“ You can’t” John Hume’s father told him “eat a flag”. He might have added “Or a statue”, and in both cases he’d have been entirely right. Except that flags and statues aren’t made to be eaten, they’re made to represent invisible values and allegiances. They are symbolic of our deeply-held beliefs. So from that point of view, the toppling of the statues of slave-owners and slave-dealers makes perfect sense.
However, there is a danger that we may focus too sharply on these symbols. If I remove a flag, does that change attitudes? We saw during the flag protest at Belfast City Hall how it in fact inflamed passions, deepened divisions. And when those passions cooled, had anything changed beyond the presence or absence of the Union flag over Belfast City Hall? Nope. Life continued with all its problems and prejudices.
There’s a danger that those committed to the Black Lives Matter will similarly go chasing a distraction. OK, OK, Virginia – not a distraction, but ultimately not something that goes to the core of the problem. The problem is the thinking of white people in the US, in the UK and in Ireland. If every statue connected with slavery were toppled – including that of the great Irish nationalist figure John Mitchel – would that change the number of black people in business, in education, in finance, in the law? Nope.
As for the withdrawal of the movie Gone With The Wind, on the grounds that it presents a picture of contented slaves, I can see why people might object to that depiction, but I would strongly resist the consigning of the movie to a dusty store-room or its modern equivalent. Just as I’d strongly resist the tinkering with the writings of Mark Twain, who in his novel Huckleberry Finn has a character called Nigger Jim.
If you’ve just collapsed at my use of the word Nigger rather than the n-word, I think that’s as dumb as people who once wrote “D—!”when they meant “Damn!”, “G-d!” when they meant “God!” and “F***!” when they meant “Fuck!” That’s how people in Twain’s day talked, and it’s a falsification of the past, not to mention interference with a work of art, to remove the word “Nigger” from his novel.
At the heart of the matter is our temptation to judge the past by the standards of today. Not fair. People then dressed differently, talked differently, and saw the world in a different way. Which is exactly what people will say of us, one hundred years from now. What’s that, Virginia? There’ll be no need for them to change anything a century from now, because we are so enlightened? Mmmm. Pass the smelling salts.
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