I get that times change and what may once have been an acceptable work of public art may be less palatable. Certainly a mural showing the conquest of native Americans is perhaps not suited to a public space. However destroying it is totally bone headed. Move it to a gallery or museum so future generations can see the journey that's been taken.
I would take issue with prominent display of artwork celebrating the conquest of Native Americans, I don't understand why showing it is necessarily a problem. The mural in question is essentially criticizing the way that schools have presented that part of US history.
It should cost either $0 (i.e. don’t do it) or the cost of materials (by having the students paint over it). Though it seems like even they don’t particular care about removing them:
> And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal.
I wonder who the bulk of that $600k will go to (certainly not the laborers!) and what their relationship is to the people who decided to spend that much.
I'd be perfectly happy to see high-res scans taken. To the extent that people want to preserve art that is now seen as unacceptably racist for children's schools, they can create a virtual museum that provides the proper contextualization.
And we can do that for all art. Given that digital storage verges on free, there's little reason not to preserve every bit of art, from a kid's refrigerator drawings on up. It'd be fascinating to see Picasso's work from his first scribble, for example. And who knows what future generations will make of it.
High Res scans are good, but particularly for both a mural or an oil painting, a huge amount of information is lost with a scan, however high res. It's also the case for almost any other medium.
To take oil painting for example: a painting is usually composed of layer upon layer of translucent paint. The way it alters light cannot be captured in a 2D scan, it is a very complex, 3D laminar object, before you even get to impasto technique. To see a Picasso in real life (or any painting) is vastly more rewarding than just seeing a picture of it.
And incidentally you can see almost every scribble Picasso ever made, there's a museum in Barcelona containing much of his early work, including sketchbooks.
Seen as by who? Isn't that a large assumption about a seemingly tiny minority that generally takes issue with everything. The vast majority can see and understand the mural for what it is.
Even if does have to be removed, it's also clear that moving and preserving it in a museum is both cheaper and far better than spending more to destroy it completely. Erasing history like this is no win for anyone.
Why not? Now, more than ever, we can see this as a tragedy and great wrong. Would you consider that a “mural showing the Holocaust is perhaps not suited for a public space”?
Of course you wouldn’t. This mural doesn’t glorify and we can add context around it to make it into a teachable situation instead of trying to erase history.
"In one of the panels – which are displayed in the halls of George Washington High School in San Francisco – shows slaves working in a field. Another depicts white settlers stepping over the body of a deceased Native American."
Why not? I'm of the belief we shouldn't be afraid of our very dark history as a species - otherwise we can't learn from it. A high school is a place of learning first and foremost. Kids should be taught to never forget these things, or they'll eventually slip out of cultural memory all together.
“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”
In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.
I mean, gosh, the horror of young people confronting history.
The vanishingly few students who might actually have taken the time to confront the images, and come away somewhat disturbed by them, are the very ones most benefiting from it.
It's activist art depicting a scene of a non-historical event. While I get what the mural is trying to say, I don't necessarily think that this is something that kids should have to see every day when they're not in the context of a history class.
Think about it; how would you feel going to work every day if your office had murals of holocaust victims being sent into gas chambers? There's as valid a lesson to be learned from such a mural, but it's unnecessarily disturbing because it's out of context.
So no, the actual motive of San Francisco officials aside, I don't think it's appropriate for a high school mural.
What is ironic is that the painting is a political, left-wing work of art, and it was created with the intent of denouncing the hypocrisy of the founding fathers.
Are we doing a good service to the youth removing any kind of potentially disturbing imagery? I don’t think so. Reality can be disturbing at times, and still needs to be known.
Explaining the meaning and history of this mural would be bettern. Couldn't they add a sign with a text and QR code with some encyclopedical knowledge about each "controversial" landmark? Something like this [1].
I think is the same with the Columbus statue removal there[2]. Art is a product of its time and if the times were racist/violent/whatever, the art will be so also. Indeed it would be a good way to learn History.
This is scandalous! And very depressing. One would think, that these topics have been understood in the meanwhile, especially in a community like San Francisco, which once was the stronghold of the 68ers.
A society, that can't criticize itself is a weak society.
This recent acceptance of art destruction disturbs me. The Minneapolis sculpture garden literally burned Sam Durant’s sculpture Scaffold after complaints.
Unwanted art ends up in the trash. We venerated old art in large part because of this process. If every child’d Doodle from 1000 BCE was still around few people would look at them or care.
