Tearing down Coulston's image was necessary to start a long-overdue debate. Now, we need to turn those that still stand into educational tools by introducing plaques that tell the full stories of these controversial figures. Rewriting incomplete narratives benefits no one.
The argument
Taking down statues of controversial historical figures is justified and necessary. Proponents of this position begin there deliberately, because their objection is not to the removals themselves but to what the removals may be allowed to stand in for. However, the act of taking down these statues ought not to distract from the issues of racial injustice. The danger they identify lies in how the argument gets framed. The debate must not become a binary choice of either fighting to take down statues or a national discussion of racism, since nothing about the first rules out the second. Both problems ought to be tackled simultaneously, and letting the controversy over statues get in the way of fighting for racial justice would be a mistake — the more visible and more quickly resolved question tends to crowd out the slower one, and a monument can be removed in an afternoon while the conditions it commemorates take far longer to change. This would allow injustices to continue even while statues topple, which is precisely the outcome being warned against: a country that has changed what it displays without changing what it does. Statues are merely a symptom of the disease itself. To lose focus on the larger problem is an error. The wider difficulty is that the statue question maps onto a division that already exists rather than resolving it. "Britain is a very divided country on class, culture, and other grounds. We thus react to the inherited celebrations of British greatness either by embracing or by rejecting them, but always too emphatically. Events such as the toppling of the Colston statue do not solve this divide." A debate conducted in those terms sorts people into the camps they already occupied. So while taking down the statues does redress protracted injustice, it must not be permitted to distract from the real issue at hand.
Premises
Counter-arguments
There is an old saying, “we can walk and chew gum at the same time.” That is the mentality that people must adopt when fighting for racial and social justice. Taking down statues does not mean that we will stop fighting against racial injustices. Whenever critics point to the toppling of statues as mob activity or anti-democratic, we must explain the justified reasons for taking down said statues while reiterating the need to push for fundamental legislative changes. Statues only distract from the real issues at hand if we allow them to.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise is asserted without argument, which leaves the position resting on a claim it never defends — and it is precisely the claim the opposing position denies. [Rejecting P2] The symptom-and-disease metaphor does more work than it can bear, since a symptom can also be a cause: a public honour is not merely an indication of an attitude but one of the things that sustains it. The premise also gives no account of how the two are to be tackled simultaneously, which is what it says should happen. [Rejecting P3] The distraction risk is stated and never evidenced, and the counter puts the objection directly: attention is not a fixed quantity drawn from one pool, and the Colston removal coincided with rather than displaced wider argument about the same history. The quoted passage says something different from the premise in any case — that the country is divided and reacts too emphatically in both directions — which is a claim about the tone of the debate rather than about statues distracting from injustice.