National Treasures: Excavations and Abstractions

Published by Monument Lab | March 8, 2021

From the essay:

Racialized practices of abstraction have proliferated across American public discourse and social relations for centuries. Their consequences, however, crystallize in much less abstract phenomena: all too familiar acts of erasure, claims to power, and other forms of structural and corporeal violence in service of hegemonic whiteness. In recent months, these consequences have compounded in assertions of proprietorship over public spaces and state-operated structures, most notably the U.S. Capitol. 

One such assertion came in the form of the December 2020 executive order promoting classical architecture as the “preferred and default” style for public federal structures in Washington, D.C. [I] The order cited precedents set by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who ensured that the original White House and Capitol’s columns and triangular pediments embodied classical antecedents of democracy and self-determination. The order contended that in recognizing these structures’ historical connections, contemporary citizens should be reminded “not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating [the] institutions” of their national republic. Jefferson, an enslaver himself, personally chose Thornton as the Capitol building’s designer. Indeed, the two men subscribed to the same colonialist frameworks that deemed non-white people bereft of a privileged subjectivity that could attend to universal reason. What, then, lies at the core of the institutions to be “maintained and protected,” if not the self-preserving interests of whiteness, ensconced in neoclassicist facades of sandstone, granite, and marble? 

[I] The Biden administration revoked this order on February 24, 2021.