The Colston in your Backyard: Performative Affirmation and Allyship
By: Luke Svasti
Tags: Social Change, Edward Colston, Sociology, Politics And Protest, Revolution

Luke Svasti

13/6/2020

Credit: Max Foster et. al, June 8 2020, CNN.com

I’ve been following the News about the pulling-down of Colston’s Statue in Bristol recently. The statue was tossed into a river earlier this week by a crowd stirred up by those protesting and marching in solidarity with crowds in the US. I have to admit that until I heard it, I had no idea who Edward Colston was: apparently, he was a big-wig in the Royal African Company, responsible for a lot of the slave trade in the late 17th Century. He was also a renowned philanthropist, donating to schools, churches and charities in and around Bristol.

I couldn’t help but notice that most of my friends in the UK who were sharing and cheering the news were…. White (or had some affinity toward White Presentation) folk. None of my fellow minorities had shared it. The tearing-down of the statue is no doubt, an act that ought to be celebrated and cheered. But my fear is that in about a month or so, the act will be largely forgotten. For the most part, I’m guessing that the act of tearing down the Colston Statue will be largely relegated to a crummy footnote in a couple of text books and journals, and the Colston name and association will still be well-rooted into the social and historical fabric of Bristol. Little plaques by old ruins and almshouses will still bear his name. A couple of galleries will still have his portrait. And in most of the middle of England, Colston’s name will likely still be associated more with a chaotic crowd and philanthropism than it will be with Britain’s entire complicity in the slave trade.

And meanwhile, a Black man will walk out of an interview wondering if it was his credentials or the color of his skin that kept the job out of his hands. An East-Asian man will be having pints with friends, but quietly wonder why it was that only he was asked about the coronavirus situation “at home”. And in some of the posher parts of London, where the iconic buses are celebrated as a real British icon, an Indian woman will wonder why it was that the only person who made space for her on a bus filled with single-sitters was a Latina woman, with bags on her eyes from another 12-hour shift.

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Two years ago, I found a statue of Colston in my backyard.

My first year in the UK, I arrived, from New York, as a fresh graduate student at Oxford, with my cat in tow. I was forced to rent a room in a house in a village far outside of Oxford simply to find something that was pet-friendly. This small village was like the village of Sandford as portrayed in the movie Hot Fuzz with Simon Pegg. In Hot Fuzz, Pegg’s character, PC Angel, is reassigned from London to a sleepy village; he finds a village that is quaint and welcoming by day but far more sinister at night. What resounded with me was the comical introductions that the village foisted upon PC Angel. It is often insinuated by the townsfolk that PC Angel, with his “London-ways” of policing, will threaten the ability of Sandford to win the village of the year award; his insistence of strict policing will mean increased arrest numbers. Nobody in Sandford says this to his face openly on the first day, however. It’s always phrased along the lines of how important the prize is to the villagers, and how PC Angel ought to respect the prize of Village of the Year as well.

Minorities will recognize this as “code-switching” or the “politics of presentation and respectability”. It’s like when you move into a neighborhood, and the nice Grandma two doors down says with a saccharine grin and that weird tone: “It’s a nice neighborhood; it’s a quiet neighborhood”.

She’s not telling you that it’s simply a quiet street. She’s saying that in order for you to join in, to be affirmed as part of the social fabric, you’ll have to be as quiet as the rest of the street. She’s saying that she thinks that you’re loud. Maybe this is from the color of your skin, or the friends that you had help move items in. Maybe it’s from the guitar case that you carried in. You might even note that she didn’t say the same to the two other White folk who live with you, who only moved in a week before you. The girl from France that lives above you was even offered cake and a tour of the village at some point.

But if you dare to traipse around on your own tour of the village, you might, say, come across a church that has only White folk. You might come across a pub where everyone will look at you and ask you where you’re from, but they’ll ask only you. And on your way around the village, you might even stub your toe on some stone, only to be stopped and greeted with a glaring Ni Hao Ma from a passing villager as you rest your foot.

