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smashing statues, the rise and fall off america's public monumentshe published by our friends. she is at the college of criminal justice. she is also the author of possession, and her writing has appeared in the washington post, the new york times. to moderate tonight's conversation, we are also joined by an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the atlantic, new york times, and many other publications. he'san also the author of verit, which was an finalist for the e garer award of the best book of thepr year. throughout this evening's broadcast, you're invited to ask questions and please order your copy a of smashing statues by

pressing the green button. we appreciate each and every order and the generosity from viewers everywhere. i would like to welcome our guest to the virtual stage. >> hi. wow. thank you all so much for coming. dr. thompson has written a really timely and compelling book,ui and you should all buy . she's and terrific writer, so t book is just a pleasure to read. mores importantly, i think her booklets us peer behind the statues that adorn our public squares and lets us see the people whola made them. let'sng us hear the voices of t communities on the losing end or theseoe public displays.

i forget which figure turned human beings to stone, but she turnset stone back to flash, an she does it in a way that gets past the often simplistic takes that sooc many of us heard in t aftermath of george floyd's murder. you're a scholar of art crime, and much of your research has -- how did you come to write this book? >> well, it's essentially because my girlfriend makes really good negronis. so i had a couple of those very casety cocktails and opened twitter. so don't tweet after drinking unless you want a book deal. and i saw the video of a toppling of columbus in front of the state paul state capital, and i jokingly wrote a tweet

about that. that tweet went viral, and i got, you know, denounced by tucker carlson for leading armies ofon vilists to topple statues. >> what was that? it was something like as someone who studies the deliberate destruction of properties, i just have to say, next time they should use chain that is are broke because it will go faster. ily actually ended up interviewg the organizer of that particular protest. i profile him in a a chapter. he assured me it came down mightyob quickly. he didn't need any advice from me, and i gotse to delve into t important reasons he thought this wasuc important to do and whenen sentencing him to communy service.

but what wass interesting to me was not so much the it but the arguments that went on. there were thousands of them. people would sayt things like, well, what's wrong with columbus anyway, or it's somehow uncivilized or funhuman to tea downnd statues at all. i thought have none of you ever ripped ast photograph of your ex-from the fridge before? it's a very human tendency. so practically everything that i study was at some point toppled and thrown into a pit by people who wanted to forget about it. i wanted to explain how changing statues is b 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. andul america has just been

exceptional in having a long period of stability of statues so to speak because we have had a very dominant model of who should run thezi country for a longd time. and now that we are starting to really have shifting questions aboutua who should be in power, it's really noum wonder that the debates are crystallizing around monuments. >> let's quantifyre here. about 170 public monuments came down in the united states in the year after george floyd's death. about 100 of those were monuments of the confederacy and christopher columbus. has america ever before seen a period when so many monuments came down so quickly? >> no, not at all. there were periods of questioning monuments after dylan whroot's massacre in charleston in 2015 and after the

deadly unite the right rally. 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.ov but the statues still stayed in place or were even more protected. so there wasng a sort of backla to protests of the enactment of laws to protest to prevent them from being moved. so this isnd something that in quantity w is unprecedented, bu again, not in human history, just in america. and also if you want to talk aboutt statue removal, it's happened all t along. so one of the things that i am happy to have written about isca number of instances in which statues were removed because they prevented people with the power to remove them from the

hallss of congress, et cetera.rs but also i start the book with the fact that the very first medal statue but up in america lasted only seven years before we tore itce down. it was thely statue of george i, and as soon as the declaration of independence was read pb newly proudud rebelled american tore the statue down. it was made out of led, so they melted it d into bullets and us them to fight the king's army. >> that story is well-told in the book. what a wild story. so melted down to make the bullets that would be fired on theto british, correct? >> yeah. they talked about how there would be melted imagine esty fired at the t king's troops. >> so if this is unprecedented in american history, where do we

have too look in world history o findhe something roughly equivalent in terms of the number and speed of statues coming nkdown? i'm probably sending you back to grad school here, but where do we find this, or can we not? is there something singular about this? >> i think it is singular because there are certainly lots of instances of statue removal likeig the informal soviet stat with the independencee from the soviet union, iraq with the fall of w sudam, any sort of big transition off power, you can look at thee very satisfying videos of blown up statues of hitler atho the close of world r ii. but i think what's unique is therere hasn't been a regime change. we haven't yet arrived at the idea of, okay, who do we not

