Someone Swaps Racist Monuments With Colorful Air Dancers In Hilarious Pics And People Think It’s An Awesome Idea

In the wake of the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, racist monuments are being taken down one by one. A statue of Jefferson Davis was toppled in Richmond, Virginia, a monument for slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England was dragged into the River Avon, and multiple Christopher Columbus statues around the US have fallen too.

And one guy has an idea on how to bring some liveliness to these now-vacant pedestals. Jack suggested “temporarily replacing all racist monuments with air dancers” while we wait for the new ones. Jack’s tweet got almost 500K likes and standing rounds of applause from people hailing the idea as absolutely wonderful.

You see, it’s like hitting two birds with one stone. First, it adds some color to the landscape and second, it gives the "wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man" its long-awaited moment to shine. Probably the first and, most likely, the last. Let’s see some of the "drafts" down below and hit the comments section to say what you think!

There’s a symbolic value to a racist statue coming down. But many skeptics find themselves threatened by the act of “rewriting the past.” Charlotte Lydia Riley, a historian of contemporary Britain at the University of Southampton, in a piece for The Guardian, stated that there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s literally what we historians do."

“Despite what Leopold von Ranke—one of the pioneers of modern historical research—said, history is not only about finding out 'how it actually happened,' but also about how we think about the past and our relationship to it.” Most importantly, “the past may be dead, but history is alive, and it is constructed in the present,” Charlotte concluded.

Historian James Holland agrees that pulling down the statues has nothing to do with airbrushing the past. “Pulling down statues is nothing new, however, nor is the changing of street names and even those of cities and countries.”

“It has happened time and again through history. Most of us in the West cheered when the swastikas were blown up in 1945, or when the statues of Lenin and Stalin were pulled down, or even that of Saddam Hussein,” he explained in an article for Sky News.

Adam Hochschild, a historian and journalist, wrote for The Atlantic that “It’s a bad week to be a racist statue.” But ending racism itself in all its forms will take much more and much longer than clearing out its old relics. “But in these tumultuous last few weeks, I’m feeling more optimistic than I have for a long time that people are taking that goal seriously,” he stated.