The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: The statues must come down

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

It has become one of the more divisive topics in today's culture wars: what to do with the statues of historical figures with controversial pasts. And while many can agree that the monuments of Robert E Lee and Edward Colston should not stand in city centres, the debate becomes murkier when the likes of Winston Churchill, John A MacDonald, Queen Victoria, and Abraham Lincoln enter the fray. Those calling for statues to come down and streets to be renamed argue that this is not a case of ‘cancel culture'. Rather, it is an overdue re-examination of past heroes and their subjugation of marginalized groups. Those who promoted racist and imperialist policies in their time should not be given the privilege of public glorification in ours. Others argue that social justice “mobs” are ignoring the context in which these transgressions took place, viewing history through a distorted lens comprised of their own values and assumptions and purposely rewriting the past to serve their ideological purposes today. If progressives succeed in their purity purge we will be left with no heroes, no history, and no nuanced understanding of our own past. Arguing for the motion is Cornell William Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former President of the NAACP. Arguing against the motion is George F Will, Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the Washington Post and author of American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent. QUOTES: CORNELL WILLIAM BROOKS “When you have commemoration, as opposed to education, it leads to misinformation. And it literally debilitates our ability to grapple with the past in order to come to grips with the present.” GEORGE WILL “My worry is about the question of control. I don't want to control the past. I want the past to be faced as what it was, and not controlled for any political agenda, good, bad or indifferent." Sources: City News, CTV, Washington Post, ABC, WPRI,  The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail]. To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran Lynch Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. How way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution? This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information

to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. The statues must come down. After 131 years, the largest Confederate statue in the United States of Confederate General Robert E. Lee came down today in Richmond. The statue of British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill to faced with red paint in downtown Edmonton. Breaking overnight, a statue of Christopher Columbus has been beheaded in Boston.

The city of Victoria plans to take down a statue of Canada's first prime minister, Sir Johnny McDonald, from the front steps of City Hall. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Well, it's become one of the most divisive topics in today's culture wars. What to do with statues of historical figures and their controversial pass. The people calling for statues to come down and streets to be reaffirms. Rewnamed, argue that those who promote racist and imperialist policies in their own time should not be given the privilege of public glorification in ours.

So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference, you see, between remembrance of history. and the reverence of it. That was New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu explaining the city's decision to remove four Confederate monuments. Others argue that so-called social justice mobs are ignoring the context in which these past transgressions took place,

rewriting history to serve their ideological purposes today. Here's Canadian Conservative Party leader, Aaron O'Toole. There is not a place on this planet whose history can withstand close scrutiny. But there is a difference between acknowledging where we've fallen short. There is a difference between legitimate criticism and always tearing down the country. Critics of these activist groups believe that if progressives succeed in their purity purge, we will be left with no heroes, no history, and no nuanced understanding of our common past.

On this installment of the Monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, the statues must come down. Arguing for the motion is Cornell William Brooks. He's a professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice at the Harvard Kennedy School and is former president of the NAACP. Arguing against the motion is George F. Will, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington, host and best-selling author. His latest book is American Happiness and Discontents, The Unruly Torrent. Cornel, George, welcome to the Monk Debates. Good to be with you. Glad to be with you. Very much looking forward to our conversation and debate today. This has been one of the animating topics of political, social, and cultural debate over the last year or more, and to have the two of you who've thought long and hard about this key debate reflected on that in your own writings

and discussions, but to bring the two of you together for a thoughtful, civil, and substantive debate on what is a difficult issue is a privilege indeed. And I just want to thank you both on behalf of the Monk Debates community and all of our listeners for your willingness to engage each other in this debate. Our resolution today is simple to the point, be at result. the statues must come down. Cornell, you're arguing in favor of the motion. I'm going to put a couple of minutes on the clock and hand the program over to you. As a civil rights lawyer and later fourth-generation ordained minister, I've made my home in northern Virginia for many years, not too distant from Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, a place in which monuments to Confederate