wants anymore and who do we wan. so we're seeing many more arguments and a discusses about statues other than that one is off. >> so what was different? i mean, surely there were periods in american history when large numbers of protestors wert just as angry about the rights and living conditions of minorities and women. why did the protests take this specific form this time? why c this now from the researc you conducted for your book? >> there is a book by the author karen cox who sort of complements my book e in lookin at the history of protests against confederate monuments. so she finds some people discussing even in late 19th century, any time we would walk through the city square, we would have something sharp to

scrape away at the statue of whomever to show that we weren't accepting the statue or very interesting student protests in the 60s and 70s that also would paint messages on confederate statues, et cetera. but i think that in that period, there is much more of a focus on adding new statues. like let's increase the representation in monuments. and there'sut a hopefulness of that, that by adding countermonuments, you could change the way the public space operated. butt i think in the last few years, we have been realizing that some of these monuments continue to have h -- to encoure harmful behavior, to solidify people and adding new monuments

is not enough. we have to address the ones with ef. >> son i think people who watchd someou of these take downs on t proenlen remember some of the eye-grabbing images of mobs yanking them down with ropes. but you point out that some 80% of these monuments were removedy public officials. did that figure surprise you? >> yeah. it's hugely significant because if youou just looked at the headlines, you would think all of thesed monuments were destroyed byss irrationally actg mobs and a lot of people including in the replies to that tweet ofnt mine said maybe we should removene monuments but w should have a democratic discussion. so as i pointed out in the book, thee majority, 80% of monuments that have been thremoved have bn done so efficiently.

for different reasons. some because officials agreed the monument should not be as there, others who put it in storage to protect it. more important, to me, it was learning how often monuments -- sorry. a my camera has turned off. one second while i switch. >> we can still hear you so -- >>or okay. good. how oftenti monuments that were torn down in 2020 had been the object of' peaceful petitions, other sort of protests. but sometimes not just years but decades, people's entire lives, and there was no way of those complaints being heard. so it's not surprising to me that if people lose all theep there be a peaceful way of resolving their difficulties

that they will turn to civil actsts of disobedience. >> got you. so the bookk tells so many gripping stories about the historical a figures who crew saided to y put out the confederate y statues. some of them were unapologetic racists. was there a particular story that you discovered in your surprised at really you and changed your understanding of what you thought you knew about the history of these monuments? >> how long do you have? there's so many of them. one that really -- what sort of pops to mind when i -- >> well, we were talking previously aboute stone mountai. so i had actually never heard of stone mountain before i started writing thehe book, but it's th

world's largest confederate monument. it was carved starting in 1914 by act sculptor, but he was hir by a a local confederate widow sort of think about doing this project of just carving a single head of lee. and he's like, no, we need hundreds of figures sweeping across thece mountain, and did because he got paid per figure. you know, he got a proportion of the total price. so he wanted to glorify the confederacy in order to make some more money. and he ended up really promisi'g much more than he could provide, so he collected all of this money without really carving almost anything. he onlyd finished the head of le

after spending the equivalent of -- they fired him, hired sculptor. so the world's largest monument has already lost one head. >> and this was a sculptor who had previously done statues of lincoln and union leaders, right? he had noo -- i mean, there was no sort of like ideal backbone. he was looking to cash in on -- >> he had made his fame sculpting union leaders and lincoln inon particular. he was gunning for being chosen to do the lincoln monument memorial so hard that he even named his son lincoln. he didn't get chosen. and so he was really down on his luck when suddenly stone

mountain came up. >> one of the most surprisingrn and counterintuitive pieces for me was your argument that many confederateit monuments here we designed to keep white southerners in' poverty by discouraging them from joining labor unions. can you talk a bit about the evidence that led you to that conclusion? it's not something that people would pick up right away when they think about these monuments. how did they exactly -- these statues, whatah did they communicate to white southerns about their place in that -- in the political order? >> yeah. well, i sort of see this because as me asking a series of stupid questions and tracking them down. so one of the stupid questions is, wait, do these monuments actually honor people's ancestors becauseeo that's a bi

defensevi of confederate monumes that's encapsulated in the phrase heritage, not hate. so they're about the heritage of people who fought in the civil war, notto about hating anybody. so i started to look at what peoplehe said about these monuments as they dedicated them. there are a lot of historic newspapers that are digitized and lovet to report at length al of thef speeches given at these monuments. andgege i saw that what was bei praised about confederate soldiers at the dedication of monuments because the vast majority ofho confederate monuments are notr named. what was being praised is this soldier's devotion to duty and self-sacrifice and obedience. thought, that's not rebellion orro knowing your own mind bhops paying for this monument?

