What is a statues purpose?

What is a statues purpose?

Statues convey and perpetuate honor. Consequently, no matter how important their historical role, villains simply do not merit statues, nor do they merit having their names associated with lakes or streets or schools or military bases.

What is the relationship between statues and history?

Statues can teach us about history, but they do not convey some immutable truth from the past. Instead, they are symbolic of the fixed ideas of a specific community regarding its past, as captured at a particular point in time.

What do statues tell us about history?

They represent what people in the Past chose to celebrate and memorialise, they do not represent history. Indeed, teaching history is almost never the reason why they are erected. Instead, statues in public spaces since Antiquity have most typically been used to represent power and authority.

Why are Confederate statues being removed?

So why are Confederate statues being removed? For many people, especially minorities, these statues are a reminder of a very painful past, and glorify the leaders who fought to preserve slavery and other forms of racial discrimination.

Why we should keep Confederate statues standing?

Further, removing Confederate statues amounts to whitewashing our history, turning our heads away from the inconvenient truths of our past. We should let them stand and use them to remind ourselves of what we are and are not, the cost our forebears paid for our freedom and to educate our children.

Why should the Confederate statues remain?

The most common argument I have heard about why the confederate statues should remain are assertions that their removal equates to erasing history – that’s an inherently insincere and shallow argument. The confederate statues weren’t commissioned to remember history, they were created to distort it.

Which Confederate statues were removed?

Academic commentary. Alfred Brophy, a professor of law at the University of Alabama, argued the removal of the Confederate statues “facilitates forgetting”, although these statues were “re-inscribed images of white supremacy”. Brophy also stated that the Lee statue in Charlottesville should be removed.