It's a great point. And the reason we have a lot of pro-slavery art is that the anti-slavery art was destroyed, or never allowed to be created in the first place. I've recently been reading The Fiery Trial, a biography of Lincoln's ideas, and mobs would happily assault and sometimes kill white abolitionists just for speaking about the notion. And Kendi's Stamped From The Beginning makes clear how eager the greater portion of American whites were to keep black people from having opinions at all.
Art has pretty much always been subjected to a pretty ruthless collaborative editing process. In San Francisco's alleys, art is continually being put up and painted over. The good pieces last longer than the random squiggles, but very few reach the level where somebody like Precita Eyes [1] will preserve it past its natural lifespan. For something to survive across generations, it has to fit the standards of multiple generations, and that's how it always has been.
Predictably, Bari Weiss isn't upset about that ongoing loss of San Francisco art. Gosh golly, why is losing this specific set of unexceptional murals important to her?
This is just false. Please learn how to do a modicum of research before putting forth these reactionary idiotic rumors.
Sam Durant wanted the sculpture to be DISMANTLED after it was heavily protested by local Dakota's for it's insensitivity.
Durant literally agreed to having it dismantled and it was buried by Dakota Elders.
"I made Scaffold as a learning space for people like me, white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists" said Durant, "white artists need to address issues of white supremacy."
Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art and looking for unacceptable views in their libraries?
Movie catalogues, books and destroy them too? We used to make fun of authoritarian regimes and how they were week for trying to stamp out art and thought they didn’t like, but it’s like we’ve become them.
I’m a bit surprised they haven’t revived Gore’s PMRC to ensure music lyrics represent correct orthodoxy.
I mean, I can understand renaming streets. Streets are renamed for various reasons, and some commemorate dubious people, but the street remains. I wonder...
...Will one day all the Mission cities get renamed because they were named by Evangelizing Spanish Missionaries. Is that where we’re headed? We can name them after tribes or chiefs, perhaps. I propose Ohlone for San Francisco.
This is basically the same argument that southern right-wingers use to defend keeping their confederate statues, but oddly enough many internet commenters seem to have no problems with ripping down those pieces of art since they represented something they didn't like.
I'm not accusing you (mc32) of being hypocritical since I haven't seen you make any comments saying that we should rip out old confederate statues because they represent slavery.
However, (let me reiterate that this isn't an attack on you, mc32), I think we as a collective internet need to rethink how we feel about removing artwork if it represents something bad. It is not okay for us to be okay with ripping out some untasteful art but not others, simply because some bad art is "left" and other bad art is "right."
Before you go jumping on me about how slavery is different than communism, remember that communism is responsible for nearly a hundred million deaths, which puts it near the level of slavery in terms of harm it has done to humanity (even if they aren't directly comparable).
I mean there is the slight difference that the statues intend to glorify the figures they represent, while this mural does the opposite - it's a pointed commentary on slavery and colonialism.
Statues are inanimate. What glorification happens is by people. When you see a statue of something or someone you find distasteful, do you find yourself glorifying whatever it represents or does the statue instead simply serve as a reminder to you of the past for which you make your own judgements? Do statues impose meaning, or do people find their own meaning in them? Of course the answer is self evident.
One reason that purging of the past is so intrinsically tied to authoritarian regimes is because authoritarian regimes do not want people to think for themselves. They want to enforce their views and only their views with no possible ambiguity or counterpoint. This is the danger of flirting with authoritarianism, as I feel we have been doing in trying to purge the past. Once the momentum for 'cultural purification' grows, you may find that where you draw your personal line in the sand is not where the rest of those pursuing such ends choose to.
However poor its implementation has been, the ideology behind communism is based is the idea that people should not be stratified by class. The ideology behind slavery is that some people are subhuman and can be treated like animals. The broad brush you are using to equate the two is inappropriate.
The U.S. freedom loving founding fathers participated in not only the legalization of slavery but also the genocide of native americans. Should we lay those sins at the feet of democracy and capitalism as a whole?
Yes. This has been going on for a while. There were several civil war statues of various generals that have been pulled down because of their politics at the time.
They tried to do the same to the Statue of Cecil Roads which I believe is in Oxford University.
There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II.
> There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II.
The use of "White Privilege" really does remind me of the "Global Jewish Conspiracy." As if there exists a cabal we're all in on.
Even more directly, "White privilege" is simply a variation of "bourgeois privilege". The whole idea of "bourgeois privilege" however rephrased and antiquated "counterrevolutionary elements" as something that should be purged wholesale from society is something that goes at least as far back as the Cultural Revolution in China; knowing that, it's incredibly scary that anyone in the West is still taking these notions at face value!