who wants tore make this phrase? it turns out that many of these confederateol monuments especiay from the turn of the century until around world war i were paid for by factory owners, mine owners who depended on having a low-paid workforce, and they wereof praising these working class menth for accepting a lif of social stratification of not getting really ahead and listening t to their betters in the s hopes that they would be better employees. andn not just in general. i also found that often you'll see a confederate monument with this type of speech go up in reaction to unionization efforts in a community. that's clear in what i write about the birmingham confederate

black movement, which would have been two parts, nine years apart, both in reaction to a strike. and both t times the strike was organized interracially. so it was really appealing to white working class families to say, don't cross the color lines in hopes of, you know, improving your lives. you should pay attention to us, your betters, and keep things as they were. one ofl these speeches even tas about, i yea, desen dents of confederate veterans, you are working to end the racial speck tore. >> soex if you keep people divid along racial lives, they won't recognize they share economic interests? and i'll ask the next question realizing it mightht sound a little fake, but i think

definitions are important. why do civilizations put up statues? i just want to like get that out there. why do we put up statues? what is the work they're supposedt to do? are community selfies. they are showing ourselves at our best angles, and they're all about the future, not really tho past. they are to show us what we think should be honored, give us ideals, give us asser rations sp we can make life better for fer ourselves. so show us who we should emulate. so i think that when we have a certain type of person honored in a monuments to the exclusionf others, thensh that makes it ha forra everybody, especially in such a diverse country as america, toou see themselves on monuments. that's really a waste.

shouldn't we be encouraging everybody to live better lives rather than saying, you over there can't really do much. just beto happy earning your lo wages. >> so politicians, including a certain former president have said that to remove a statue is to erase history. do you agree? >> when trump was going on about how he needed to create a national statuarybe garden of american heroes or something like edthat, there's an actual executive order to this, and he said they w can't all be in modn style. they haveua to be in traditiona style. but onene of the people he list in that order was columbus, whichot i found ironic. we don't know what he looked like, so it would have to be a speck withdrew la tif representation. that never happened. so i got this idea that to take

down a monument is to erase history. what i h say to that is that monuments are not how history is taught. monuments actually themselves often e ration history by posting certainxi narratives an ignoring others. something i talk about in the is how northern memorials hardly acknowledge the existence of african americans despite an inei -- instead, they are depicd in rags, kneeling, receiving emancipation as a gift instead of risking their own lives to free others. so to take down what history is erasing is a very particular picture of u history that was

designed to enforce social norms at the time. so i'm not too saddened, and i thinkou that history doesn't ge erased unlessnd you erase all forms of communication of knowledge, andw if you are walking around in your community and you think i'm not really sure who's that guy on that horse over there, you'll know that not a lot of statues do a good jobre of communicating tha as well. >> i noetsd he said that tearing down history, no, we're exposing it. they -- which i thought was quitect an effective way to put it. >> he's a o very interesting perspective. he had o tried to get the statu removed peacefully for decades. but he didn't want it to be torn

down. he wants it to be put on display in a hall of shame with information aboutbe why it was there, the role columbus played, the role of columbus in america, et cetera. so he wasn't given a choice besides this more desperate act versus a conversation. >> this leads perfectly again to my nextse question. others support the removal of monuments that no longer support a community's values. but they say it should be in a museum.se the argument goes itt could be surrounded by programs. even -- i wonder if you could us about what happened at the houston museum of african american culture after it took

in the stoo chew andho how that affected your view about how works of statuary can be disarmed. >> so i think taking down a statue doesn't e ration history. so if you are concerned about history, you can p think, how ee can we display this statue so we can tlernrn history of its use a monument. so i lot of people steam say put its in a museum, but i really don'tin think this is as simplef an answer as one might think. first of all, storage is expensive,e, preservation is expensive. who's going to pay for all of this? a lot s of museum professionals talked too were kind of like we're not america's attic for racist stuff we want to hide. no, that's a not the role of museums. so to really change people's