generals, Robert E. Lee, have stood for so many years as a testament to the nation's past and our inability, at least in this country, the United States, to remember it and to reconcile ourselves with it, not too distant from Charlottesville, Virginia. the home of the Unite the Right rally, but also the home of Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia and Monticello, and also the home for many years of a monument to a Confederate general who presided and provided military and moral support for a slaveocracy in which four million African Americans were enslaved. In the midst of this global anti-colonialist racial reckoning, all across the length and breadth of Canada, the United States, and around the world, we have a generation of advocates and activists calling for these statues to come down. Why? Because these statues represent not the lessons of the past, but our inability or unwillingness to come to grips with the lessons of the past because we have endeavored. in so many instances, to romanticize the past, to forget the past, to fail to remember the past.

So when we think of the words of George Santayana back in 1905, whose words yet ring true, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, those who cannot remember, those who choose to remove the stories, the histories, the narratives of resistance and resilience are condemned to repeat the past, and they yet condemn the rest of us to repeat the past. So these statues that speak to our colonial history or fail to speak to our colonial history, that romanticize and glorify and commemorate our racist histories have to come down, not only so that we might come to grips with the past, but that we might find inspiration and the proper historical grounding to face the present

and to embrace the future. They have to come down. Thank you, Cornell. Precise, powerful opening statement. Our resolution today, be it resolved, the statues must come down. George Will, you're arguing against the motion. Let's have your opening remarks. Well, this is a summons to moral reasoning, and the fundamental moral obligation we all have as human beings

is to be as intelligent as possible. And being intelligent involves making reasonable, intelligent distinctions. This is, of course, very important when we come to the matter of what national memory we should cultivate by honoring or not honoring particular people. The phrasing of the resolution says these statues must come down, a definite article, and surely we don't think all statues should come down. And we have to begin by saying, when we commemorate human beings of any sort, we're commemorating flawed people. That's definitional to part of being a human being. So deciding who to commemorate in shaping the national memory, it's an exercise of saying

on balance, on balance, this person mattered a lot and mattered on balance for the good and therefore the good that he did or she did should be commemorated. In looking at statues, we have to bear in mind the motives matter, the motives that is, for erecting the statues. If a statue was put up just as Jim Crow was being put in place. That's a reason to think that it ought to be taken out the way Jim Crow itself has been taken out. But it is one thing to say at the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan and a war criminal, if we'd had that concept in the 1860s.

Nathan Bedford Forrest is different from Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who had dark racial side, but Forrest and Wilson have to be distinguished. Similarly, John Calhoun and John Marshall, both slaveholders, but very different in their importance and in their moral stature. And once you start with the business of purging the past, you have to come to terms with, for example, what do you do about Franklin Roosevelt,

who signed the order that stripped rights from about 130,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them, citizens, more than half of them women and children, and the exclusion of the Japanese during the Second World War. So if we begin by understanding that even heroes can have feet of clay, we have to come finally to the proposition that I think we can discuss and defend that if you can't have heroes, you can't have villains. That is, if you can't make these distinctions, it's going to be hard to decide who is on the continuum of goodness. who is a hero and who is a villain. So with that in mind, let us proceed. Thank you, George. Great opening statements from you both now in opportunity for rebuttals. This is a chance for both of you to kind of weigh in on what you've

heard from each other as we've opened up this debate. So Cornell, to come to you first, let's have your rebuttal of George Will. Well, first of all, let me just begin by saying, I appreciate Mr. Will's distinction in terms of gradations of good and evil and imperfection among our heroes and heroines. But I think it's important to note here, as he has suggested, the purpose, the motive, the intent behind these statues. So in other words, where many of the Confederate statues were erected in the first 20 years of the last century and doing this civil race. rights movement, not and not as a way of educating the public with respect to America's past, and this is true elsewhere, but really as a way of glorifying, romanticizing, commemorating