>Even more directly, "White privilege" is simply a variation of "bourgeois privilege". The whole idea of "bourgeois privilege" however rephrased and antiquated "counterrevolutionary elements" as something that should be purged wholesale from society is something that goes at least as far back as the Cultural Revolution in China; knowing that, it's incredibly scary that anyone in the West is still taking these notions at face value!
Your comment seems to imply that the premise of "white privilege" should carry a connotation of "white genocide," and that anyone who accepts the former likely desires the latter. I certainly hope that was not your intent, if so you are very mistaken.
White privilege simply means that white people benefit, however implicitly , from a society which was founded on white supremacist ideals. Or more abstractly, that the descendants of the people who stacked the deck of Western civilization in their favor may enjoy privileges that those against whom the deck was stacked may not.
No sinister overtones of purges or mass murder need by applied, except by those with an agenda.
This connotation is entirely your own reading. Both politically-motivated killings of the sort that may have occurred during the Cultural Revolution, and cultural cleansing no matter how destructive or how close in its goals to erasing any group's distinct cultural values or self-perceived "integrity" as people, are very clearly excluded from the most common definition of genocide as adopted by the United Nations. And while one could definitely make the case that the most rabid haters and vilifiers of so-called "whiteness" (not the same thing, strictly speaking, as "white privilege", which is part of a slightly less radical memeplex) are pursuing something practically indistinguishable from cultural cleansing as described above - and indeed, that this sort of hate and vilification is something we should be quite concerned about - that is, again, not genocide of any sort.
> White privilege simply means that white people benefit, however implicitly , from a society which was founded on white supremacist ideals.
You know what it really is. It is called in Christianity "Original Sin".
There is no such thing as a society founded on White Supremacist Ideals. The only one that did exist was Nazi German and we damn well made sure that the German's would never move back to that.
We just happen to be living at a time after the largest Empire in History was run by a country that happened to be white. Would you be talking about Mongol privilege if we living in the time where the Mongol empire was at its height?
It is a total nonsense concept that is used by racists to guilt trip white people.
America was founded on white supremacist ideals? Catholics, Irish, Italians...? The vast majority of "white" groups had absolutely no power within society. Even for groups such as the British the vast majority were also rather less than reigning supreme. But slavery... For centuries peoples around the world enslaved one another. White enslaving white, brown enslaving brown, black enslaving black. Even within the US while the majority of owners of slaves were white, so was the majority of the entire population. In America there was also native Americans that owned slaves, blacks that owned slaves, and people of every color and type owning slaves.
But then why were most slaves black? Europe was almost exclusively Christian and the church had long since forbade Christians enslaving Christians. And across the world there were various powerful empires forming. In the Mideast there was the Ottoman empire, China had the Qing dynasty, and so on. Then there was Africa: a disorganized, technologically underdeveloped people whom also had a thriving domestic slave trade already in place. Africans were not chosen to be slaves because of their skin color, they were chosen because their nations' lack of development left them susceptible.
But I think we should go even further on slavery. In spite of the normalcy of the practice of slavery at the time, many of the founding fathers were actively working to see its end. Thomas Jefferson, indeed a slave owner by inheritance, had penned an explicit condemnation of slavery into the original draft of the constitution. However this was not workable when trying to form a union of states when some still endorsed it. It was stripped from the final revision. In its place we saw two things. The first was the addition of "all men are created equal", which was a fully self aware statement. The second was an agreement that the US would not federally ban slavery prior to 1808. Thomas Jefferson was the president who would effect a law in 1807 that would ban the slave trade on January 1st, 1808. [1]
America, in spite of an extensive "need" of slavery, was also a very small player in it. About 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the new world, 10.7 million survived the voyage. How many were shipped to North America? 388k, less than 4%. [2] There are complex reasons for this, but our mixed relationship with slavery no doubt played a significant role.
But perhaps you mean voting laws. Once again this was hardly an American institution. The idea of the masses being able to vote is something very new. The reason this was avoided in the past was to try to avoid demagoguery and corruption. What do I mean there? Our current president is a reality TV star who had no experience in politics. At one point it looked like he might be running against Oprah, a TV talk show host - with no experience, for the 2020 election. We are a living demonstration of the very reasons that nations feared letting people vote without condition.
After downvoting this because... reasons, please do at least consider that not a single statement I've made here is false. It's quite dangerous when ideology becomes more influential than facts.
Are you fucking kidding me? One is referring to a thoroughly researched imbalance of power in society, if used a bit callously in recent years. The other is an unfounded, racist conspiracy theory that lead to a genocide of six million people.
Racism obviously does exist, however if someone who isn't white can be elected to the highest office in a majority white country, one would think that the race of that person is irrelevant for the most part in the electorate's mind. I am sure you can find some KKK or Neo Nazi nutcases somewhere but they are few and far between.
