The Built Landscape

The Built Landscape

This article was written by Brandon Inabinet and originally published on November 20, 2017.

The Fall semester is slowly coming to a close, and with it, the initial historical research to guide the Task Force. A series of meetings through the Spring semester will help us reflect and determine what courses of action are appropriate for the university to take. Many Furman stakeholders have wondered aloud to Task Force members if the eventual goal is scrubbing “Furman” off of the nameplate. No. However, what is more worth considering is how we contextualize and deploy that name and the many others on our highly-ranked campus.

One of our faculty members relayed a story to me worth sharing here. Her young daughter was enjoying the beautiful scenery around campus–the lake, the trees, and the various sculptures around our park-like campus. She saw the athletic fields and alumni house, the academic buildings, the areas around the dorms, and basically, all of our campus. Her three-year-old daughter stopped and hugged almost all the statues. Before they got into the car, her daughter said, “I want to be white.” The mom was surprised, as this was the first time her African-American daughter had ever really noticed race, and asked why. The daughter replied, “I really like those white people statues.” Stunned, the mother’s heart sank because she wished her daughter saw statues that reflected her beauty as well.

And of course, she’s right. While it’s fairly obvious that statues of our founders and donors might be white, the lack of variety elsewhere is striking. Almost every athletic team is represented with bronze players on our campus; none of them are non-white, despite our diverse teams. On our campus, a welcome place of retreat for all of Greenville, we have sculptures of children playing and chasing butterflies, a water nymph, a girl tying her shoe on her dad’s lap, a soldier–all represent happiness and success . . . in European ancestry.

Of course, none of this was purposeful in an individual or targeted sense, but it does speak to a blindness in the past and a landscape in the present that does no benefit, erases the contribution and provides no positive role models or social worth in bronze or marble for persons of color.

No act of removal fixes this sort of problem. Context goes far in cases of saturated, historical representations in places like Richmond and Charleston, but does not speak or lift up silences.  Creation of non-white sculpture will be a step, but will surely appear as tokenism at first. In other words, there is no easy solution; and the day of equity in the built landscape is years off.

But one place to start is an inventory of what we have and then establishing oversight that future representation include more voices to catch up, toward our current diversity and the inclusive community we want to become. Toward that end goal, several classes are going to work to inventory campus this spring and bring these findings to the Task Force for consideration. They will be helped by PocketSights, an app that will allow classes and visitors to see the campus through the lenses of social and rhetorical critique. By the time of the report this summer, a pilot version will be available for everyone to tour campus with a new consciousness and help think alongside us toward solutions.