brutality in ways that made it acceptable, not only acceptable, in ways that would be acceptable, palatable, and they would garner support for Jim Crow. So we agree there, but I think is also important for us to not subscribe to this notion that if we don't have heroes, we can't have villains or that our heroes have to, in fact, be perfect. The point being here is this is not a matter of some timeless standard of perfection roughly applied to the past. This is a matter of statues which literally commemorate people who've raped. pillage, engaged in genocide assault, and engaged in racial terrorism to the detriment of this country, the U.S., but also Canada in terms of colonialist statues, and elsewhere.

So we've got to be clear in terms of the kind of statute, and we have to be clear about the fact that we're not insisting on perfection among our heroes. We are, in fact, speaking very clearly to the fact that when you have commemoration, as opposed to education, it leads to misinformation. and it literally debilitates our ability to grapple with the past in order to come to grips with the present and literally embrace the future. Thank you, Cornell. George, your opportunity now similarly to rebutt Cornell's opening statement or what you've just heard in his rebuttal. Well, I think Cornell is quite right to say that we have to be scrupulously diligent about avoiding romanticism,

particularly the romanticism that came to be to envelop the south. When in the second half of the 19th century, reconstruction was liquidated, and the nation decided to sacrifice the interests of African Americans and free men, free people, to national reconciliation, there was a sentimentality about the lost cause. This extended all the way into the 1930s, when you had gone with the wind, both Margaret Mitchell's novel and the movie, of course,

but also Douglas Saldall Freeman's multi-volume biography that was a huge bestseller in the 1930s his biography of Robert E. Lee. So I think Cornell is quite right about that. One thing I would stress is it is one thing to talk about these statues relating to the Civil War and the great racial drama of this country. It is important to understand. that once you start this business, it's hard to stop because we've now seen, of course, people splashing paint on statues of Winston Churchill because he was unsound by current sensibilities on the subject of India and colonization. You need to have limiting principles, it seems to me, that will prevent a kind of indiscriminate attack on eminence and on greatness itself.

There is in any democracy, as de Tocqueville warned us, a leveling impulse. And there is, I think, a tendency on the part of some people to say the statues themselves by suggesting that some people are more important than others are undemocratic. So this impulse to tidy up the national memory. may start with the civil war and the question of race and our sectional differences. But what starts there need not stay there. I'm simply warning that unless we think clearly we're going to find that the impulse for what has been now called the cancel culture is going to leak into a broader examination

and an indiscriminate attempt to purge society of all people who fail to meet very exacting contemporary sensibilities. Thank you, George, for that rebuttal. My opportunity now to join the debate and kind of think up some questions that are top of mind from our listeners tuning into this really wonderful, civil and substantive conversations. So, Cornell, let me come to you first with this idea of interpretation, that there's been an argument that is the removal of the statute necessary? Isn't there a bigger public good, a better public purpose served by?

leaving a statue there and reinterpreting it in our own moment with additional education that could occur around that physical edifice to make people conscious of the very history that you've so eloquently talked about. Why isn't that a more a pragmatic and useful approach than the removal of these statues and the concern that George raises of this. of history, the disappearance, in a sense, of the past by its physical obliteration in the form of the destruction of these statues. Well, let me know a couple of things. When we talk about the removal of these statues as erasure, that assertion suggests that the erasure is commencing, is beginning, as opposed to our response to a previous. erasure. So that is to say these statues that are testaments to our racist past and present,

colonialist past and present, erase stories of resilience, erase stories of liberation, erase stories of struggle, erase stories of the active efforts of people to free themselves, free others, realize and recapture the promise of the countries in which they lived. And so stories have already been erased. The removal of these statues in many instances provide opportunities for us to tell stories, for us to embrace history, for us to literally lift up the past in ways to give sight, as in literally seeing the victims, the heroes and heroines of history who've been left out, but literally amplify the voices, which have often been muted and rendered silent.