Somewhat of a person anecdote. Somewhat recently in the UK we had a new Princess. She was mixed race. I'd had seen a few pictures of her and wasn't even aware she was mixed race until the news and television kept on constantly mentioning the fact that she was mixed race (half black, half white I guess, I don't really care). Now of course I know because people wouldn't shut up about it.
The civil war generals thing is different. Traitors should not be honored, and the honor was put in place reinforce the ideals and make it clear that those ideals still ruled. That is, black people need to know their place.
If someone wants to put up a statue of a confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway, that’s also different. And would say more about southern culture than the worship of Lee or a monster like Forrest.
The content of your politics doesn’t change whether folks are assholes or not. People pushing for eliminating challenging art are feeding their ego first.
And that's precisely why those generals were being honored; to proactively show that, despite them being on the losing side, we would not be regarding them as traitors! This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today even as cultural divides within the country are widening to the point where they might essentially split it apart all over again. (Not on racial or ethnic lines however, but, loosely speaking, on ones pitting "elite intellectualism" against the "common man's good sense". And I say this while fully acknowledging that the latter is at least as flawed as the former.)
> ...the ideals... That is, black people need to know their place.
Not so. The Civil War was indeed "about" slavery in many ways, but the "confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway" you mention above would be able to tell you plenty of reasons why he was going to fight the Yankees with full conviction no matter what.
Slavery and "keeping black people in their place" were important to the opportunistic elite of the South; but in the common man's view, what was being threatened to the point of wholly justifying their sacrifice was their culture and way of life. And this viewpoint is still one way that the war is understood in many parts of the South.
> This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today ....
Except the South reneged on the deal almost as soon as the war ended, violently suppressing and oppressing the formerly-enslaved.
The Reconstruction was badly bungled on both sides. Many Southerners even today object far more to what happened to the South "as soon as the war ended"[1], than to the war itself. This is not a justification of Jim Crow and the like of course, but an account of how the folks in the South who wished to "violently suppress and oppress the formerly-enslaved" for their own benefit managed to get away with it, despite having just lost a war with the North over that very issue.
[1] Well, not quite; the "Radical Reconstruction" was a bit of a later development. But then, the truly nasty politics on the other side, with a "Redeemer" movement working together with violent, paramilitary organizations (including the 1st 'Klan') to ensure that white Southern democrats would dominate the South and impose overt white supremacy, was itself enabled and triggered by a backlash to the Radical Reconstruction.
While what was going on in the 1960s is indeed suspicious (though it was very obviously a time of political upheaval in the South as a whole, and this may have very well been what was being "reacted" to, more than civil rights themselves!), the 1910s was well within living memory of the war itself as well as the rather problematic "Radical Reconstruction" era. What's more interesting in the chart you link to is the way the monuments drop sharply in the 1970s and especially the 1980s, precisely as the "New South" starts really taking off. Not exactly consistent with the common viewpoint that "politics in the South didn't really change in that time frame, they were always dominated by racism and white supremacy"!
I respect your perspective, but the underlying assumption is heritage for white southerners. It’s a dangerous thing to honor.
The 1910s were also within living memory of people who were born as chattel, property of someone else. What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them? This was put up with because the political machinery of the south was incredibly powerful, and northerners, particularly immigrants weren’t exactly woke to the troubles of former slaves either.
The new South era was unique in many ways, including the end of open racial oppression and blacks voting in numbers. LBJ broke the back of the solid south for a few years.
> but the underlying assumption is heritage for white southerners. It’s a dangerous thing to honor.
Actually, I've consistently been trying to make the point that the things being honored in this way do NOT include slavery itself. Yes, it's a weird point of view which involves a whole lot of willful cognitive dissonance on the part of those white southerners who celebrate their heritage today. Yes, it is entirely fair to criticize it on that basis. But it's not any more inherently weird than celebrating Washington despite him being a slaveowner, or celebrating the U.S. itself even though its expansion was accomplished by killing Natives. It's just not fair to be in denial about these nuances, and insist that "Southerners who respect their own heritage are celebrating slavery" in a way that others are not. (Note that one can fairly object to the Confederate flag on other grounds - it has always been an overt symbol of illegal secession, and a secession that was explicitly motivated by slavery - that don't quite apply to the statues of defeated generals.)
> What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them?
