In 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released a song with a title that remains uncomfortable to write more than half a century later: Woman Is the Ni**er of the World.
The phrase was originally Yoko Ono’s. Lennon later described it as something she had said years before they turned it into a song. It was deliberately inflammatory, an attempt to compare the treatment of women with racial oppression. It is a comparison I would not make today. Racism and sexism have different histories and different consequences, and that particular word carries a history which should never be treated lightly. But the anger behind the song is worth revisiting, because yesterday a woman appeared above Trafalgar Square and within hours thousands of strangers were telling us exactly what they thought of her.
Tschabalala Self’s Lady in Blue now occupies the Fourth Plinth. She is a huge bronze figure of a Black woman walking forward in a blue dress and heels. She isn’t a monarch. She didn’t lead an army. She isn’t being commemorated because she conquered somewhere, ruled somewhere or killed enough people to earn a statue. She is simply a woman walking through the city, and apparently that was enough.
Of course people can hate the sculpture. They can call it ugly. They can question whether it belongs in Trafalgar Square. They can criticise its proportions, the colour, the style, the choice of artist or the entire Fourth Plinth programme. That is what happens when you put art in a public place. But read the comments and it doesn’t take long before something else begins creeping in.
One response calls the sculpture “an insult to Trafalgar Square and white culture in Britain.” Another demands: “Please vandalize this piece of shit statue and destroy it. It does not belong in This Anglo Saxon country.” Another simply asks: “Is London the new Africa?” Elsewhere, someone writes: “Even the statues are now dei.”
None of those comments is about sculpture. They are about who is allowed to be represented, and there is a difference which shouldn’t be difficult to recognise. “I think this is an awful statue” is an opinion about art. “This does not belong in an Anglo-Saxon country” is something else entirely.
Yet whenever this happens there is usually an attempt to blur those two things together. Anyone who objects to the racism is accused of trying to prevent criticism of the artwork. Nobody is doing that. Call it ugly. Call it ridiculous. Say you would rather the Fourth Plinth was empty. But if your criticism somehow requires you to mention Africa, “white culture”, DEI or the fact that the woman is Black, don’t pretend you are discussing the artistic merits of bronze sculpture.
The sexism isn’t particularly well hidden either. Self has spent much of her career making work about bodies: bodies taking up space, bodies being comfortable, bodies that aren’t asking permission to be looked at. And perhaps that is part of what makes the reaction so revealing.
Women in public art are very often allowed to be beautiful, naked, maternal, mournful or allegorical. This woman isn’t any of those things. She’s going somewhere. She has a stride. She occupies an enormous amount of space and makes absolutely no apology for it. For some people, that seems to be surprisingly irritating.
Self herself anticipated that the figure’s race would become part of the reaction. Before the unveiling she said that if people could not identify with the figure because she was Black, then that was “a larger social phenomenon that needs to be unpacked”. She had good reason to wonder what might happen.
In 2022 another of her sculptures, Seated, was displayed at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. Someone vandalised it by spraying white paint specifically over the Black skin of the figure. Self called it “a completely racist act”. So when Lady in Blue arrived in Trafalgar Square, the possibility of racism wasn’t some imaginary culture-war argument dreamed up by people looking to be offended. There was already a precedent, and now there are the comments.
What I find most interesting about Lady in Blue isn’t whether she is a great sculpture. I haven’t even decided whether I particularly like her. What interests me is what happened when she arrived.
For hundreds of years Britain has filled prominent public spaces with statues of powerful men: generals, admirals, kings and politicians. Men sitting on horses. Men holding swords. Men looking heroically towards an empire. We barely notice them. They have become part of the furniture. Put an enormous Black woman in the same landscape, however, and suddenly people start worrying about identity politics.
One commenter called it the “Woke brigade at work.. again!” and complained about “box ticking”. That response fascinates me, because there is an assumption buried inside it. A white man can represent history. A Black woman represents diversity. A white man is simply a person. A Black woman is a political statement.
And perhaps that is exactly why Lady in Blue belongs where she is. Not because everybody should like her, but because of what the reaction exposes. Put her there and listen to what people choose to say when they believe they are simply commenting on a statue. Watch how quickly criticism of a piece of metal becomes a discussion about race. Watch how quickly “I don’t like it” becomes “white culture”. Watch how easily the words “everywoman” and “Black woman” become incompatible in some people’s minds.
More than fifty years ago, Lennon and Ono used an appalling word to make an appalling point about hierarchy, power and the position women occupied in society. I wouldn’t use their comparison now, but perhaps there is still something in the anger that produced it.
Prejudice rarely announces itself by saying, “Hello, I am prejudice.” It dresses itself up. It calls itself common sense, tradition, anti-woke, a joke, an opinion, a concern about culture. And occasionally it gets careless and tells a statue of a Black woman that she doesn’t belong in an “Anglo Saxon country”.
That is why the comments underneath Lady in Blue matter. You don’t have to like the statue. You don’t have to understand it. You don’t even have to think it should be there. But when the appearance of a Black woman on a plinth produces racism and misogyny, we should at least have the courage to call those things by their names.
Tschabalala Self has placed a woman above Trafalgar Square. The really interesting exhibition is happening underneath her.