So that's the first point in terms of erasure and muting of history. The second part is this notion that with these statutes, we can somehow append a plaque, a footnote of history to make the commemoration of what didn't happen and that was lied about appropriate and educational in the present. So in other words, a plaque, if you will, a plaque, of education on a statute of commemoration leads to misinformation. It leads to romanticization. So in other words, we can't fix this by simply footnoting what we're often, Louis, misstatements of history wrapped in marble. Thank you, Cornell.

Important point. So, George, let me come to you with those too. this idea that about erasure and how it's really just a previous erasure here that's being addressed. This isn't the one in true history of all time that is being removed with the removal of these histories. The removal of these statues, in fact, opens up the opportunity to recover those older histories and the realities of them that were erased by the very erection of these statues. And then Cornell's second point here that footnoting is not enough, that this is a kind of a tokenism to the harm, the violence of these statues in our present.

And what they mean to African Americans and other marginalized communities walking by them every day. These cause real hurt right now in America, 2021. Yes. But again, to get back to the business of drawing. distinctions first within the context of the Civil War and the racial reckoning in this country, there is surely a distinction to be drawn between Nathan Bedford Forrest, as I say, war criminal and first leader of the Ku Kluxlan, and Robert E. Lee, who was interesting because he was tormented and torn because he was situated in a way that it is very difficult for

us to understand or sympathize with today. When he was invited by Lincoln to take charge of an important Union Army, he said, I cannot draw my sword against my country. His country at that time was how he thought and was not alone in thinking this was Virginia. So it seems to me one of the tasks of education should be to tell people to help people learn how to empathize with people who were situated in times, and societies and cultures very different than the one we now have. This requires a kind of empathy that you sometimes get from literature, but you also ought to get from biography and from history. And the question is, can any person on the losing side of the Civil War

deserve a place in public? That's a fair question. But again, I want to stress that once you start on this, it's very hard to stop. For example, and I'd be interested in Cornell's view on this, Jefferson was a slaveholder. He was also much else. James Madison was, in my judgment, the most subtle political philosopher we have produced in the United States in our 200-some years. He was a slaveholder. John Marshall, who, with his decisions, helped create the sinews of national strength that were turned on the South and destroyed the slaveocracy.

He was a slaveholder. So these are complicated judgments about them. Cornell, are you comfortable? I was just at Marshall University of Huntington, West Virginia. They have a statue of John Marshall, which has occasionally been controversial, but not very. Are you comfortable with a statute of John Marshall? In terms of recognizing on balance,

the good, evil, mixed motive, of various historical figures, Jefferson, Marshall. It's important here to, I think, lean on, as you've lifted up, biography, story, history in terms of pages and pixels, which give us an opportunity to present more complete fulsome pictures as opposed to commemorative statues. So, for example, I love the example you use with respect to Franklin Roosevelt, right? So Roosevelt, of course, signs the executive order, interning Japanese Americans. But he was also, in many ways, he wrote to a great many African Americans and so many Americans for so many reasons. The point being here is where you have these commemorative statues that leave

out nuance, that literally glorify oppression. My belief is that we need to shy away from the statues, tell more stories, write more biographies, teach more history. We should reserve commemorative statues for those whose deeds and lives inspire, encourage, speak to the ideals of the country and our societies. And so that should be the principle here. In other words, we need more storytelling, more biography, more history, more nuance in order to provide avenues of empathy and understanding in terms of complexity, as opposed to these commemorative statutes. And let me know this. We've not spent a lot of time talking about the impact of these statues on young people, including children, right? So in other words, it's when someone,

when a child walks past a statute commemorating literally someone who enslaved, tortured, terrorized their forebears, that's a psychological assault. There's no nuance there. There's no complexity there. As opposed to reading a book, studying a life. That would be my response. George, come back on that. That's an interesting place to take this argument,

