'I don't like erasures,' the novelist Toni Morrison told a Princeton audience in 2017. She had been asked what she thought about Confederate statues, then being torn down throughout the South. Leave them up, she said: 'Talk about the offense. You know, put another statue next to it and say the opposite.' Hang a noose around its neck, she added. The audience laughed nervously, but she wasn't kidding. The moderator quickly moved on to another question, so Morrison kept the rest of her views to herself. After 11 novels, many of them prizewinning, and a wealth of essays and literary criticism, she was a monument in her own right'a canonical American writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993'and monuments aren't supposed to stir up trouble. In any case, she had laid out her theory of cultural preservation in the 1970s, a more experimental era than ours. In a brilliant essay called 'Rediscovering Black History,' she tells a story about racist statuary and the NAACP. The...
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