Various leaders and people of influence in Arizona have advocated that Charlie Kirk be remembered fondly either through renaming of a highway, bridge or giving him a statue. In my opinion, those plans are ridiculous.
Charlie Kirk was disgraceful, in my opinion. He argued that Black people are inferior. As The Nation noted, “(Charlie Kirk) smeared Black women like Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama, whom he claimed had benefited from affirmative action, saying, ‘you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.’”
Just as appalling is that if he saw a Black pilot flying his plane, he said he would be concerned: “I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” While he insisted his concern revolved around DEI employing people who cannot do the job, let us not take this at face value. As Mehdi Hasan commented on X, “DEI has become the new N-word the new rightwing abstraction deployed by Republicans to conceal their anti-Black racism.”
To help underscore the problem with insistence on building statues or naming roads after Charlie Kirk, I evoke the brilliant British philosopher and logician, Bertrand Russell. In “On Reverence,” Russell observed that harm is caused by reverence by making people “lazy” in that they no longer challenge the claims that the revered person made.
Making matters worse is that to do otherwise, Russell wrote, would result in condemnation, since it would be deemed disrespectful.
By giving Charlie Kirk statues or streets or bridges devoted to him, we make it harder to challenge his awful claims. The result is that we are safeguarding racist rhetoric.
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