that it's not about the erasure of the past writ large. There's lots of opportunities in Cornell's argument here to investigate and interrogate the past. It's that these statues are a specific, you know, medium modality of communication they are heroic they are by their nature a bold assertive positive representation of an individual they're not nuanced they're not showing you multiple sides of an argument they're crude unsophisticated and by virtue of their inability to communicate history in a richer more contextualized way that's a

reason why, as per our resolution, the statues must come down. Well, then, again, let me help us reason by taking another concrete example. I got my Ph.D. at Princeton University, I served as a trustee there, and Woodrow Wilson is all over the place at Princeton University. Woodrow Wilson, as president, gratuitously re-segregated the federal workforce. He showed the first movie ever shown. in the White House, and the one he showed was Birth of a Nation, which was the celebration. I keep coming back to poor Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Ku Klux Klan of that group. What do we do with Woodrow Wilson?

Now, Princeton has made some adjustments about the prominence of Woodrow Wilson's name there, but the question is complex because Woodrow Wilson had a multifaceted career, leaving an enormous impress upon a American society that goes beyond his unquestionably retrograde and aggressively retrogate views on race. As a conservative, I offered jokingly to come to Princeton and teach people how to more comprehensively dislike Woodrow Wilson than just for his racial views. But this strikes me as a good example of to tell the story, as Cornell rightly stresses, to tell the story of Woodrow Wilson in a rounded way. The fact that I didn't like much of his legislative agenda is irrelevant.

A lot of people liked it. And in any case, he was a shaper of modern America, the Federal Reserve System and all the rest. So it seems to me a mistake to sort of scrub Woodrow Wilson from the public square. Now, to again stay with Cornell's example, there will be young African Americans who will learn that Woodrow Wilson, Wilson was in many ways germane to them extremely unpleasant person. But I don't think that's a sufficient reason for, as I say, scrubbing him from the public square

and from the national memory because he is a baker of modern America for better or for worse. Yeah, of course. So, George, let's note this. There's a difference in a decision to be made from scrubbing Woodrow Wilson from the public square as opposed to scrubbing him from public memory. The public square, as in the pedestal, as in the statute, as in the name on his school, the former Woodrow Wilson School, as opposed to studying his long career in the academy, in public affairs. But his life and him as

example illustrates my point, meaning more books, fewer naming of buildings and fewer statues. Why? Whittrell Wilson, as you well know, is linked to Nathan Bedford Forrest in the sense that when he screened the birth of a nation in the White House, first film screened, a film which glorified the clan, that was literally a propagandist tool that inspired the image, racial imagination of many in this country in terms of violence. And so the point being here is, it's not merely that, you know, President Wilson screened this film at the White House. I mean, he's literally connected to the founder of the clan. Point one. Point two, it's not merely that he segregated the federal workforce. He campaigned in many ways for the support of least

of some black leaders, and then got to the White House, gratuitously segregated the federal workforce. William Monroe Trotter, from whom the Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at Harvard is named, a pioneering civil rights leader, was kicked out of the White House by Woodrow Wilson because he resisted. He opposed the segregation of the federal workforce. The point being here is Wilson is a complex figure. He's a complex figure. He's a complex figure. who was racist, who did things that were absolutely terrible at Princeton in the White House in other places. He needs to be studied, not commemorated. Again, more books, more biographies, fewer statues, and fewer names on buildings. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator.

I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best. debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. And you get a specially curated Friday weekly Monk Members Only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. George, is there a compromise here that, you know, what Cornell's saying here is it's about a reset. It's about a different series of emphasis that,

you know, we're going to create a society around commemoration and that we're going to look at commemoration in a different way. It's not about hagiography. And that's not why we have statues. And if the statues are about hagiography, then they come down because we just have a more sophisticated view of the past now than we did in the past? The question is how binary is the choice that Cornell is suggesting? That is, do we say we're either going to study and tell stories about, or we're going to have statues? Because, again, what are you going to do about the Jefferson Memorial?

