Considering ‘Contested Heritage’ – Mike Higton on the ‘Rustat Case’. # 133. 10/10/2023.
Out of Many, One People.
Welcome, to a detailed focus on a very particular issue. But it interests me, I hope you will find it so as well. I may also be presumptuous. Please comment.
Considering ‘Contested Heritage’ – Mike Higton on the ‘Rustat Case’
What approaches should be taken to memorials or statues in churches of ‘contested heritage’ – that is those that mark the lives of people or who celebrate events that are now widely regarded as unacceptable, notably those that celebrated performances of British power that caused injustice and suffering to colonised subjects. Of the several cases that have occurred, the refusal by the Chancellor of the Diocese of Ely to accept the application of Jesus College, Cambridge to remove the memorial to Tobias Rustat because of his ‘known involvement in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans’ is one of the most controversial and high profile. The recent report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice (reviewed next week) includes a 13 page appendix of Professor Mike Higton’s closely argued critique of the refusal which eloquently and powerfully (though possibly wrongfully) analyses the issue and which I think deserves close analysis.
Substantially Higton argues that the judgement was wrongly focussed on the judgement’s attempt to make an objective evaluation of the ‘special architectural or historic interest’ of the statue, over against the less easily evaluated harm to the ‘ministry and witness to the college community’. A central perspective to his critique is the judgement’s failure to give weight to the experience of the descendants of those slaves who were the victims of the physical, cultural and mental violence upon them made possible by Rustat’s highly profitable financial investments. Underlying his criticism of the judgement are hints of the epistemological issues involved in critiquing the judgement’s evaluative stance. ‘No questions were raised about the origins or development of this scale of values, nor about whose interests its maintenance might serve’ (p 61). Rightly, he argues this is not a ‘neutral’ legal issue. Underlying assumptions and preferences have shaped it.
Nonetheless Higton’s critique is also based on assumptions which are important, perhaps more controversial than he realises, and which point to two questions that need fuller discussion.
1. How do you quantify ‘hurt’?
Central to Higton’s critique is the Chancellor’s failure to give sufficient weight to the impact of the statue not on a generalised class of worshippers but specifically on the descendants of those whose enslavement Rustat financed. The judgement has looked closely in the wrong direction – attempting to make an objective assessmet of the statue’s aesthetic value and ignoring the subjective feelings and the grievous past of some of the worshippers, including the first black Master of a Cambridge College, Sonita Alleyne. Here Higton invokes the increasing theological weight now given to ‘testimony’ (for example in Richard Bauckham’s ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses’ or David Ford’s theological commentary on John): the case is ‘about the impact of contested heritage on real people in the present, it properly also includes personal testimony’ (p 66). As an evangelical giving theological weight to warmed hearts, part of me welcomes this emphasis on the value of ‘lived experience’, but another part of me is aware that testimonies can be exaggerated, overplayed, crafted to speak to particular needs, or be downright manipulative.
This turn to subjectivity is riding high in contemporary society, and I fear its misuse. At a recent conference for educationalists a speaker was withdrawn by the organiser’s because several other participants spoke of the ‘psychological harm’ they would suffer and from which the organisers felt bound to protect them. Ought arguments to limit transgender rights to be muted because of the fear (apparently now discredited) that it increases the likelihood of suicide. In this instance the college has claimed that the statue was a ‘serious obstacle’ to providing a ‘safe space’; but the very notion of ‘safe space’ has mushroomed in a few years from originally being free from physical attack to now giving no cause for inner distress.
It is very difficult for those not in the vulnerable group to assess the depth of the harm being caused. In the educationalists conference noted above it is (to me) clearly risible. In other cases, especially as here with the descendants of slaves, I can well understand the source of the hurt – but how deep it is, how strong in some but not in others, and what here are the proportions are unanswerable questions. And who do we listen to? The Church of England’s guidelines here that a ‘memorial has a demonstrable negative impact on the mission and ministry of the church or cathedral’ is hard to evaluate. In such cases, how do we assess the significance of vocal minorities?
Further have we arrived at peak ‘hurt’ – a time when the weight of claims for psychological harm or need for safe spaces may be beginning to recede, and attempts to judge the offence caused by statues and memorials amongst other things seem modish and slightly ridiculous? Or will peoples’ sensitivity in this area continue to become yet more significant? We are still in the early days of assessing the moral weight of emotional experiences expressed by words such as harm, hurt, need or safety. He refers to ‘this unfamiliar kind of assessment’ (p 67). In terms of listening to unfamiliar voices this is important. But thought needs to be given as to how to evaluate the unfamiliar. The fact that peoples’ experience and feelings need attending to gives us no measure by which to assess them, and therefore an adequate and appropriate response is exceedingly hard to formulate.
The weighting we should give to testimony and feeling is hard to determine, It becomes even harder when the nature of the situation generating such experiences is also in debate. To which we now turn.
2. How do we assess our current situation?
As regards the past, Professor Higton argues that ‘Britain’s repentance from the trade must be judged partial, grudging and still very much incomplete’ (p 64). But this is contested territory. Britain’s subsequent commitment of money, material and lives to stop future trading in slaves through the nineteenth century was certainly not grudging, and by what measure do we consider this and a variety of other reparative measures ‘incomplete’? On what basis can we form a reasonable assessment?
