[T]he heritage industry fails to address or acknowledge how their work supports that of white supremacists. When white nationalists flocked to the streets of Charlottesville in August 2017 to protest the city’s decision to remove their statue of Robert E. Lee, and even murdered a counter-protester in their zeal to defend the statue, scholars and public historians tried to maintain a separation between America’s artistic and cultural heritage and white supremacy. For example, the statement released by the National Council on Public History, an association of American historians who work at and study museums and historic sites, immediately after the “Unite the Right” rally, referred to their study of “how notions of heritage are distorted to support racism.”1

The alt-right knows that this is why statues matter. And I think “we” do, too, though we hesitate to say it. In part, our hesitation to articulate it is due to the truly staggering implications of this realization, what it means, not only for statues but for many other elements that assert whiteness in America’s built environment — including the white columns exalted by this new executive order.

Claiming that white statues and white columns represent the whiteness of the United States is not a twisted innovation of 21st-century white supremacists. The idea that “classical antiquity” is the heritage of white Americans can be traced to the Revolutionary era, when white Americans began to obsessively overlay the ancient world onto their own. Ancient Greece and Rome offered the perfect heritage for white Americans, because they provided a model for righteous empire and civilized slave ownership. For example, Thomas Jefferson, who was also a Founding Father of American racial science, recruited these ancient civilizations in order to prove the inherent difference between white and Black people. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote about how the Greeks enslaved by the Romans still achieved greatness in art and science, claiming that it was because they were “of the race of whites,” and thus it is not enslavement “but nature, which has produced the distinction” between white and Black people. In other words, even if white people were subjected to the same treatment Jefferson inflicted upon the hundreds of Black people he enslaved, the inherent brilliance of the white race would still shine through.

The Founding Fathers also set these heritage claims in stone.

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• 1. But pretending that “heritage” can only support racism if it is “distorted” is just plain dishonest at this point. Heritage and exclusion have always gone hand in hand. The prevailing concept of heritage in the United States one of decent-based ownership (hence the close relationship between “heritage” and “inheritance”). In order for one person to own something, they must have rights to it that others do not have. When heritage is made material in a public space, through a statue or a building or a flag, it makes the implicit claim that whoever owns that heritage also owns that space. Thus, when the alt-right protects symbols of whiteness in public space, they are not “distorting” heritage. They are defending it. They don’t want to lose the statues and buildings that are constant visual and physical enforcers of the idea that America is historically a country in which power has been held by white people.