minds or open people's minds to different perspectives to not have a museum gallery become a site of appreciation of the statue, et cetera, you have to doit a lot of work. so i decided in the work to profile the african american culture, which is the only african american institution to have rehomed a removed monument so far. what they did was really take a lot of steps to ensure that this mon mumt didn't exert its -- the power it was r designed to have. because it is a powerful monument. very gilded statue of an attractive personro winged, nud representing the ideals of the confederacy. his body draws you in, so they put himf in an enclosed courtyard. they surrounded him with eyes to

make sure he knows he's always being watched. so they've had symposiums. they have a goal not just that, oh, we want to destroy history. no. they t want to use its emotiona poll.

manuscript in march of 2021 which is ridiculous. m >> that's very fast. w >> but. ve >> you have to sort of like drol everything and just focus on this or able to multitask and write a full. >> no, i was doing anything else. but i -- it was -- every single moment of my time that was not spent with my kids. >> gotcha. >> to the extent that all of my social interactions, it was he during pandemic so i had my a friends and family in the bubble. they heard a lot of -- it was a real period i was writing the stone mountain chapter which hat a lot of klan involvement yo we would be sitting down at

lunch, okay, today's klan facts are c -- and my family was like, why? >> it took over your life for do 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, a you know immunocompromised. i couldn't go to protest. i was outside of my city.ti and the -- it felt like on something i could do. >> let me ask you this. i think whether it's sort of liberal activists taking down confederate statues or conservatives banning library t books in curricula about america's long and ugly history of racism, the country seems ton be in all-out war about the stories it tells itself about its past. and there are critics saying the fights are more about performance than substance. there is a “washington post” article you site in one of the footnotes for instance, bearing

thelo headline, controversial memorials are surprisingly easy to pull down fixing the world that built thee is harder. as one black activist put it about the removal of the confederate monument quote we are making the courthouse look more equitable without reckoning with the institutional racism that takes place inside. so in your research for the book did you find the removal of the statues serve as a quick cathartic release substituting t for real change? or did you find the takedowns launched sustained forms of collective action. >> first to challenge something you said at the beginning, i don't think that debates about monuments of the past are a particular feature of the present. i think they are just able to happen more in public. because one side is not winning so heavily. so, you know, i quote a letter e that fredrick douglass wrote to a washington newspaper after the day after the dedication of the freedman memorial complaining ti

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 ly since they went up. it's just that those voices have been effectively squashed through very concerted campaigns to shape what vision of history gets taught, especially to american school children. so in the early 20th century, the united daughters of the confederacy, a confederate te heritage group, would do things like stamp unfair to the south e in textbooks that they thought for example attributed the 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 perceptions and sort of coming out to public because one side is not so successfully tamped down on all of the complaints.

>> sure. >> and yeah, so i think i have seen a lot of analysis of statui protests with commentators or thinking they knew what protesters wanted from it. 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 l for indigenous elders. and unhoused people, protesting oil lines, et cetera. he is risking his -- his 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, whose histories had gone suppressed and ignored. he has passed the ropes to indigenous women and took down the statue in memory of indigenous women whose cases aren't prosecuted or solved as often, ignored. his question essentially being i why are we paying more honor, pe moreay visibility to this hunk f someone who never set foot in north america versus people who are living right now? so, sure, maybe in some cases om taking down -- you know, chopping the head of columbus in boston in the middle of the night doesn't mean anything or lead to lasting change. but in other cases these on removals have -- or even the debates, the lack of removing have led to really interesting ongoing conversations about the values that a community wants to see represented.

>> sure. so we have a couple -- we have two audience questions here around the same theme. a i'll read one and summary the other.en this person writes i believe ou that all sculpture is artistic as well as sometimes lu historic and as such, representational. and as such, they should be preserved regardless how inappropriate they may be.er they may be seen by someone over the years.r 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 l merit and argument for preservation? >> maybe. a lot of confederate monuments were actually mass produced. e especially delightful to learn that the same factories would make both union and confederate monuments so they'd look exactly the same except for details of the uniform. they would use a slightly

different mold. if you look at videos, for example, of activists pulling id 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.po it's like throwing away old dvds. we have got copies. we know what they look like, et cetera. i know this is a heretical viewpoint from a non-historian. butin i also think about all of the things that have been allowed to decay because they hk weren't thought as important as these monuments.rs there was a really interesting funny 18th smithsonian -- there was m 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. whereas there's all sorts of t african american or indigenous sites and historical landmarks and monuments that have essentially crumbled away 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, butu let's have that preservation dollars be spread around more equally than just public c monuments. a >> your comment about how complex decisions about monuments can be, you write at one point should we honor only perfect people? if not, how much imperfection ti should we tolerate? who should make these decisions and how? towards the end of your book you offer some advice on how communities should go about w. 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 the.

