For most of my life the Statue of Liberty was one of a number of pieces of American iconography that seemed to memorialize an idea that had never materialized. It is a feeling I suspect many Black Americans experience with respect to pieces of history that commemorate an ideal of US history. What is the Declaration of Independence but a parchment of half-truths and contradictions? What is a monument to the American Revolution if it doesn’t say who was kept in chains after it ended?
