Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments by Roger C. Hartley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments by Roger C. Hartley Jordan Brasher Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments. Roger C. Hartley. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. x and 255 pp., figs., bibliog., notes, and index. $29.99 hardcover (ISBN 9781643361697). The question of what to do with Confederate monuments and why they matter socially, politically, and geographically to diverse publics and interest groups has received much attention in local, state, national, and international news media, by community organizers and activists, lay citizens, teachers, students, scholars, practitioners of law, and many others. The tragic events in Charleston in 2015, Charlottesville in 2017, and Minneapolis in 2020 have reignited decades-old public debate and controversy around Confederate landscape iconography and more recently, wider issues of commemorating enslavers and colonizers in spaces and places around the world. Understanding and challenging the "monumental harm" these memorials inflict and perpetuate is of pressing public interest, and a book examining Jim Crow era Confederate monuments within the current moment of racial reckoning is timely, presenting an opportunity to contribute to public and academic discussions around Confederate monuments and the relationship between white supremacy and Confederate memory politics in the United States. Yet, to be frank, Hartley's Monumental Harm does not meet the moment. It is underwhelming in its critique at best and at worst, implicitly condemns antiracist advocates who seek to destroy and overthrow monuments to enslavers and colonizers, especially those associated with the Confederate States of America. Although the author states that the book is "directed to scholars, students, the general reader, and all others who seek clarity regarding the role of Confederate monuments in contemporary America," the book is as much written for a conservative white legal practitioner audience as for scholars and students, whose activism and research outside the narrow constitutional law realm stand to benefit little from the analysis presented in this book. The language, theory, and ideology underpinning the writing in the book would not prove acceptable to most critical social scientists, students, and activists researching and organizing against Confederate commemorative infrastructure. Linguistically and ideologically, the book's use of terms and concepts like "non-racist" would not meet the standards of critical race scholars and activists who recognize, as [End Page 79] Angela Davis once famously noted, that "in a racist society, it is not enough to be nonracist, we must be anti-racist." This is borne out by the author's admonition to understand white Southerners' "non-racist-based views associated with the need to preserve their understanding of Southern heritage" (xiii). Arguably though, white Southerners like myself cannot ever fully tease apart white supremacy from our cultural heritage, despite our most conscious intentions. Other linguistic-ideological concerns involve the author's capitalization of the "W" in white, the use of "slave" rather than "enslaved" in reference to people held in chattel bondage prior to the end of the Civil War, and the problematic use of the "n" word fully spelled out without quotations or censorship as a white author. Whether this was a choice forced on the author by the publishing press or by their own choice is unclear given that the book provides no discussion or rationale for these linguistic-ideological choices. From a critical race-informed perspective, the book is not nearly critical enough in terms of the kinds of language and ideology the author uses. Additionally, from a theoretical perspective, the distinctions that the author draws between history and memory are not widely accepted within scholarly communities in critical memory studies or geographies of memory. The author's contention that history "reflects what is objectively provable from the record of past events" and that memory by contrast "consists of subjective representations, constructions, of reality created by those with the power and cultural authority to do so in order to influence how we think about some historic event" (19) fails to acknowledge that the formal business of "doing history" by historians is not immune to or separate from the cultural authorities that produce collective memories and that all knowledge about the past, even that created by professional historians, is socially produced from particular social locations...