In the many forms it took throughout 2020, the movement challenging statues is irreversible and that is why it is under attack. It is part of the global challenge to a modernity that shaped the world according to racial and sexist criteria that destroyed cultures, silenced voices, erased knowledge, and pillaged to fill its museums and palaces.
When psychiatrist Frantz Fanon reflected on the role of doctors during the Algerian struggle for liberation in his 1959 essay “Medicine and Colonialism”, he emphasised the consequences of physicians’ class interests. More bluntly put, he tore into the colonising complicities of his ostensibly humanistic profession.
Although the physician presents himself as “the doctor who heals the wounds of humanity”, Fanon writes, he is in reality “an integral part of colonisation, of domination, of exploitation”. Both the European colonial physician and the native Algerian physician are “economically interested in the maintenance of colonial oppression”, which yields them profit and elevated status. One of the chief services doctors provide to the perpetuation of oppressive systems, Fanon notes, is the use of scientific objectivity to obscure the role of politics in driving the sickness and death they dutifully treat and then bury in medical statistics.