way we make these decisions now? >> well, the way we make these decisions now is very limited io who gets to participate in thema when you hear public monument, you might think there's some sort of public participation and you'd really be surprised how little there is, both when they come down and when they go up. monuments are usually put up by very small groups of people.er even new monuments even today. so, for example, after the deatw of ruth bader ginsburg, dn 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. 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 this been air dropped into communities, sometimes against their will, and are now often a also plucked from them without enough debate.

so something that i feel strong about especially after writing y this book and doing this research, these debates ntt shouldn't just be about the character of the person represented but they should be about investigating how this da monument has been used as a monument. who put it up, what were their motivations, what did they want the monument to do, what messages do they want it to communicate, and how has it been used since??ou has it continued as stone mountain continued to foster t 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 er instance, was put up in a very questionable, i would say, way. the dedication ceremony was segregated. but it has been transformed by its use as a rallying point fort

various marches, a backdrop forv speeches, so i think it's much different now than it was. so in some ways it might seem . like a complex project, you have tos state the whole history of monument. but as i s said, you can really look into historic newspapers. there's a lot of digital a archives online.o you can figure out what people said they were doing when they put these things up, and people. especially in the early 20th 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?d? because it seems like in the examples in the book, the e political action surrounding t this has more been a reaction ta it and you have legislatures particularly in the south it enacting laws that say don't touch our monuments, don't move

them, and creating these almosts impossible to clear criteria for even laying a finger on them.it so are there places that you a look to as hopeful examples of community involvement in deciding what the public visual space looks like?ct >> it's hard to find, because there are some states that have passed laws to really protect monuments, remove them from democratic discussion ft whatsoever. and then in states where that hasn't happened, there's very s 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 finalls took down a statue of theodore roosevelt that has been the object of protest for many, manb years. and there is a large number of public hearings and ee public discussions that resulted

in that removal. similarly, boston took down a copy of the freedman's memorial that had been in a park in boston, and again after a large number of hearings.til so these types of debates take t lot of effort, take a lot of time, take a lot of expense, frankly, but i think is worth it. again, somebody who cares what happens with this particular hunk of metal, but to come s 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 each other. 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 t figure, that we're all supposed to put on a pedestal and er worship, at least in a civic way, worship or honor, that in itself is limiting. i may get these terms wrong but

in some places there are a little more abstraction and a a little less figuresome, so more people can see themselves in a d work so it's more open to different sort of readings.t' 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 om point -- it's tricky, though, right? 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 of certain value, like the vietnam veterans memorial, say, but also how do you still have it mean something and not just be like l 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 e

example of this type of extraction where people can reao into it what they want. you can see that as an unquestioning honoring or an anti-war statement.mo it really depends on how you come to it. but it does raise emotion. it's an emotional experience tos visit that. and that type of heightened state which leads us to ask al questions is what i think monuments can do. so most american monuments, especially traditional style premaya lin don't want you to ask questions. they want you to feel a vague patriotic thrill and keep living life as you're living. but i think monuments that are a bit more confusing that don't spoon-feed history to you can lead to more debate about what america should look like. 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 don't know. i don't know.ng i will note that a lot of e h current discussions about what new monies should go up are sort of just replacing the person on the horse.fe all right, let's take robert e. lee off the horse and put on somebody else that's a better model.l. but i think, as you put it, t' nobody is perfect. even if you found a perfect ea person, that person wouldn't en represent every single person who might look at them. so i think it's time to think h creatively about monuments, rather than struggling to keep toel models that haven't really worked for us. >> and i should ask our host here, how much more time do we 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 -- e. >> we have some time, so no rush.f >> so let me ask you at least one more question here.

