Tear Them All Down
I’m regularly amazed at how politics in the science fiction community serve as a bellwether for politics in the larger world. Over the past few years, the SFF community has responded to criticism of awards bearing the names and likenesses of problematic figures in clear parallel to the current debate around taking down not just statues of Confederates but of other problematic figures.
Making physical or metaphorical icons of real people is always as much an act of erasure as it is one of commemoration. People are complex. Because no one is perfect, icon culture traps us in a zero-sum game: either the person’s work matters or their victims do. Pick one.
When the person is still living, this also means the community becomes complicit in and enabling of the person’s ongoing behavior. But even if the person is now dead, icon culture shuts down honest discussion of how that person’s problematic legacy continues to influence us and the systems within which we live.
Ideas and ideals can shift, can be interrogated. Icons are (sometimes literally) set in stone. A narrative of what our ideals are or have been, and how well different people succeeded or failed in furthering those ideals, is much more nuanced and able to weather challenges. It allows us to say that Isaac Asimov and JK Rowling are important writers who have had a huge impact on their genres and on the wider world while also acknowledging the pain they’ve caused. It allows us to say that Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that continue to inspire us towards freedom and equality for all, and also raped slaves, enslaved his own children, and planned the removal of indigenous people and the eradication of their cultures, a complex and contradictory mixture which impacted the systems we grapple with today.
We need to stop worrying that once we start tearing down icons, no icon will be safe. Icons aren’t history. Icons aren’t real people. We need to dismantle icon culture entirely so we can talk honestly about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
Making physical or metaphorical icons of real people is always as much an act of erasure as it is one of commemoration. People are complex. Because no one is perfect, icon culture traps us in a zero-sum game: either the person’s work matters or their victims do. Pick one.
When the person is still living, this also means the community becomes complicit in and enabling of the person’s ongoing behavior. But even if the person is now dead, icon culture shuts down honest discussion of how that person’s problematic legacy continues to influence us and the systems within which we live.
Ideas and ideals can shift, can be interrogated. Icons are (sometimes literally) set in stone. A narrative of what our ideals are or have been, and how well different people succeeded or failed in furthering those ideals, is much more nuanced and able to weather challenges. It allows us to say that Isaac Asimov and JK Rowling are important writers who have had a huge impact on their genres and on the wider world while also acknowledging the pain they’ve caused. It allows us to say that Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that continue to inspire us towards freedom and equality for all, and also raped slaves, enslaved his own children, and planned the removal of indigenous people and the eradication of their cultures, a complex and contradictory mixture which impacted the systems we grapple with today.
We need to stop worrying that once we start tearing down icons, no icon will be safe. Icons aren’t history. Icons aren’t real people. We need to dismantle icon culture entirely so we can talk honestly about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
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