What to Do When Our Heroes Fail Us
Can we learn to live without the people we once revered?
In the past few months, the American media has been filled with images of protestors pulling down public statues of racist historical figures — many of them Confederate soldiers. A startling number of these statues were created during the Jim Crow era for the express purpose of intimidating Black Americans; these sculptures depicting “heroes” of the Confederacy are often little more than monuments to what those supposed “heroes” stood for: slavery, segregation, and anti-Black violence. These sculptures were, quite literally, putting prejudices on a pedestal, and there is something powerful in seeing them removed.
As I’ve watched the triumphal toppling of these statues, though, it’s made me think, again, about what it means to create a monument or shrine to anyone, literally or metaphorically. So often, when we venerate someone as a personal hero, it’s because they have helped us to understand something about ourselves; they have helped us feel seen, heard, valuable in some way. They give us something to aspire to, even just in our daydreams.
But what do we do when we realize our personal heroes are just as problematic as our statues? When our heroes cease to be the wondrous figures we once imagined them to be?
