The Statue of Bigotry
Liberty Enlightening the World as a Very Bitter Joke

In the eighteenth century, Europe and North America underwent a profound intellectual and cultural transformation. It was called the "Enlightenment." The Enlightenment was the culmination of a growing humanism that had bloomed centuries before during the Renaissance. As never before, the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century valued human reason and human dignity that they came to see as a common bond among all the diverse peoples and nations of the world. This revaluation of values inspired grand political revolutions such as the American Revolution of the British colonists in 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution was very intentionally carried out under the banner of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" — the Enlightenment values of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood. 

In many ways the Enlightenment was a response to the cultural diversity that had been discovered by Europeans as they carried out far-flung colonization of the globe. David Graeber and David Wengrow, for example, have argued that native American statesmen had a direct influence on British colonists that significantly contributed the way Europeans embraced civil equality and democracy (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity). However, as Enlightenment values manifested themselves in constitutional revolutions, it was apparent that cultural diversity within nations such as France and the United States presented a great challenge to governance and social cohesion. This resulted in a transformation the idealistic notion of universal siblinghood among human beings into the explicit declaration of universal human rights. 

In his Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, written in 1770, Abbé Guillaume–Thomas Raynal defined a right to "natural liberty." The Declaration of Independence of 1776 then spoke of "certain unalienable Rights" among which is found Raynal's conception of natural liberty. Promulgated in the pivotal year of 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in France along with the Bill of Rights in America enshrined specific itemized universal rights in the respective republican constitutions. Inspired by the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, and the defeat of the Confederacy during the American Civil War — Frenchman Édouard de Laboulaye conceptualized in 1865 his masterwork, Liberty Enlightening the World — the "Statue of Liberty" — fraught with symbolic meaning alluding to Enlightenment ideals. This Franco-American monument — dedicated in 1886 — was later inscribed in 1903 with a sonnet penned by Emma Lazarus exploring the expressive dimensions of this "new colossus," measuring 151 feet tall atop her 154 foot pedestal. The tallest structure in the Western hemisphere, she would stand for centuries — a literal beacon — welcoming the world as she towers above the port of entry into New York Harbor. It the midst of her musings, Lazarus christened the statue "Mother of Exiles:"

THE NEW COLOSSUS

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

With the close of World War Two, the United States became the hegemonic imperial force in the west — as one of two "superpowers." And the US championed the promise of a United Nations — which was founded with the signing of its Charter in San Francisco in June of 1945. The hope of the UN was that humanity would never again experience a world war, and that humanity would never again allow atrocities against human dignity to be perpetrated in the name of ethno-national supremacy or otherwise. In 1948 the General Assembly of the UN proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Enlightenment ideals of universal human rights that had been written into the constitutions of France and the United States would now be upheld under the judicial authority of the International Court of Justice and by enforcement carried out by UN member states. It was a grand vision. 

In those early years of the United Nations, the delegates sent to the General Assembly must have drawn inspiration from that vision. And in 1952 — when they first travelled to their newly built permanent headquarters on the island of Manhattan — those delegates who had to in those days sail past the "New Colossus," as they entered the harbor of New York at the end of their trans-Atlantic sea voyage — I imagine they saw an avid vision of Lady Liberty truly "enlightening the world." 

James Baldwin — who as a young student abroad was confronted with being an unwilling and desperately confused American ambassador to Paris, but who at length truly found himself as a trans-Atlantic "commuter," sailing back and forth between the Normandy port city of Le Havre and Manhattan — of which he had undoubtedly always been a capable and authentic cultural ambassador — iconic New Yorker, black, queer, ultimately lauded novelist and essayist — when this native son of America would cruise past the "Mother of Exiles" circa 1952 he, however — evidently — did not see it that way — not the way my imagined enthusiastic delegates to the UN saw Liberty Enlightening the World. In a 1985 filmed interview he was asked, "What is liberty?" Baldwin had this to say:  

"Oh, wow. That's quite a question. That, I suppose, almost nobody really asks themselves that question. Well, I can always quote the Declaration: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.' —And the moment I do that, I'm in trouble again — because, obviously, I'm not included in that — in that pronouncement — 'that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'"

Baldwin sighs deeply, looking downward.