I'm sure that they had plenty of other things to worry about. And that, by and large, they wouldn't have wanted a South that failed altogether to reconcile with the North. Failed reconciliation after a defeat in war can be very dangerous - and if the "Redeemers" were willing to use paramilitary violence in our timeline as a reaction to a comparatively mild "Radical Reconstruction", can we even imagine how Southerners would have reacted to extreme levels of festering resentment? It would have gotten quite ugly, to say the least.
You should wonder why did ACW did not degenerate into slaughterhouse like Russian or Chinese civil wars..
A lot of people now dream about such a thing, they have not perhaps read what that actually means. US let South get away with this crap because it WAS beaten and peace and unity of the country was worth a lot more.
The “traitors” things is somewhat silly, since even men who served with them Before the war did not consider them such. Most considered their state to supersede the union that is all. If Virginia did not secede Lee would have been happily helping Union put down rest of the states.
Lincoln movie has a great moment at the end of president talking to Grant, they were wise men and luckily for all involved did not turn the aftermath of the war into bloodbath that would span decades and turn US into police state.
> US let South get away with this crap because it WAS beaten and peace and unity of the country was worth a lot more.
To be clear about it, the US let the South get away with plenty of terrible things that they shouldn't have. But yes, the monuments thing that people are objecting to nowadays was a lot milder and more positive in its goals than many people assume. The reality is that at some point, by all appearances, many people in the North did not so much care about the plight of the formerly-enslaved; they mostly wanted to punish the South, no matter how counterproductive this would have been. The 'Radical Reconstruction' was in no small part a result of this attitude, and had the North objected to the Confederate monuments, this too would've been seen as such.
It's interesting to note that Lincoln himself did not make this mistake; it may be fair to blame the comparative chaos following his assassination by a radical slavery supporter (which, it should be noted, was immediately condemned in no uncertain terms by the saner voices in the Southern states, including Lee himself) for the sudden change in attitudes. At the very least, the fact that Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, was thereafter made President (leaving him free to sabotage even that remarkably mild approach to Reconstruction, and to antagonize Congress over the issue to a perhaps unprecedented extent) did not exactly help matters.
"In partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, UC Santa Cruz will be removing the mission bell that is located on campus. The bell was originally donated to the campus by a local women’s club many years ago ..."
"Mission bells, which were installed across the state to memorialize the California Missions, are viewed by many populations as a symbol of racism and dehumanization of their ancestors."
> Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art
These are public murals. They're on giant walls hundreds or thousands of community members must walk by daily (the kids don't even have a choice). I don't think it's too much to demand that public art not be... y'know, wildly racist.
It's not like we're outlawing private galleries or burning books here. This stuff really is offensive, and "historical context" only goes so far.
It's so easy to forget that authoritarianism is often not brought on against a people, but through their very support. The book burnings of the past were not the product of an unpopular government forcibly purging 'inconveniences'. Burnings were joyous events where people celebrated 'purifying' themselves and their culture by removal of newly unacceptable influences.
"No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign [these books] to the flames..." That was spoken by Joseph Goebbels to raucous applause in a crowd of tens of thousands as they celebrated the new and improved morality of the German State, in 1933.
In America we've started down the exact same path, but people accept it because think they believe that banning and burning flags, destroying statues, banning books (see: e.g. Mark Twain), and now destroying art are part of some grand effort to bring about a new morality and new vision for the nation. Instead we just continue down paths that have been tread many a time before yet ever refusing to consider the parallels because, after all, this time it will be different.
> Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art and looking for unacceptable views in their libraries?
Good grief. It's not a library, it's a mural. This isn't an archive of historically important but plausibly controversial artwork being purged for thought crimes, it's a fucking school wall. Kids and staff have to walk by this thing every day. And there's a dead indian on it front and center, and a bunch of slaves working in a field. It's... it's just not appropriate artwork for a public space.
And all this hand wringing is completely insincere anyway. If some random school in Arkansas had decided to repaint a mural with similar content, no one would care. But this is San Francisco, so of course Bari Weiss gets to write about it int The Times and pretend it's some kind of liberal disease.
So... maybe their school district should feel free replace the ugly history with some more acceptable public artwork without a bunch of internet conservatives freaking out about it?
I mean, it's not like they don't teach the history of slavery or indigenous peoples in California schools. They don't need to celebrate it on the corridor walls if they don't want to, do they?
Does it matter? Do you really argue that no one could possibly be offended by this 40 foot long painting of a literally larger than life dead native american?
Let. Them. Decorate. Their. School. Why must everything be a moral lesson with you people? You don't apply that level of finger wagging to anyone else, but Good God if liberals do something then it must be evil.
Because the question isn't what the art means! It's whether or not the San Francisco school district and its community should be free to choose what kind of artwork to decorate their school with without knee-jerk conservatives like Bari Weiss and "darkpuma" freaking out about it as it it were censorship.
