eligible famiies access to affordable internet through the connected program. bridging the digital divide, one connected and engaged student at a time. cox, bringing us closer. cox, along with these television companies supports c-span 2 as a

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