The statues are toppling and Gone With the Wind has been (temporarily) removed from TV. On Thursday morning came news that a cultural reckoning has finally come even to the packaging of pancake mix: the “mammy” stereotype labelling PepsiCo’s Aunt Jemima products will – thankfully – be no more.
Everywhere, brands, individuals, organisations and institutions are rushing out #BlackLivesMatter solidarity statements. They should. The president of the United States may wish to defend the naming of US military installations after racist, incompetent traitors to his own republic, but a thundering majority of Americans are behind #BlackLivesMatter and pressure for a name change is being led by the military itself.
The death of George Floyd at the hands of police inspired what is indisputably a mass uprising across modern democracy. The footage provoked human outrage but also existential horror, and with it a powerful – physical – instinct to act. March. Kneel. Chant. Rename everything. Tear down the statues. Pull the movies. Ban the flags. Do anything you can, immediately, that might – just might – help the terrifying violence to stop.
There are sophisticated considerations being made by critics and activists about how to frame and manage a vast archive of texts, such as Gone With the Wind, that inherently propagandise racism or anything else straddling the spectrum of dangerous prejudice. Without giving into censorship, it’s time to redeploy the classification systems we already use for film, television, video games and other cultural products to identify these artefacts of our culture in a context that’s honest about their nature. Alongside the pre-broadcast information that a film may contain “adult themes”, I’d suggest additional warnings describing “deeply racist drivel that purports damaging stereotypes, misrepresents history and lies to you about humanity itself” is long overdue.
But what to do with the statuary is another question, given that while monuments continue to occupy public space they are not artefacts of a past – they proclaim the state-sanctioned values of the present. Hence when the allies marched into Berlin in the second world war, no one was defending “heritage’’ value in keeping Nazi eagles flying. One finds it unfathomable to imagine the survivors of Ba’athist repression comfortable with Saddam Hussein-themed decorations.
I’ve criticised Australia’s own monumentalising before, and the enduring supremacies conveyed when women are half of the population yet 3% of the statues. Recently, Paul Daley presented a chilling list of local memorials that commemorate massacres of Indigenous Australians and celebrate racists.
Representation matters, and the question demanded by the moment is why there are any Australians out in self-conscious nationalistic dress-ups “protecting statues” of those who don’t represent the modern Australia that they live in. Dare I suggest that if they wish to celebrate true Australian achievement in statuary, they drop a dollar into the GoFundMe fundraiser for a statue of Nova Peris OAM? Not only would they be commemorating the first Indigenous Australian to win Olympic gold – an athlete who reached Olympic level in two separate sports and a community leader who became a federal senator – they’d be making an active contribution to helping Australia’s public monuments look a bit more like, you know, Australia.
The time is now not merely to celebrate the real achievements of Australian diversity, but to interrogate how racism flourishes in white Australia because we keep role modelling the examples of white racists.
It’s 2020, and this country yet heaves with memorials to Cook, Macquarie, Batman and Mitchell; men who defined “civilisation” to themselves and others by participating in – let’s not euphemize this – land theft and race murder. But it took until 2019 for a statue to be erected to a white Australian whose example represents the far more worthy – and familiar – shared Australian values of fairness, solidarity and humility.
By Lakeside Stadium, Melbourne, stands a statue of Peter Norman, the Australian 1968 Olympic 200m silver medallist who stood in solidarity with black American athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith on their medal dais, wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge as they gave their era-defining black power “salute”. At a moment of his greatest personal triumph, he ceded his spotlight to a more noble cause – and was ostracised from the Australian sporting community as a result.
And yet Carlos said of him: “There’s no one in the nation of Australia that should be honoured, recognised, appreciated more than Peter Norman for his humanitarian concerns, his character, his strength and his willingness to be a sacrificial lamb for justice.” Both Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral.
It’s conspicuous that Aboriginal artists like Richard Bell have long memorialised Norman. Nova Peris herself says he “epitomised human decency and his stand for human equality immortalised him with that iconic picture. A stadium named in his honour has my full support.”
There is a statue to Smith and Carlos’s salute at San Jose State University, where Norman’s own space at the dais is left empty. It was his own suggestion to keep the space empty. He wanted visitors to the site to show they would also stand beside them.
In this time where white Australians are grappling with their own role and responsibility in accounting for racial injustice, to learn Norman’s name and model his behaviour is a critical cultural instruction.