That’s no stone you’ve just tripped on. That’s the partially uncovered head of the still-buried statue of Colston, sticking out from the ground.

And the rest of village smelt like cow-shit.

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I want to tell you about the happiest day I had in the village.

It was the day that I uncovered the rest of the statue of Colston that lay in my driveway.

It was a parking dispute. I lived with 2 others — a woman from France, a man from Italy. Both were White, and honestly quite a good bunch outside of where the bills and the dishes were concerned. And like any other modern multi-adult household, we needed parking space — we each had our own lives, and our own cars. If you’ve been in England before, you’ll realize that this is a problem — many areas don’t have much parking space, and even new developments built only one or two decades ago feature single household parking spaces. The unwritten rule was that one of us could use the attached garage, and the other two could use this little side street overflow area.

The garage was a pain to get to, and so the side overflow area was used mostly by me, who ended up driving fairly regularly. I also used to work weird hours as a grad student, driving in at 7 pm and working through the night. And then one night, one of my neighbors came running out.

He was polite at first, but his dropped the act as the conversation (mainly a one-sided demand) went on. He wanted me to stop parking in the overflow area. He said that where I parked (the only place available due to my working hours) blocked his wife from parking. I explained that she could fully park in hers if she followed DVLA guidelines of reverse parking. He said that she was a nurse in the nearby hospital, who worked long hours as well, and being tired meant she could only park head in. I meekly protested. There were no rights to the overflow area, anyone could use it. I wasn’t blocking her — the weird angles of the driveway only meant that she’d have to stop, do a three point turn and then back in — an extra two minutes at the most. Some days, I backed in myself.

And then Colston showed up. I didn’t realize his name at that time; he still goes by many names. Colston. Trump. Calhoun. Sheriff Stuckey. But it didn’t matter what he was called this time.

The man flew into a rage, accusing me of insulting the honor of his wife. Said that I was forcing his wife to work harder. The statue of Colston in my backyard was quickly being unearthed; bricks and rubble flying away, but not fast enough. What would it take to finally excavate it?

As the man raged and spewed threats (I know people on the town council, I won’t be responsible for a brick through your car window, My kids sometimes scratch peoples’ cars and I can’t control them….), the wife showed up. She didn’t speak much, but what she said made me happy.

She said that I disgusted her and had made her life harder simply because she had to back in to park.

She said that I was a poor driver like the rest of my “race”.

She said that she hoped Brexit would happen sooner, and then I could be deported. And then she left.

So that’s what the parking dispute really is about.

The man stood in silence for a second. He threw some more words out, made some angry faces. But his words had no more meaning, because his secret was out. The English pride themselves on being able to say a lot in very little as compared to the Americans. The English are polite only because it allows what it left unsaid to fester and wound, like a cut that just won’t close, an ailment that can’t be diagnosed. But here, the hemorrhage itself was secondary to the disease. When you fill in the gaps yourself of what is left unsaid, you do the wounding to yourself. It just hurts that much more.

The wound was well worth the diagnosis. The disease was a gangrenous rot buried in my backyard. The statue of Colston had been fully excavated. This made it a Happy day.

They never asked any of my White neighbors or housemates to move their cars. Only me.

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I recount this story only because the of the questions begged from the story of Colston’s swan dive into the Bristol Harbor. What’s next, I wonder?

Not much, I fear.

