Reference: The statues must go: Brown should not celebrate colonialism (browndailyherald.com)
Yikes, we thought Brown University was a good school with smart students. Well, sorry to disabuse those of you who might have once thought the same. In a recent op-ed in the Brown student newspaper, several woke students with a lot of time on their hands penned an explanation for why Decolonization at Brown (DAB), a student group to which the writers apparently belong, think it’s a good idea to eliminate campus statues of Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
DAB is “a student group committed to reimagining Brown by decolonizing our academics, spaces and relationships. One of our current initiatives is to remove and replace the two copies of Roman statues, those of Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, on Brown’s campus. . . . we are calling for the statues’ removal because they celebrate ongoing colonialism in the United States and idealize white, Western civilization — both of which continue to cause harm at Brown today.”
As you can imagine, colonialism in the US is viewed by these students as nothing more than than “the violent displacement and occupation of Native communities and land by Europeans and others. The 13 original colonies were created by European settlers through the killing of Native peoples and the systematic dispossession of Native land. These settlers did not leave following the Revolutionary War. Instead, they remained on Native land, claiming it as their own. Today, Americans continue to perpetuate this process. The 13 colonies have expanded to 50 states and many territories — an expansion made possible by further displacement, genocide and the continued denial of Native rights. This is what we mean when we refer to colonialism in the United States.“
Brown evidently doesn’t require homework before mouthing off in writing. Even a cursory review of pre-colonial American Indian culture and activities would show these kids that there is no monolithic American Indian. Rather, those peoples were made up of hundreds of tribes, some settled, some nomadic within certain bounds, many of which warred on and murdered their neighbors and took their land from them, and didn’t give it back until and unless it in turn was taken from them by some other tribe or federation, and so on and so forth over the years – very much like European history and the history of everywhere else on the planet. To demonize the white colonists for doing exactly the same thing is pretty hypocritical. And the American Indians were every bit a vicious as the colonists, if not more so; the colonists, at any rate, didn’t come over with scalping the inhabitants in mind.
Therefore, continues the DAB dogma, “within this broader context, the two Roman-style statues at Brown are harmful because they celebrate the ongoing occupation of Native land by the United States and replace Native histories with monuments to white, Western civilization.” This is because “the Europeans who began colonization in North America cited Ancient Rome as a guiding example for their colonial mission on Native American lands. Later, the founders of the United States would do the same, claiming Ancient Rome as part of a lineage of European civilization. This idea of a shared Western civilization led European settlers and their descendants to set up replicas of Roman statues across the United States.”
Therefore, they have to go because their “presence shapes space at Brown and forces students to interact with monuments to colonialism and whiteness . . . . our initiative aims to remove the public celebration of colonial occupation and white superiority within the monuments of our landscape.”
There’s a lot more of this nonsense in their excessively long op-ed piece, but we won’t tire you with it here. But we do have to say that the scope of their ambition is admirable, though it’s a shame they haven’t put it to better use. Yes, it isn’t just America that is run by white racists, it is all European countries, and presumably all white countries from the beginning of time. Why they only went back to the Romans and not further back to the Greeks is something of a puzzle, but we assume that must be because they only took History of Western Civilization II and not I. Could be they never even heard of the Greeks. Not to mention that the concept of “white supremacy” wasn’t even a concept until hundreds of years after the height of the Roman empire.
But you have to be careful what you wish for. Take their “thinking” (if you can call it that) to its logical conclusion and their view seems to be that every white in the country should have to go back to Europe, every black back to Africa, every Hispanic back to south of the border (unsure we are whether or not Hispanics count as white for these purposes), every Asian back to China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, etc. After all, the whites didn’t leave after they defeated the British in the American Revolution, as these kids think they should have.
Call it a foot in the door, the thin edge of the wedge, pick your cliche, but if statues of Romans come down because they celebrate white colonialism, then it isn’t a long step to advocating for largely depopulating the country and leaving only those who call themselves Native Americans, even though, as these Brown students fail to realize, so-called “native” or “indigenous” Americans aren’t any more native or indigenous that you or us or probably 99% of Brown students – we and/or our forebears all came from someplace else, they just got here earlier. An anthropology course in human migration might serve these kids well.
So, who’s in favor of ponying up and cancelling these kids’ student loans!?