It's their school, not yours. Why do you think you should get veto power over what they are allowed to change and what they must keep? And why on earth, of all things, do you think they should be required to keep this thing?
> "Because the question isn't what the art means!"
Of course it is. You've got a bunch of hysterical people saying the mural is in support of slavery and genocide. How can you say that the meaning of the art isn't relevant? The beliefs the mob have about the meaning of the mural are central to the story, you cannot abstract them away.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? and violating the site guidelines?
For example, the guidelines include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." The comment I'm replying to here broke that, as have others you posted, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20299823 from yesterday.
Fair enough, I'll delete the responses here. To be fair, though, we both know that the linked editorial is a deliberate exercise in insincere outrage. Demanding that one side assume good faith while the other is allowed to feign as much outrage as it wants because their media feeds the narrative isn't a good path to clean discussion either.
With no one to challenge the framing (which, yes, includes accusing people of being conservatives) topics like this become echo chambers. I don't want that, and am willing to tolerate some flamage as the price.
But yeah, it's not my forum. Like I said I'll delete the responses here.
Thanks for the reply. It's quite possible to express your points thoughtfully rather than flamingly, and then there wouldn't be any problem at all.
It's not my forum either! We're just trying to preserve it.
We're do our best to demand good faith equally from everyone, or rather to cajole them into it. Outrage—feigned or otherwise—seems pretty evenly distributed as far as I can tell.
It's not just any artwork, it's a piece of WPA art by an independently-notable artist. Yes, it's ugly (if only in the way it freely uses stereotypes that are considered at least somewhat offensive today). But so what. The school district can cover it in a non-destructive way if they don't want the schoolkids exposed to it, but destroying the work altogether would be out of question in a sane world.
> Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art and looking for unacceptable views in their libraries?
I think that's been going on for a while. I remember discussions of some works of American literature, which routinely have been parts of teen curriculum, being declared unsuitable due to the use of certain words that represent racial slurs now.
> I’m a bit surprised they haven’t revived Gore’s PMRC to ensure music lyrics represent correct orthodoxy.
That's way too little now. Long past are the times where the only thing that needed for a work to not be banned is content of the work itself. Now if the author fails the purity test, all their work, no matter how clean, is automatically treif and must be expunged. So the ideological commission would have a lot of work on their hands. Likely, it can be crowdsourced by twitterati who are only to happy do dig up any utterance, no matter how old, in the service of the noble goal of unpersoning yet another offender.
> Will one day all the Mission cities get renamed because they were named by Evangelizing Spanish Missionaries.
I wouldn't put it past them. Not only "San" prefix clearly implies religious reference, which triggers atheists and ACLU, I am sure modern sensibilities would not be too kind to Francis of Assisi, which associated with literal crusaders, engaged in various acts of cultural imperialism and so on. And of course there's the question of gender balance - out of all surrounding cities, only Santa Clara - one of the smallest cities, arguably not even a real city at all but merely a district of San Jose agglomeration - is named after a woman. On the other hand, we have San Francisco, San Mateo, San Leandro, San Carlos, San Jose, San Gregorio, San Martin, San Bruno... you get the picture. Cats get the same representation in city names in the Bay as women do. How does it look?
I think renaming San Francisco should be on the agenda very soon.
Well, they aren't wrong as far as that goes. I would simply remind them that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me add also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
I'm not sure what those statements imply. I read them to mean that anything is justified if it can be said to protect "liberty" in any way, however small. And the same for "justice".
A mural painted by a communist depicting Washington and his slaves walking over indian corpses wouldn't have lasted five seconds in any place dominated by the right, and anybody publicly defending it would probably have had their house burned down.
IMO the left has been more extreme regarding removal of liberties for the past decade or so. Not saying the right isn’t trying to do that (see abortion), it’s just the left is much broader and those who are liberal seem to generally be blind to it or think the trades off are worth it (although it’s not really their call, that’s why it’s in the bill of rights).
That’s why so many people supported (and still support) Trump. Removal of the second amendment (guns), fourth amendment (FISA court), first amendment (all the political correctness), etc. The “right” feels persecuted and IMO justly so.
Personally, I fall on the libertarian side so I think both are pretty poor for liberty. But I have watched this scary shift and it kinda mimics the decent into Nazisim... “share my ideals or else we will erase you”.
When has first amendment been threatened? And if anything, the "right" or whatever Trump is all about FISA courts and pro military/police establishment. I know that abortion rights, right to assisted suicide, drug rights, separation of church and state are all threatened by the "right" also.