"What is Liberty?" he asks rhetorically.

He continues to stare thoughtfully downward. After some time, he looks back up into the camera.

"Liberty is, the individual passion or will to be free. But this passion, this will, is always contradicted by the necessities of the state — everywhere — for as long as we've heard of mankind — as long as we've heard of states. I don't know if it'll be like that forever. It — for a black American — for a black inhabitant of this country — the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke — meaning nothing to us."

Ken Burns conducted this interview while making his documentary simply titled The Statue of Liberty. The last paragraph of Balwin's answer — the part specifically about the titular subject — did not make the cut for that 1985 film. 

But in a 2022 short, The Mythology of Monuments, Burns included the whole thing — placing Baldwin's assessment in the context of a contentious contemporary debate about memorials and markers. Burns draws attention to a statue standing just 16 feet tall. Even adding the 60 feet of the marble column it sits atop it is dwarfed by Lady Liberty. But the diminutive icon is noteworthy, because it was erected in 1884 in the center of what was then called "Place du Tivoli" in New Orleans, and was dedicated on George Washinton's birthday of that year — just months before the colossal statue of Lady Liberty had been fully pre-fabricated in Paris, and presented to the minister of the United States on Independence Day. The effigy of Louisiana was no "new colossus." And it was no statue of liberty. The bronze atop the marble column was in the likeness of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

And the figure at the center of what became Lee Circle was indicative of a trend now nearly a century and a half in the making. Burns explains:

"During the 10 years in which the Statue of Liberty was constructed, 20 Confederate monuments were erected across the United States in places as large as New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina — as small as towns like Quitman, Georgia, and Marianna, Florida. And since then, hundreds more have been built — the most recent in 2015. These monuments were efforts to reimpose white supremacy and rewrite history. They are racism memorialized in our public spaces.

"When we look at the Statue of Liberty and think about the ideals it's meant to represent, we cannot forget the larger context in the country at the time. The Jim Crow era in the South was just beginning. The Chinese Exclusion Act, a piece of legislation explicitly barring any Chinese laborers from entering the country, was in full swing. And more than half the American population couldn't vote." 

Burns does not mention Charlottesville, Virginia — but for his audience in the year 2022, the city goes without mentioning. Charlottesville was the scene of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. The rally "united" a broad spectrum of protestors, including alt-rightists, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Some Rally participants held a tiki-torch parade on the night of August 11 chanting, "You/Jews will not replace us!" And the afternoon of August 12 erupted into violent clashes between Unite the Right and counter-protestors made up of anti-fascists and others generally opposed to white supremacy — resulting in many casualties, including the death of counter-protestor Heather Heyer. The epicenter of the Rally riot was Emancipation Park, formerly "Lee Park" denoting the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee standing at its center — the planned removal of which was the proximate cause of the protest. 

In his typical indiscriminate fashion, then President Donald J. Trump insisted during the evening following the riot that there had been "very fine people on both sides" — representing the ambiguous attitudes Americans hold about the Charlottesville incident itself, and more generally about memorials to the Confederacy, authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism. A similar reflection of the convoluted attitudes held by Americans came in 2019 from Ken Cuccinelli who was acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services for the Trump administration. To justify a proposed change to immigration policy that would disqualify any migrant from permanent residence, if they were to use public benefits, Cuccinelli proposed a rephrasing of Lazarus' "New Colossus" poem: 

Give me your tired, and your poor, 

Who can stand on their own two feet 

And who will not become a public charge

Sure, there is something sadistically provocative in that. It may bring a cruel chuckle to some narcissistic imperial elites. But in his song "Dirty Blvd." found on his 1989 album  New York — in which the City of New York is memorialized as a synecdoche of America — Lou Reed already said it better: 

Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor - I'll piss on 'em

That's what the Statue of Bigotry says