My testimony on Jefferson before the NYC Public Design Commission today

Jefferson statue in New York City Council Chambers

The question before the commission was whether or not to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the City Council Chambers and relocate it to the New York Historical Society.  If you have been reading me for any length of time, I’m sure you can imagine what my opinion about this hot-button issue was.

The question, of course, was if the New York City Council should continue to honor a man who owned, during his lifetime, more than 600 human beings and enslaved them and used them to labor on his plantation, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia.  In an op-ed I wrote for the New York Times earlier this year, I recommended that the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. either be taken down or that his statue in the memorial be replaced by a significant figure from African American history in this country.  I suggested someone like Harriet Tubman as an example.  I’m sure that is why members of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus of the City Council asked me to testify today.

I was thinking about what I would say as I drove over to Damark, a local deli out here, to get my paper and a couple of bagels this morning.  I already knew what my opinion was, but as I drove along, I found that I was asking myself, why? 

I got my answer after I parked the car outside Damark and started to walk along a covered porch to enter the store.  A man with dark brown skin was walking in the opposite direction.  I looked at him and started to nod a “good morning” when I saw that he was looking down at the ground and away from me, clearly to avoid making eye contact.  I’m a white man.  I’m 74 years old.  Age has removed at least an inch from the height I was when I was younger, so I stand about 5-7 these days.  I’m not an imposing or threatening figure.  And yet it was obvious that he was afraid of me.

I’m not exaggerating this experience.  As I entered the store, I was wondering what had just happened and why, and then I remembered what had occurred at another local store on Sunday.  The place was crowded, and after I picked up a few things, I carried my handbasket to the end of the aisle where a line had formed for the cashiers.  The line had bent around the corner along a row of beverage coolers.  I started to make my way to its end when two Latino guys quickly stepped back, making room for me ahead of them.  I tried to say no, you go ahead, but they wouldn’t move. 

It pains me to say this, but they looked frightened.  Latinos are in a minority in East Hampton, but a lot of them live out here in Springs.  You can tell by how they walk along the road looking warily at passing cars that many are undocumented.  I’m sure they’re afraid ICE will round them up without warning at any time.  The two guys in the store were nervous and clearly acting submissive with me.  And then I remembered that the same thing had happened in line at the store before, more than once.  Quite a few times, in fact.

As I waited for the time of my testimony on the Jefferson statue today, the two incidents stuck with me and I found myself thinking, what must it have been like to be a slave at Monticello walking along Mulberry Row just down from the house by the vegetable garden and see Jefferson himself walking toward you?  He wasn’t just a white man passing by on a porch, or a white guy in line in a store.  He owned the dark-skinned people all around him.  He controlled their lives completely.  He could sell them, or give them away as gifts to friends.  He could break up families, selling children away from their mothers, or husbands away from their wives. 

And so that’s what I asked the members of the Design Commission today, to try to imagine what it felt like to be a slave and walk past Thomas Jefferson as he watched where you were going, what you were doing, how you were acting, whether you were working or not.  And now imagine you are a Black or Latino child on a school tour, and you’re walking into the City Council Chambers, and you have to pass this seven-foot-tall statue of a white man on a big pedestal, in fact a slave owner who is looking down at you.  The people who walk into City Hall own that building.  It’s theirs, not Thomas Jefferson’s.  Buy do they feel like this is their building, the seat of their city government?  Do they feel like they belong?  Or do they feel that he belongs, because his statue says he is a great man, one of our so-called “founding fathers” to whom we are constantly told so much is owed?

I don’t think it’s possible, finally, to imagine ourselves into the shoes, or inhabiting the shoeless feet of a slave, just as I don’t feel it’s completely possible for me to imagine myself as a brown-skinned man who lives near where I live in Springs, who shops in the same stores I shop in.  It makes me nervous to make assumptions about their behavior, what a step back means, or a glance away from my eyes.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I don’t know them at all.

But we must do this, we must try to imagine us as them, because that is what is necessary for there to be we.  Indeed, this as much as anything else, is what our democracy depends on.  It is a duty of citizenship to see ourselves in others, or else we’ll end up with nothing to see at all.

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