People always refer to nazi's, but I think communism falls in the same boat. So both extreme right and extreme left are oppressive regimes. The difference is that extreme left has a more "social" explanation, but in the end they kill and oppress people the same way.
That's why extreme left is more scary to me, like a wolf in sheeps clothing. Historical death counts also show that extreme left can be quite devastating.
Ever since the Bush II years I've felt like the right and the left have been engaged in a competition over who can be the most irrational and insane. It's a game of reacting to reaction to reaction ... all the way down.
If we have this on the left and the "alt-right" on the right, I'm a bit afraid of what the next round will bring. How much crazier can it get? I'm sure top minds on both sides are working tirelessly on things even dumber, meaner, and crazier than anything we've seen so far.
I think worrying about the alt right is similar to worrying about antifa. Both seem to be fringe minority groups that get disproportionate amount of media attention. I've never met anyone in real life who claimed to be alt right, or repeated alt right talking points.
That’s a good question, but a bit pointless. Usually when people say “crypto fascist” it’s just shorthand for “people whose opinions I find inconvenient or with whom I don’t agree”.
I mean "people that can be bonafide described as fascists by any reasonable standard but are smart enough not to broadcast their horrifying beliefs in polite society" but sure, be cute with words, it's the right moment for that historically.
I am sure a fascist can hide in plain sight. But my currently unanswered question is how can you measure that? Is there any objective data here, or are we talking about our subjective perceptions of society?
I live in Kansas City and the alt-right people definitely exist and I’ve had a long chat in person with at least one. It was even more bizarre because he was half Jewish and seemed really excited about an approaching race war, it was really shocking and scary to hear. It was also strange because he was convinced this coming race war would be fine for him because he “wasn’t raised Jewish”. For some reason I was convinced I could dissuade him, he stopped talking to me though. The vast majority of people I know, even the conservatives, are nothing like that though.
>>Ever since the Bush II years I've felt like the right and the left have been engaged in a competition over who can be the most irrational and insane.
Firstly I take some issue with the scope of the study being limited only to North America and Western Europe.....and completely ignoring the Asian democracies which largely skew more to the right. But scroll down to the third graphic (the line graph). The Republicans are slightly more-right-wing than they were 2000-2008. The Democrat's platform, however, has sharply gone off the deep end of the Left since 2008.
But most PEOPLE are fairly centrist. Even if they are slightly-left-of-center, the Democratic party's extremism is pushing normal to abandon them. But they long-standing Democrat power structures have an outsized influence on media and information channels, hence the non-stop bombardment of outrage culture at how everyone is a "Nazi". Ever notice that almost no-one uses "Communist" as an epithet anymore, despite the world's two major historical Communist governments having by FAR the largest domestic bodycounts of the modern age?
They promote gab and confederate statues but I don't ever see them fighting against intellectual property laws, or fighting for legalizing sympathetic striking, or fighting to allow pornography on youtube. Instead it seems to be fighting for a very specific kind of free speech.
The group supporting its removal alleges that it “glorifies slavery.” If you read the description of the painting, that’s just false and makes me skeptical of the quality of the minds involved.
This would be appalling even if it were free to remove the mural. With all the literal and figurative shit San Francisco has to deal with, it’s borderline criminal to waste more than half a million dollars.
Another question is how painting 1,600 sq ft which is maybe half the area of the walls in a small house, costs $600,000. I'll gladly do it for a cool half million, and you can use the $100,000 saved to remove any other awkward signs of the past that might pop up in the future.
Sometimes people get so caught up in defending whatever side of some political argument that pragmatic matters such as price go right out the window. They stop thinking practically. The only thing that matters becomes their ideology or what have you.
I, personally, have the exact same questions as you. Come on, 600 G's?
I'll fly out and paint it for half that if you guys really want it done.
I would like to believe that the steep cost is due not to destruction, but actual removal and preservation of the murals. To destroy these pieces of art is an outright atrocity.
Unfortunately, it seems that removal and preservation are not the intent here, the aim is to destroy the art so that it cannot be recovered in the future.
if they are truly set on destruction they won't merely paint it, they will first reduce the surface back to its original form them paint that.
off the subject...
intersectionalism, safe spaces, and more, and some wonder why independents are more horrified by one side of the aisle than the other? once thought, speech, and expression, are neutered nothing else much matters.
According the SF Chronicle, the majority of the cost is in preparing the required environmental impact report:
"Painting over the mural would cost at least $600,000, with the majority of the cost in producing an environmental impact report. In addition, supporters of the mural have vowed to sue if the board voted to destroy it and legal costs could add to the cost, district officials said."
