By Emeka Aniagolu
For the past two years or more, but certainly since the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit and still hitting the United States very hard; President Donald Trump has been floundering around in search of a “wedge-issue” he can use to consolidate his so-called “political-base” in the coming election; a political-base, reputedly made up of a motley lot of: white “nativists” (an odd appellation for such white Americans whose forefathers and mothers, were immigrants from Europe to America; and who perpetrated genocide against the real natives—Native Americans); garden-variety racists, masquerading as “Christian Fundamentalists,” rural and/or small-town, uneducated and barely educated, white working class or hardly working white folks; who tend to react to racist cues, like a bull does to a Matador’s muleta—his red cape!
Now, President Trump and his co-conspirators, think they have found the perfect wedge-issue in the recent wave of African Americans and other morally conscious Americans—of all races and ethnic groups—agitating and demanding that the public statues of white American racists and mass-murderers in America’s blood-soaked history, be taken down.
For anyone familiar with the history of the United States, Donald Trump’s race-baiting tactics, will come as little or no surprise.
It has been the fallback playbook of many United States Presidents, going all the way back to President Andrew Johnson (1808 – 1875), the 17th President of the United States, who assumed that office following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, on April 15, 1865.
He was Lincoln’s Vice President at the time of his assassination. I provide analytical detail of that phenomena and many other contingent issues in my book: The Hood & the Swastika: A Comparative Study of the Ku Klux Klan & the Nazi Regime (2016).
President Johnson was in favor of restoring the former Confederate states to the Union, without providing any protection for former slaves.
This led to a major conflict within the Republican-dominated Congress, bringing about Johnson’s impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1868.
He squeaked through with an acquittal in the Senate, by one vote! Andrew Johnson was an avowed racist. He owned slaves and was supportive of James K. Polk’s pro-slavery policies.
As military governor of Tennessee, he convinced Abraham Lincoln to exempt that territory from the Emancipation Proclamation; Lincoln’s January 1, 1863 proclamation that supposedly “freed” African Americans from slavery, though the American Civil War will not end with Union victory over the Confederate states, until April 9, 1865.
And speaking of the metaphor of the Matador, his red muleta and the bull, which I employ in this piece; there is a palpable irony: first, the bull cannot actually see color!
It merely reacts to the Matador taunting it by waving his cape in front of it, regardless of the color of the cape! A write-up in Business Insider, observed that: “. . . A Matador’s cape is called a muleta and they have a good, but gruesome reason for their color.
You see, bulls can’t see red. Like all cattle, there are color blind to it. Then, why the hate? Bulls are irritated by the movement of the cape.
They see the waving fabric and charge, regardless of [its] color. In fact, the muleta is only used in the final 3rd of a bullfight. The Matador uses it to hide his sword, and he pierces the bull as it charges past. The cape is traditionally red to mask the bloodstains. That’s one way to save on dry cleaning.”1
In yet another irony, though I am no fan of President Trump, whom I think is unfit to be President of the world’s worst “Banana Republic,” let alone the United States of America; I agree with him on one issue: the absolute importance and necessity of History—good and bad.
After all, history, by definition, is: “a branch of knowledge dealing with past events. A continuous, systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc, usually written as a chronological account [or] chronicle: i.e. a history of France; a medical history of a patient.”2
Consequently, it can be safely asserted that the compilation, conservation and transmission (teaching) of the history of a people or nation is not only necessary—from one-generation-to-the next—but ought to be seen and treated as indispensable as well.
However, there is a yawning and unbridgeable gap between the compilation, conservation and transmission or teaching of history—contemporaneously and for posterity—which as I noted in the foregoing is important and necessary; and racist triumphalism of the form of erecting public statues to well-known and well-documented racists and mass murderers!
Just because the victimized peoples of such racist mass murderers lacked the power to do anything about those offensive public statues all these many years, must not be mistaken for their intellectual and moral acquiescence or the practice being right, fair or acceptable.
If the erection of statues of such individuals in public spaces is purely for historical conservation and fidelity, why are there no public statues to Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, W.E. B Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and so many other African Americans, who did remarkable things, albeit against the racist system of slavery and post-Civil War America’s system of racial segregation and discrimination; and who are, inextricably, also part and parcel of American history?
African Americans fought tooth and nail to get Martin Luther King, Jr’s Memorial built in Washington DC, and, ultimately, the bill for its erection, was paid for by African Americans in collaboration with private corporations, not from the coffers of the government of the United States!
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington DC, which was opened in 2011, is the fourth such memorial in Washington DC to honor a non-president and the first to honor a man of color. It cost $120 million and the organizers are said to be still trying to raise the last $5 million!
There is a reason the statues of Adolf Hitler, Herman Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and other monsters of the Nazi regime, do not grace the public spaces of post-World War II Germany, even though the Nazi-era is and will always be, an important and indispensable part and parcel of German history.
The American government, under the George W. Bush Administration; after winning the shooting- war following its illegal invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; presided over the pulling down of the larger-than-life statue of Saddam Hussein in Bagdad by a celebrating Iraqi mob.
Why did the American government not insist Saddam Hussein’s statue remain standing, in the interest of Iraqi history?
Whether it is Apartheid-era South Africa’s public statues of racist, white imperialists and colonizers; the colonial period of King Leopold’s Congo; Pol Pot’s Cambodia; Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Idi Amin’s Uganda; genocidal past presidents of the United States or former Confederate generals; who did terrible things to hundreds of thousands and millions of “indigenous peoples” around the world, including the United States; as well as enslaved Africans in the United States, for 300 years of Chattel Slavery; belong to the history books, videos and museums; not as statues in the public spaces of those nation-states; which, by their presence, suggest they are not just being remembered as part and parcel of the history of the given country; but are being publicly celebrated and venerated as “national heroes!”
That is symbolic racist triumphalism, in-your-face glorification of the pain and suffering, domination and cruelty, such individuals inflicted on their victims and their descendants; not merely the preservation and teaching of national history!
Nobody is denying that such individuals lived, walked this earth and did important things—good and/or bad—in the history of the United States and other places in the world. But to glorify and venerate them in the public spaces of the relevant nation-states, in the context of the changed moral order of things in our contemporary world; is either to live in a fool’s paradise—in complete denial—or to be inordinately insensitive or plain racist!
The United States is not, cannot be, should not be and must not be an exception. If it does, it will lose its place as one of the world’s moral arbiters; and slip into a state of a regressive and calcified power, trapped in a disowned past! It is just as well, and might well be the mysterious hand of God at work; that a new, powerful, and perhaps even, definitive political Ad, has just been released in the United States by “Republicans Against Trump;” which concisely, methodically, marshals point-after-point of why Donald Trump should vacate the premises of the White House, ASAP!
Perhaps, the day is not too far off, when the official name of the residence of the President of the United States—the White House—will, itself, be renamed: The “Rainbow House;” to reflect the multiracial and multicultural caravanserai the United States and its history actually is!
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Prof. Aniagolu was a professor of African and African American History and Politics at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio, for thirty-six years.
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