New York’s representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on Thursday afternoon denounced a statue of the holy Catholic father Damien of Molokai as an artifact of “white patriarchy and supremacist culture.”
“Even when the characters tell stories of colonized places, they are the colonizers and settlers whose stories are told, and almost no one else. Discover the statue of Hawaii,” he wrote on his Instagram story, recording the statue of Damien, a missionary who served lepers in a remote colony until he succumbed to the disease himself.
Ocasio-Cortez said she would prefer a statue commemorating Lili’uokalani, the indigenous queen who ruled Hawaii until she was overthrown in an 1893 coup subsidized through the Dole fruit corporation. Ocasio-Cortez said that she was the statue of Damien, regarded as a “martyr of charity”, to highlight “the models that have emerged” in which other people are revered in the Capitol: “virtually all men, all white, and especially both.”
“It is radical or irregular to perceive the influence that white supremacist culture has traditionally had on our global culture and how it [affects] the present,” he said.
The complaint from Damio of Ocasio-Cortez came here amid a broader critique of all the statues on Capitol Hill. The freshman MP also criticized conservative icon Barry Goldwater, noting that because it was recently erected, it shows that statues of racism “are not all relics of history.”
Hawaii has some other statues at Damien’s Outdoor Capitol. It represents King Kamehameha I, the ruler who unified the islands during his reign in the 1810s.
Ocasio-Cortez’s complaint about the statues came here after a months struggle for the position of memorials in honor of whites or Europeans in public life. Religious statues have become the target of protests, some of which are torn down, burned or beheaded through crowds of angry people.
Father Junipero Serra is a target, with statues of the Spanish Catholic saint destroyed in San Francisco and other California cities.