In every age, people will find ways to justify and celebrate what is in their economic interests, writes Joseph Cocker , while Jenny Blackwell says controversial statues should remain, but context should be provided

Toppling statues of everyone who supported racist and discriminatory views effectively whitewashes history (White supremacist statues must fall, 19 September). We could start with Plato and St Paul. And who is going to decide and how grave does the offence have to be? Far better to make people understand the context. The fact is that in every age, including our own, people find ways to justify what is in their economic interest, hence slavery and apartheid, and in many cases religion supported them. (I would make an exception where statues are erected long after the event with the deliberate aim of stoking old conflicts, as with some of the confederate statues in the US.)

Yarden Katz singles out Crick and Watson regarding eugenics. The word has acquired an aura of horror, but in practice we abort foetuses known to have abnormalities. They may have been misguided but the early proponents of eugenics genuinely wished to reduce the human misery that was all too apparent in Victorian times.

There is a splendid statue of Charles Darwin outside Shrewsbury library (formerly his school), but reading your review of AN Wilson’s book on Darwin (18 September), I fear he might be next.

Joseph Cocker

Leominster, Herefordshire

• Instead of making statues disappear, we could erect a plaque explaining why these people were deemed by their contemporaries to deserve a statue in the first place (and let’s face it: some of them had important achievements, which quite a lot of people would not know about) but also the negatives.

A plaque for J Marion Sim, the “father of gynaecology”, could mention his significant achievements at the time, and that services for women were totally inadequate, but would also explain how he “experimented on enslaved black women and infants”, and how the powerful of the time accepted this without question.

It then goes on to state that this statue is here to remind us both of achievements and terrible wrongs, and encourages us to think about whether the changes that came about were enough, and where we have got to now in terms of egality and power.The statues could be become an “outside classroom” where children and their teachers could come to get inspiration for discussions, and printed information where people could read authentic facts rather than saying “who is that?” or feeling aggrieved by the injustice of it all.

Jenny Backwell

Hove, East Sussex

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