you don't gloss over complicated cases where you have statues of columbus where italian americant draw a lot of pride. native americans see him as a catalyst for genocide. y and you talk about the minneapolis columbus statues. how do you negotiate these discussions where different ps groups -- marginalized groups. we clearly don't want to honor racists.t get that. given immigrant groups that may have been at one point at loggerheads who take different meanings from the columbus monument, what is the discussiom that should be had if an italian american community feels honor int this statue, and a native american community that sees something very different? >> 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 na statues because they're saying

give us -- like leave us columbus. we've been a marginalized, discriminated group.g we know what it's like to be rejected by americans who said that we are less. that's the same feeling that many indigenous people are saying that columbus is reminding them of. so why resist so intensely -- why perpetuate the same ay experience? 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 es columbus in america went up starting after the 1924 immigration quota restriction act. so many italian americans have their roots in immigration shortly before this. there's a lot of discrimination, a lot of essentially regarding

italians from southern italy asl nonwhite, as lesser, as not fitt for any intellectual labor, et cetera, et cetera. there are a lot of efforts to restrict immigration, so that act passes in 1924.ts worries are assuaged about a wave of immigrants and the task turns to assimilating the immigrants, to making them into american, not italians anymore.t 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 of an argument that italians should count as white, which was very unclear before. so by pinning a new identity on columbus, i say that he -- as a tool for assimilation was a br knife, because he forced a lot of people to cut off a lot of

parts of themselves that had le been important, speaking italian, celebrating certain italian religious rituals and d other cultural customs, et cetera, et cetera. there's a real attempt to fit t in. and i think there's a lot widery range of italian heritage that f can be explored in a way. in a way that doesn't directly sort of remind other people of the genocide of their culture. so i feel like get a little, give a little.ou >> we have an audience question here. a have you seen the octavius valentine cano statue on the apron of city hall in i philadelphia honoring the 19th century african american leader who's considered a martyr for voting rights, having been assassinated in philadelphia onh election day in 1871? are you familiar with this statue?it any comments on that? >> i am not.

but that sounds great. >> what about the -- has there been much research or sort of f social psychological research -- i think there's a lot of research on the effects of ug representation on children, minority children. but you write quite pointedly ay one point in your book, one of the things that's interesting is that though these statues have i been taken down, they're not out. they haven't been -- most of them have not been it melted down into something elser like bullets or recycling, you know. so they're still like in storagd somewhere or being held in a warehouse where they might rear their heads again. but you argue that shuffling statues around our cities is like, this is your quote, is like moving an abusive priest tw another parish. it may not be around as many potential children or potential victims but still in a positiont to abuse. you write not a single child deserves to grow up looking at a

piece of stone or metal trying to convince them they are not equal to other americans. iy lot of people, when they see -- most people when they walk through a park don't even pay attention.et is another old dude on a horse. do you get a sense of these statues being implicated in ta shaping children's understanding of who they are and whether they belong' do you encounter any research specifically about statues as opposed to other kinds of to representation? b >> there is not enough of it for me to feel comfortable in the ci big discussion, not because it isn't there, but because not enough people have had the research funds to measure a statute specifically, but the research -- the preliminary findings, the smaller studies, h 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 the visual world. l and i came across a lot of really moving and disheartening quotes from people saying -- like the freedman statue with the kneeling of a black man in e washington, d.c.ou i don't want my kids to walk past this. every time i come to the park, i my kid says, oh, daddy is up there. that's not the representation th that i want to see.en

so i think that i too often thought, eh, they're just er statues, i don't pay attention to them when i'm walking. m but i realized when writing thea book that that sort of privilege of disregarding statues is very much mine as the white middle wa class person, and you can't extend that to everybody.ey >> 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 you 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 wherever they're going? >> yes. so i was only able to tell stories about a handful of monuments in the book because ii wanted them to be really engaging and full stories, but that left out literally thousands of monuments in the

u.s. all our communities have them. so i really hope that people take another look at something they might walk or drive past e every day, maybe do some research, maybe do some thinking to themselves or out loud about whether or not that should be e there or what monuments should be 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 heard. >> just fascinating. thank you so much, dr. thompson. really interesting talking to you and i'll pass it back to books & books. >> thank you both so much for this conversation. that you for moderating tonight's conversation and thank you again. thank you, everyone, who joined us tonight. don't forget you can purchase pe your copy of "smashing statues" at books & books online or in our stores. thank you all again.

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