College Fix:

A Brown University student group, Decolonization at Brown, wants the school to remove two Roman statues displayed on campus, claiming the statues represent white supremacy and colonialism.

The student group at the Ivy League university in Rhode Island has lobbied the school’s Undergraduate Council of Students to support its initiative to remove of statues of Roman Emperors Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.

Removing the statues “is one step in a broader project of decolonization by confronting Brown’s institutional and ideological legacies of colonialism and white supremacy,” members of the group wrote in The Blognonian, a student publication at the university.

The Undergraduate Council is scheduled to vote on endorsing the initiative on Thursday after it bumped the vote, originally scheduled for October 22.

Jason Carroll, the student body president, would not comment on the proposal yet because the body has yet to hold a vote.

“There is not a resolution and the potential endorsement would be for an on-going student initiative run by Decolonization at Brown,” Carroll said via email to The College Fix.

“It is not that difficult to see how a statue of (Caesar Augustus) would serve as an icon of colonial and imperial domination,” Kelley Tackett, a leader of the decolonization group, said at an October 14 Undergraduate Council meeting.

“They function not as monuments to ancient Rome, but to a set of values and political stances which existed when they were commissioned on Brown’s campus,” Tackett said, according to student paper The Brown Daily Herald.

The Caesar Augustus statue has been on campus since 1906 and the Marcus Aurelius statue has been on campus since 1908, according to a university website.

Sam Kimball, another student leader, asked “what kind of impact” the statues have on “student well-being and inclusion of students of color,” according to the Daily Herald.

Junaid Malik, a leader in the effort, said, according to the student paper:

For those of us who come from countries that were also colonized, these statues carry the symbolism of conquest, one that we think is incompatible with the continued occupation of Indigenous land in the U.S.

RTWT

HT: Bird Dog.

So, after they get rid of Julius Caesar and Augustus, they’re going to get us all to get on the boats and leave North America to its Indigenous population?