It is perfectly adequate for the Church of England to set aside a lump sum in reparation for the fact that it consciously profited from financing the trade in slaves, though here any figure is arbitrary, and the reality or not of ‘completeness’ will need a clear answer.
So too as regards the present, Higton assumes one side of the argument without any consideration of alternatives. How bad is the situation now for black people? Both Professor Higton and I are outsiders. He thinks the situation is clear: ‘racist patterns of imagination and evaluation have long outlasted the trade that they excused. They have proved to have very stubborn roots indeed, and they are still very much an active force’ (p 64) But are they? As a long-term observer of the situation my impression is that over the past twenty years those racist roots have attenuated significantly. He refers to ‘a large and growing scholarly literature’ but provides no sources for us to assess. Arguably, the present situation is wide open to debate. The Sewell Report (Commission for Racial and Ethnic Disparities) was controversial but argued cogently that whilst racism existed, as did institutional or systemic racism the extent of the latter had been seriously over-inflated and that there were a host of other factors, including family structure, that shaped the negative disparities experienced by the African Caribbean community. Despite the opprobrium heaped on the report subsequent ripostes, such as by the Runnymede Trust simply avoided engaging with the main substance of the report, and repeated the weak ‘orthodox’ line that the disparities suffered are the product of society’s racism. Tomiwa Owolade and Rakib Ehsan have argued for a much more complex and positive understanding of race in Britain.
In the USA Professors Glenn Loury and John McWhorter have argued the importance of a positive ‘development’ narrative over against the simplistic grievance emphasis of the widely applauded Ibram X Kendi. (Kendi’s Centre for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University, funded by businesses to the tune of $43 million dollars in the wake of the death of George Floyd has just collapsed under accusations of mismanagement and wasted funds).
Higton uses the word trauma, and that the experience of slavery was traumatising is indisputable, and also that trauma can persist in the society and be augmented by continuing racism. But as a day-to-day reality it can be overstated and unhelpfully negative,
All this is to say that the grievance account of present-day black life both in the USA and especially Britain is not, as Higton seems to assume, the only story. As outside observers both he and I need to listen, but to be aware that there are now two sides to listen to. Neither of us should assume that one side is unquestioningly the true story on which all policy should be built.
So, when he writes of ‘the present impact of the Rustat memorial upon the specific people whose lives are still being harmed by that legacy’ (p 67) I can feel for the force of his argument, also as it applies well beyond this specific case. But I also feel uneasy about how constructive it is to continue to sustain a narrative of black grievance, especially with its attending under-current of black fragility - heightened by his downbeat conclusion when referring to the impact of memorials as to the ‘the harm they continue to inflict upon Black people’ (p 68).
So what difference would it make if Rustat’s statue were to be removed?
There is a good case that Rustat’s statue ought to go. I believe the Church of England’s guidelines in saying that such cases are ‘not about judging people in the past by the standards of the present’ but instead are just about their present impact is too relativistic. Those who invested in the slave trade were evil men. Their consciences ought to have seen the enormity of the sin. Slaving was not inevitable. In the seventeenth century British sea captains were known to refuse the trade. The great reformed pastor Richard Baxter saw the evil of it. It was the practice of relentless brutality for profit that makes all who were involved a disgrace. Higton rightly has no time for the argument that Rustat was a sinner just like we all are. (Though there is a subsidiary argument worth exploring that the statue contextualises the chapel, and the Church of England, as a historically compromised church that rightfully deflates our hubris when we come to worship).
But to what end the cost and dislocation of removing the memorial? The Master, Sonita Alleyne testified that ‘Every time I go into the chapel . . . I feel like I am giving a false impression that everything is fine. It is not’. But without the statue how much finer would things be? Micro-aggressions will continue happen, though at a diminishing level. There were still be deficits in the African Caribbean community that are not easily solved. Meanwhile increasing numbers of black people will enter positions of influence in our society and probably increase in her college. So the removal of the statue might be a trophy achieved, but after the euphoria subsides life goes on as ever. All this, whether Rustat stays or goes. Might the Master every time she enters the chapel give the Rustat memorial a mental V sign, affirm that she is in charge and walk on.
We should be grateful to Mike Higton for an original and thoughtful analysis of a highly controversial and flawed case. But even if the Rustat memorial went there will still be elusive issues to clarify, notably the immediate question of how we can evaluate the distress memorials can cause in specific contexts, and the wider question of how that context can most constructively be assessed.
Previous blogs relevant to this topic:
25 Report of the Commission on Racial & Ethnic Disparities [Sewell]- a review.
40 Runnymede v Sewell?
50 Glenn Loury on ‘Race in America: The Black Family’.
121 Review of ‘Racism and Inequality in a Time of Crisis’.
125 The New Conversation on Race 1 – Tomiwa Owolade.
126 The New Conversation on Race 2 -Rakib Ehsan ‘Beyond Grievance’.