I live in Washington and drive by the Jefferson Memorial constantly. Jefferson was, as she used the word that Cornell used about what it wasn't complex, and tormented by America's racial dilemma, but until he died was a slave owner. It seems to me that it ought to be possible to tell stories, stories that include large blemishes, but stories that lead us to conclude that on balance, this is, an admirable and important figure who ought to be commemorated. So, Cornell, I mean, what do you do? I mean, that's a great example, the Jefferson Memorial.

It's such an iconic piece of statuary in your nation's capital, given this incredible prominence on the mall. How do you approach that in your view? Can you square the circle where you allow that statute to continue? It is hagiography. It is a validation of Jefferson in his life. Is that okay, in your view, of a more nuanced, sophisticated approach to the past? I will know of this, that, of course, Thomas Jefferson being a slave owner, being a man who, with respect to Sally Hemings, because as a slave, she as an enslaved woman, she could not give consent. I would argue that he was a rapist, a sexual assaultor.

Yes, it's a complex figure. That's a tough example, given that his words, Jefferson's words have been invoked by any number of aspirants in terms of freedom and emancipation for decades on in. He's a complex figure. But let me note this. the fact that you have a notable example does not obliterate the necessity for a rule and a conversation. And so, yes, the Jefferson Memorial certainly has inspired a great many people. Not too many years after the March in Washington, I recall my parents taking me as a little boy to the Jefferson Memorial.

So I think I understand and appreciate George's point. But there's a bigger point here, which is to say the rare and notable potential exceptions to the rule don't obliterate the necessity for more rules. And again, more stories, more biographies, more study, more history, less hagiography and blind commemorization and romanticization. Because the fact of the matter is, when we look at the hundreds of statues, across this country and elsewhere. The fact of the matter is we literally have generations of children who are walking past these statues and wondering, what does the presence of the statute say to me and my history?

And what does the absence of stories about my history and a larger, more inclusive history, say about the countries in which we live? That's true with respect to indigenous children. is true with respect to black children, Latino children, but also white children, whose histories are wrapped up in the stories of indigenous children and black children and Latino children. The point being here is, yes, George, I agree that that is a potential exception to rule. But again, we spent a lot of time talking about the exception and not as much time talking about

the rule and the necessity for the rule. When the young Cornell was taken to the Jefferson Memorial, I hope and assume that his gaze was turned up to the words of Jefferson, some of the words of Jefferson that are carved in large letters in the marble there. They include the following. I tremble for my country when I think that God is just. Now, when that is explained to people at the Jefferson Memorial, they understand that he trembled for his country because a just God will put. punish the country for slavery. That's what he was talking about. That's right.

That's right. So that's an example of how you, and it's not quite warts and all, but sort of warts and all. That was the, when Oliver Cromwell was having his portrait painted, he famously told the painter, paint me warts and all.

That's a sort of warts and all memorial to Jefferson because it acknowledges his acknowledgement of a great national failing. I think, Cornell, I don't know what you think about this, but I have a home in South Carolina where Calhoun is everywhere. Calhoun was brilliant, ambitious, skillful, and thoroughly bad. But I should think that African-American young people walking by it in would say, ha, we won, you lost. And take great satisfaction from the fact that he's a relic of a truly lost. cause.

And I really don't think that's a example. Yes. I really don't think that the people in South Carolina today look at that statue and says, good old John Calhoun, someone we want to emulate. They know better. But they say this is really an important part of our past. And there it is. And I think some of the reflection prompted by a statute like that is really quite healthy.

Say, he lost because today in the South, The only established religion in the United States is SEC football. And you go to an SEC football game, say, Mississippi against Alabama, and the head referee is out to be an African-American bossing everyone around, making rules, and look out on that field and you say, my goodness, things have changed a lot for the better. Well, George, I love this example, but perhaps not for the reasons that you might think. So I'm a South Carolina and grew up around testaments to Sir Chodgson, John C. Calhoun's brutal legacy. But as a law student at Yale Law School, I had to walk past Calhoun College.

