It’s easy for me to pontificate about this … I’m a white, born-to-Irish-immigrants working-class-made-good-through-education, male Briton — short of having been born to wealth, it’d be hard to be more privileged than me.
But …
I was coincidentally just reading an article by (of all people) Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian …
As ever, the BTL comments section contains a wealth of information and thought-provoking material, including the discussion of the merits of installing such statues in museums.
I wonder though …
How many people go to museums in their spare time at all, let alone on a day trip to somewhere new? How many kids go to museums in their spare time? Not many, I’d suggest.
Moreover, it might, perversely, serve the agenda of the likes of Johnson et al to have them hidden away.
As I said, I’m privileged, so thinking about this in the abstract comes easy to me, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be more useful in terms of teaching everyone … most especially the privileged … if, instead, they were to be restored to their original settings but with information about the darker side of their history installed along with them. That way, they aren’t simply whitewashed out of History by being hidden away in dusty museums … leaving only the positive legacy (schools, alms houses, whatever) visible … but there for bored teens with nowhere else to go and nothing better to do than read the plaques to while away another dull Saturday/Sunday afternoon (which the majority of them aren’t, I suspect, going to spend in a museum even if it’s raining).
And, as a bonus, it’d probably give bigots even more reason to suffer apoplexy and froth ineffectually with ill-founded indignation. Tey’re gonna do it even if the statues are installed in museums anyway, so why not shove it in their faces? They might even learn something by osmosis too.
</just a passing thought>
