How do we think about taking down controversial statues in the UK?

The controversial statues legitimise racism

Question: How do we think about taking down controversial statues in the UK?
Position1 of 3›: We have every right to take the statues down
Argument‹6 of 11›: The controversial statues legitimise racism

The statues offer vehicle through which racists can legitimise their views.

The argument

The statues that are being taken down not only legitimize racist ideas, they also celebrate them. Statues and monuments are built and represented in honor of someone or something. While the creation of these statues may be explained by the changes in beliefs and ideals throughout history, representing them to the public in the present is not. Some of these statues being taken down include a known slaveholder Robert Milligan and Edward Colston, a slave trader believed to have sold 100,000 slaves from west Africa. These people should not be celebrated as monuments in today’s society. Especially when there is still racial inequally interwoven in today’s society. Like the fact that if you are a Black man in England or Wales, you have a 40 times higher chance of being stopped and searched by police. Keeping these statues presented in the public eye takes away from the racism, not only in history but also today. Society should be presenting and working against the issues of colonial and imperial remnants of racism, not commemorating the men who were part of the cause of it.

Premises

[P1]Statues and monuments are built to honour their subjects, so displaying them today legitimises and celebrates what those figures stood for. [P2] Figures such as the slaveholder Robert Milligan and the slave trader Edward Colston, who sold an estimated 100,000 enslaved West Africans, should not be celebrated in present-day society. [P3] With racial inequality still entrenched — a Black man in England or Wales being 40 times more likely to be stopped and searched — keeping these statues distracts from confronting racism past and present. [C] Therefore, the controversial statues legitimise racism, so there is every right to take them down.

Counter-arguments

The statues do not legitimize racism because while the personal values of the people that are depicted by the statues were racist, the statues were created and intended to legitimize the good they did, not the bad.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A monument honours its subject, but the counter-argument's distinction goes unanswered: statues are usually erected for a particular achievement, and the argument needs the further claim that honouring someone for one thing endorses everything they did. [Rejecting P2] "Should not be celebrated" is accepted by many who nonetheless oppose removal, favouring relocation to a museum, added interpretation, or a public process. The premise establishes that these men do not merit honour; it does not establish that removal is the right response, which is exactly what the sibling position urging caution disputes. [Rejecting P3] The stop-and-search disparity is real evidence of present inequality, but the argument does not connect it to the statues. No mechanism is offered by which a bronze figure produces a policing outcome, so the premise shows that racism persists rather than that these monuments sustain it.