Glenn Cantave believes white supremacy in 2017 stems back to 1492. And he’s letting NYC’s mayoral commission know.
In 2013, when Glenn Cantave was an undergrad student studying abroad in Bolivia, he did as many tourists do in the country and visited the colossal statue of Cristo de la Concordia, one of the largest depictions of Jesus in the world.
For many Bolivians, the statue is a site of national pride. The 133-foot figure towers over visitors clamoring to take his photo, his arms outstretched as if offering a giant hug. But for Cantave, something about it felt wrong. I have nothing bad to say about Jesus as a guy, he told HuffPost. But Bolivia has one of the largest indigenous cultures in South America and the religion of Christianity was imposed on its people. This image of a white man looking down on everyone was very problematic.
The experience shifted Cantave’s perspective on the relationship between men perched on pedestals and the communities obliged to literally look up to them every day. But the monument that angers him most, however, is the one at home: a 76-foot statue of Christopher Columbus, a man who Cantave unequivocally calls a terrorist, in Manhattan.
A terrorist is someone who intimidates people for a political cause, Cantave said. For him, that cause was the expansion of the Spanish Empire for profit. Columbus threatened and raped and murdered. It is ass backwards that a city like New York, with such a high awareness of terrorism, has a terrorist as a landmark.
I met Cantave at Queens Borough Hall, at the first of five public hearings addressing what should become of New York City’s contentious monuments. Cantave attended and testified at four of the hearings.
Concern over what should become of the controversial monuments ― which Mayor Bill de Blasio referred to as symbols of hate ― bubbled over in August when a white supremacist rally protesting the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent, resulting in the murder of counterprotester and anti-racist activist Heather Heyer. Shortly thereafter, protests erupted in New York demanding the removal of a statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims. Though he is known as the father of gynecology, he has a legacy of torturing enslaved women, performing experimental surgeries on them without anesthesia.
In early September, de Blasio announced that he was forming a committee, called the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, to advise him on what should become of the various controversial monuments strewn throughout the five boroughs.
The commission ― co-chaired by Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, and Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of NYC’s department of cultural affairs ― includes artists, architects, professors, activists and scholars of a cross-section of ages, races and genders. Together, they invited interested citizens of various neighborhoods to take the floor of public hearings and share their opinions on the fates of monuments in question, such as statues of Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt and J. Marion Sims.
In Queens, Cantave addressed a moderate crowd, many of whom were protective of the Columbus statue. Panelists spoke of its historical significance and value to some Italian immigrants. What this says to me is that my life as a black man does not matter, Cantave told the room. My last name is Cantave, it’s a slave owner’s last name. I don’t know my real last name because of Columbus.