Replace Racist Statues

About

Replace Statues With… refers to a series of tweets which offer humorous suggestions of statues that could replace statues of controversial historical figures. The jokes began growing popular when several statues of Confederate generals were removed or destroyed as a result of 2017 protests and saw a second rise in popularity when statues were removed or destroyed as a result of the 2020 George Floyd Protests.

Origin

Jokes about replacing statues depicting controversial historical figures began growing popular online in 2017. One of the earliest known examples was tweeted by user @IanBoothby,^[1] who on March 22nd, 2017 suggested replacing all statues of Christopher Columbus with fictional detective Lieutenant Columbo, gaining over 150 retweets and 300 likes (shown below).

Spread

Jokes began growing more popular that year when several Confederate statues in America were either removed or toppled as a result of protests against the 2017 Unite the Right Rally. A petition was organized to replace Confederate statues in New Orleans with statues of Britney Spears.^[3] On November 13th, user @TeddyRedder^[2] posted a suggestion that statues be replaced with statues of Chill Cat (shown below, left). On September 21st, Twitter user @TogetherPangea^[4] tweeted suggesting Confederate statues be replaced with statues of Buc-ee, the mascot of Texas convenient store Buc-ee's.

Jokes surged again in 2020 amidst the George Floyd protests, which saw the removal of several statues across America and notably the toppling of the statue of Edward Colton, a 17th-century slave trader, in Bristol, England.^[5] For example, Twitter user @BYaugs^[6] suggested a statue of the Pokémon Bulbasaur, gaining over 230 retweets and 650 likes (shown below, left). User @moeiswe^[7] suggested replacing statues with statues of Hello Kitty, gaining over 30 retweets and 110 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References