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.
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