Anyway, Grant is actually one of my favorite presidents, but I still understand people toppling statues of him. Statues aren't useful for telling or sharing history. Their destruction or removal is irrelevant to whether or not people learn about these figures. This isn't erasing history. It's removing an image that causes some people pain/frustration/anger when seeing it, and I'm okay with that. That means they know about the reality of history. Grant did good things and bad things. Lincoln did, too. He's a hero to African Americans but a villian to Native Americans. We need to learn about all these aspects, and statues don't encourage any in-depth education.
I'm sort of perplexed by this stance. It seems to boil down to "if a group has decided that it is angry at something, or if it at least looks like their actions are ideological, they have public leave to do whatever they wish to public property." Who's to say that the small percentage of city residents that decided to go out on a particular night have the right to make those decisions? I know the fate of statues is probably not of great moral significance in and of itself, but at the very least it is vandalism of public property, and carries with it the ideological decision to reject the person or group the statue represents. Those are decisions for publics, not mobs.
