New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday afternoon decried a statue of the Catholic St. Father Damien of Molokai as an artifact of “patriarchy and white supremacist culture.”
“Even when we select figures to tell the stories of colonized places, it is the colonizers and the settlers whose stories are told — and virtually no one else. Check out Hawaii’s statue,” she wrote on her Instagram story as she taped the statue of Damien, a missionary who ministered to lepers in an isolated colony until he succumbed to the disease himself.
Ocasio-Cortez said that she would prefer a statue memorializing Lili’uokalani, the indigenous queen who ruled Hawaii until being overthrown in an 1893 coup backed by the Dole fruit company. Ocasio-Cortez said she was using the statue of Damien, who is considered a “martyr of charity,” to point out “the patterns that have emerged” in which people are honored in the Capitol: “virtually all men, all white, and mostly both.”
“It’s not radical or crazy to understand the influence white supremacist culture has historically had in our overall culture and how [it] impacts the present day,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez’s criticism of Damien came amid a wider criticism of all statues in the Capitol. The freshman congresswoman also singled out conservative icon Barry Goldwater for criticism, emphasizing that because it was put up recently, it shows that statues enshrining racism “aren’t all relics from history.”
Hawaii has another statue in the Capitol aside from the one of Damien. It depicts King Kamehameha I, the ruler who unified the islands under his reign in the 1810s.
Ocasio-Cortez’s criticism of the statues came in the aftermath of a now monthslong struggle over the place that memorials honoring white people or Europeans have in public life. Religious statues became the target of many protests, with some being toppled, burned, or beheaded by crowds of angry people.
Father Junipero Serra became a target, with statues of the Catholic Spanish saint pulled down in San Francisco and other California cities.
