C2 Reading Test – Memory Politics & Monument Toppling
Practice C2 Reading for free: track perspectives, assess rhetoric, and match claims with evidence in debates over monuments and memory.
Read the passage and decide if each statement is True (T) or False (F).
Public monuments are often treated as neutral heritage, yet they are political technologies of memory: they select which lives become emblematic and which remain peripheral. When movements call to remove a statue, critics warn of erasing history. Advocates reply that the monument already performs erasure by elevating one narrative while normalizing the silence around others. The conflict is not between remembering and forgetting but over what is remembered, by whom, and to what end.
Toppling is not the only option. Cities have experimented with counter-plaques that recontextualize figures, commissioning new works that shift the focal story, or relocating statues to museums where curators frame contested legacies explicitly. Each path trades off symbolism, pedagogy, and harm reduction. Street-level presence confers civic endorsement in a way a museum label does not; conversely, leaving a monument untouched can function as ongoing injury to communities it marginalizes.
The timing and choreography of change matter. Sudden removals during unrest can feel cathartic but risk a backlash if procedures lack transparency and due process. Deliberative processes—hearings, multidisciplinary panels, open archives—slow the pace but can broaden legitimacy. Still, formal procedures are not neutral either: who sits on panels, which archives exist, and how “public” participation is defined all shape outcomes.
Opponents sometimes argue that critiques impose present values on the past. Yet public space is present-tense by design: monuments speak to today’s crowds in today’s conflicts. Updating the landscape is not airbrushing textbooks; it is adjusting what the state chooses to honor now. The principle at stake is not perfectionism but accountability: whether a polity can revise its symbolic vocabulary as evidence and ethics evolve.
The passage describes monuments as neutral objects that do not influence public memory.
Supporters of removal argue that statues can erase history by elevating one narrative while silencing others.
Relocating a statue to a museum allows curators to contextualize contested legacies more explicitly.
According to the text, keeping a monument in place can inflict ongoing harm on marginalized communities.
The author claims toppling is the only legitimate solution discussed.
Rapid removals during unrest can provoke backlash if due process is missing.
The passage says formal procedures are entirely neutral and unaffected by who participates.
Critics’ charge of “presentism” is addressed by noting that public space communicates in the present tense.
Updating monuments is equated in the passage with rewriting or erasing school textbooks.
The concluding idea is that revising the symbolic landscape is about accountability to current evidence and ethics.