And it represented to me a legacy of slavery on the campus of Yale University. Decades later, a generation later, a generation of students called. for the renaming of Calhoun College at Yale and for the naming of a new college at Yale, namely after Paulie Murray, the intellectual architect of the Brown v. Board of Education decision ending, legally speaking, are separate but equal. Paulie Murray, who graduated top of a class at Howard got the first JSD from Yale law school, and who inspired Ruth Bader Ginsburg to fight sex discrimination. Here's the point.

The presence of John C. Calhoun College, in many ways muted the voices, muted the stories, obliterated the visions of herons and heroes in our past. And when his name came down, it's not a coincidence, that Paulie Murray's name went up. So these statues are not just. about presence, they're about absence, not just about statements, they're about the muting of voices. And so the harm of these statues is not merely a matter of, you know, romanticizing the past and putting an a historical revision as lens on the past. It's also about, again, muting voices. And the last point I want to make here is when you walk past these satchews,

children don't say our forebears won and their forbear's loss. They say they're still winning because their statutes commemorating their past, their loss cause are standing. And our statues have yet to be erected. Except there is, of course, there is a statue in Richmond to Arthur Ash. So statues have come up. There is a statue not far from the Jefferson Memorial. to Martin Luther King.

So their statues are coming up, and there is a slow, perhaps still inadequate redress underway, but it does reflect the change sensibility. I'd like to just to touch on one bigger picture question before we go to closing statement. It's really to hear you both, because you've been so thoughtful in this debate, about what do we owe the past and what does the past owe us? And maybe to come to you first, George, with this argument. that, you know, the past is the past. These people are no longer alive. Whether we take their statute down or not, it does no harm to them. The present is where we live, how we understand

the present, how we interpret the present. This is what matters. So let's get on with it. And why be hung up with a past that is past that is over? It can never be recovered. Well, except as a Mississippian, William Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance speech, the past has never passed. It's in us. It's in our vocabulary. It's in our architecture. It's in our statues. It's everywhere. What we owe the past is honesty. Honesty about its flaws and honesty about the dilemmas people faced being situated as they were. What irritates me about some of the attacks, the promiscuous attacks on U.S. Grant and Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt, oh, my goodness, on and on, is that there's at work here an exercise in vanity on the part of contemporaries. Someone said, well, I may be only an adjunct lecture on gender studies at a community college, but I'm a better person than Winston Churchill. I got news for you. You're not. And this idea that some of this,

statue topling is an exercise in vanity on the part of the topplers, rather than what we should be seeking, which is an exercise and empathy for people who grappled with moral ambiguities that we did not face, and we cannot be sure that they grappled worse than we would have done. Similar big question for you before we go to closing statements, Cornell. I mean, there is an argument that we are imbuted in a culture of narcissism. And by trying to so consciously and explicitly refashion the past around the values of our present, it may make us feel better.

It may be validating in terms of a world that reflects our views, our assumptions. But isn't it at the end of the day just all so ephemeral? It's so temporary. The next generation will come along and reinterpret our present as their past, you know, by asserting their present over our past. Isn't this all just in some ways pointless?