It’s easy to tear down a bronze statue. I don’t know how, exactly, but I’m sure you can do it with a few friends, a good pick up, and maybe a couple of hacksaws. I don’t know — essays are more my thing, rather than acts of public revisionism. The harder thing to do, though, is to first unearth and then destroy the statues of Colston that are strewn across the landscape and history of Britain. Some of these statues are very small; some of them sit by your mantle and behind your fine china cupboards. You’ll only be reminded of these when you bring home a new partner who looks a little different from Mummy and Daddy, or when your uncle sits across from you at Christmas and asks what value is there, really, in Gender Studies since women could always just be stronger and less tarty? Some of these statues of Colston might even look at you with eyes of love, as they ask your friends from faraway places whether or not they’re excited to be returning home permanently after their degrees in that strangest of tones. Some of these Colston statues will have very warm hands and very soft bodies, bodies not made out of bronze. They will be in bed, next to you, and as you both cool down together the statue might even have soft lips, lips that ask questions like “I just like the girls, the boys, the people where you’re from. I like them better, you know?” And in that moment, they will go back to being as hard and as cold as bronze.

And some of these statues will gaze back at you in the quiet lobby mirrors that will adorn your first job’s workspace. And even as you turn and walk away, feeling pride at your first paycheck, your first project, your first business-class adventure, the statue will smile in silence in the mirror dimension as you forget that time you could hand in an assignment late and still get away whilst your classmate, working three jobs and navigating visa requirements, fell behind. Or that time when your skin meant a warning for expired tags while somebody else got impounded. Or that other time, when you got to tour the new office and the new village while somebody else had to go because there was “no more space”.

The statue will keep smiling long after you’re gone, still.

The statue will be sure to smile at your kids too.

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At Oxford, the current statue’s name is Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes was a man, just like Colston. He lived, he prospered for and with the Empire, and then he died. In between, he took and he gave. What he took allowed him to give, but he took a lot. And he took from people that looked and spoke differently from him.

The people that want the statue to go name the movement, “Rhodes Must Fall”.

Rhodes must. But so too should many, many other statues.

Including the ones in your backyard.

I’m a sociologist, and the inside joke amongst historians and sociologists is that sociologists are like “very bad” historians. I’m a bad historian because I insist on living and writing in the now. I also have ADHD, and a very bad working memory, and will trip over the tiniest of details. All this to say, I don’t care about the history of Rhodes. It isn’t so much so that the history of Rhodes — and the pain and suffering that he caused — don’t matter. But it is more so that the particular history of Rhodes bears little consequence to the oppression that still lies, deeply woven into the hegemonic Empire that we still live in today. And I raise this only because of the peculiar types of comments that arise over the issue of Rhodes in Oxford. Some say that history matters, and use that to defend the statues’ existence. Some say that history matters, and use that to want to topple the statue.

I care. I do care. I care every time my friends get assaulted and pushed away. I care every time we go hungry. I care every time a visa gets denied, a parking dispute goes awry, an arrest ends in a death. I care every time a Black and Brown body falls, when flesh meets pavement. I care when Queer bones are broken, when journalist skulls are broken. I care when our soft limbs, our beating chests full of pride and love meet the harshness of a steel baton, or the speed of a rubber bullet. There are many more statues, as many statues as there are people. Most of them invisible. They rise up, like so many thorny rose bushes in the quiet of Summer, whenever it comes time to skip a line at the museum, whenever there’s only one vacancy at a company and no quotas left. It comes up in parks when there are no more open Barbeque grills. It comes up whenever it’s the end of the month and that Thin Blue Line needs to make its arrest numbers.

And so, my take on this is: toppling a statue costs nothing, but nothing is what we’ll all collectively get, if there is no radical impetus to help us along. If White people don’t take the time for introspection to carefully weed out the statues that are buried in the quiet of the suburbs and villages, then what we’ll end up with is what we’ve gotten all along, not much more. This is not to say that felling a statue is not a step in the right direction. But care more for the living than the dead. Care more about softness of life than the hardness of bronze or the arbitrariness of a symbol. And step up — be honest about the Colstons in your life. The ones that may have given you your life even.

But I never know what, or how to care whenever a White person asks me to opine about Rhodes; expecting praise in return. It is the right thing to do, but it has always been more than the statue.

Fell your statue, or don’t. I only know that millions more remain, buried in the cold Earth.