Well, I have to say here, I don't believe it's pointless and I'm quite optimistic about our ability to come to grips with the past in order to address the challenges of the present. But to go to your earlier point about what do we owe the past and what do we owe the present, And we owe the past, and here I agree with George, we owe the past a commitment to honesty, a commitment to true telling, a commitment to intellectual and moral integrity, which means we have to face it with our eyes open and our hearts open and our minds open. Point one. Point two, I just want to note here, this is not a matter of applying retrospectively the values of the present to the past and ways of the unfair. When we look at the heroes and heroines of yesterday who have been unduly commemorated,

this is notion somehow we're being unfair. We're applying 2021 values to 1850 figures. Well, let us note this. When we think about people like Harriet Tubman, we think about people like W.E.B. Du Bois. When we think about Carter G. Woods, when we think about Frederick Douglass making demands for justice and equality and emancipation and liberation, those values sound like the values of many of the people in the streets in 2021. So in other words, this commitment to human agency,

this commitment to freedom, these aren't modern day notions. And George, I think you will agree with me. I mean, to the extent that Jefferson talked about the innate value of people, right, and being a predicate to rights, the Amago Day embedded in the Declaration of Independence. That sounds a lot like Black Lives Matter. We have innate value and worth. The point being here is that this is not a matter of, like, modern day vanity. This is a matter of, like, modern day commitment to history. So, in other words, when I hear 19-year-olds talking about reconstruction, talking about the civil rights,

movement, talking about the founding hypocrisy and contradictions in our respective histories. What I hear there is a commitment to honesty, a commitment to true-telling, a commitment to history. Thank you, Cornell. Let's move to closing statements in this excellent debate we've been having, a resolution today, be it resolved. The statues must come down. George Will, you've been arguing against the motion.

Let's have your final points in this debate. What I'm really arguing against is a kind of moral puritanism that is self-absorbed and self-regarding that says, I want to make a statement about me, and I'll make a statement about me by my stance towards statues. I'm reminded of Horace Greeley, as the Civil War approach, saying, let the erring sisters, meaning the seceding states, let the erring sisters go in peace so that he, moral Greeley, wouldn't be tainted by association with the South. those abolitionists who said, we will leave the slaves in slavery and accept secession so that we won't be tainted by this moral dilemma of what to do about the South. George Orwell in 1984 famously wrote that he who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past.

I guess my worry is about the question of control. I don't want to control the past. I want the past to be faced as what it was and not controlled for any political agenda, good, better, and different. Thank you, George Will. Similar opportunity, Cornell, for you now to wrap up this debate with a closing statement, summarizing your key points. I begin by invoking the metaphor used by Carter G. Woodson, the father and founder of African-American History Month in this country, and an extraordinary scholar and historian. He used the example of the power of teaching people

or conveying to a man, as he put it, that you're an outcast in society. And the effect of this in terms of a willingness to go through the back door, to stand at the back door, and to insist that there be a back door in a democracy, in our republic. What I hear among activists and advocates all across this country, but also around the world,

is an insistence that their stories be heard, that their voices be heard, that their histories be read and lifted up. And when those histories are lifted up, that also means that many of these statues have to come down so that those stories and histories might be heard, appreciated, listen to, and hated. If we take note of the fact that in many instances, many of our social justice struggles in 2021 are predicated with a deep appreciation of the past. When we hear young people talking about the tragedy of George Floyd's murder, but talking about it in the context of racial injustice in the criminal legal system, talking about the convict leasing system, talking about lynching. They are talking about history with a nuance and with a full appreciation of its power in the present. This is not a narcissistic exercise. This is not an exercise in self-preoccupation.

This is an exercise in nation love, not self-love. It's an exercise in altruism, civic altruism, not narcissism. And because of that, I'm in fact hopeful that as these statutes come down, more histories will be lifted up. and our countries will be advanced in ways they advance the globe and advance humanity. Thank you, Cornell, and thank you, George, for just such a rich, civil, substantive debate on, you know, what has been a lightning rod topic. I think we would all be better off as a society if we could have these types of conversations, sharply different points of view, but listening to each other's arguments, engaging with reason, with history, with civility. So on behalf of the monk debates community, George Cornell, thank you so much for participating in this monk debate.

We enjoyed it very much. Thank you so much. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, George and Cornell, for a fantastic debate that gave me so much to think about. I hope you're also reflecting on the important issues and ideas that were raised in this debate. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email.

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