It's a little hard to square this with their other numbers, though:
"Other options included covering the mural with panels, which would cost up to $825,000, or obscuring it with curtains, which would have cost up to $375,000."
Maybe there is still small tiny amount of sanity left in San Francisco, and adding curtains doesn't require a full environmental impact statement? Otherwise it means that 1600 sf of paint costs the city at least $225,000. But if no EIS is required, it's hard to imagine spending that much on curtains --- or twice that on panels, for that matter.
What unholy things are they using that painting a wall is a half a million environmental risk?? If you take the average income and tax rate that's nearly an entire person's lifelong civic contribution dedicated to painting a wall
Painting the art might allow it to be restored later so they are making sure to destroy it. Destroying the art is probably going to break up the surface and generate a lot of dust, so there is an issue here though it doesn't seem like an obviously half million dollar issue.
That's both incredibly tacky and also kinda useless since this doesn't seem like one of those paintings that depend on texture or fine detail a ton, meaning restoring it can be as simple as creating a template off of a photograph and playing paint by numbers
These murals are part of the wall. They were painted whilst the plaster was still dry, the artist working right next to the plasterers. It's not an easy job to remove intact.
> makes me skeptical of the quality of the minds involved
There are plenty of us who identified the problem at the heart of this movement ages ago: many interpret the movement to change the way we engage with history as filtered through their own, nuance-capable minds, in which case there are good points to be made about glorifying parts of history that we no longer agree with. But in reality, when movements hit any semblance of popularity, they need to be interpreted through the way most people approach issues: it's entirely unsurprising to me that the reaction to this mural is based on gut aesthetic reactions instead of an attempt to engage any brain cells in understanding the mural's intent.
If I recall correctly, back in the 90's, when the Taliban decided to destroy those giant Buddhas, the BM pleaded to be allowed to dismantle them and take them to Britain instead, at its own expense. The Taliban refused.
This art doesn't seem nearly as important, but, I wonder if they could do the same in this case. The PR alone may be worth it. This sort of thing is the best conterargument they can possibly have against contestation of their legitimacy to hold foreign art.
As someone with an MA in Art History, this is simply astounding and unbelievable. None of the people on that school board seem to have any historical perspective:
- Rivera, his work and his pupils like the mentioned painter were left wingers actively denouncing white privilege, slavery etc.
- The work is meant to be critical and through being uncomfortable evoke discussion and reflection
- Destroying art because “it doesn’t fit what we think is right” has many really bad examples in history.
I really can’t believe this is happening. Totally sickening and it makes me despair for the education of the kids under this school board.
This has nothing to do with unacceptable views and everything to do with middle-class people wanting to cover up anything unpleasant.
It's unpleasant to teach your children that the US forefathers were people to be admired when they have seen him with his slaves walking over dead Indians every day.
Absolutely untrue. The uncomfortability ship as an excuse has long since sailed. This is 100% about either fearing about any claim of racism or actually believing that it's better to destroy art because it shows something that doesn't fit the narrative.
From the article it doesn't sound like the people who want to erase the mural believe that the forefathers are people to be admired:
One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”
These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”
I’m going to go against the grain and argue that some erasure of history is a good thing. If we want people to integrate into one polity, it may well be better to focus on disparities that exist in the present instead of dwelling on what happened in the past. The British are the product of invasion and brutal repression of the Anglo Saxons by the Normans. But you don’t really see public art dedicated to that.
I'd be fine if this was being stashed somewhere or at least put to auction and painted over if no one bought it for the price of removal. They are making extra sure it gets destroyed.
FTA: Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”
But you don’t really see public art dedicated to that.
The Bayeux tapestry is one of the most recognizable artworks in the world (yes, it's not a mural in the tube or even in the UK but it doesn't need to be). Norman castles, Norman cathedrals...
Of course it's in France; the Norman invasion was some lads from Normandy. William was born and died in Normandy.
Perhaps the French could gift a statue of William to the UK; they could put it next to the statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square.
Edit: The French are not known for their tactlessness. In truth, William the Conqueror is simply not offensive to the modern British people. William is even more distant to the modern British than George Washington, and you don't have the British crying themselves to sleep over that great whupper of Britons having a statue in London.
My point is: French folks are less interested in British social cohesion than British folks, so glorification of the invasion in France does not undermine rayiner's original argument that the British are de-emphasizing that part of their history for social cohesion's sake.
Aside from the ridiculous price tag, it would set a dangerous precedent. It's not so much about the value of the art itself, which is debatable, but rather how appropriate removing a historical testimony is.
Just because an interpretation no longer fits with today's view doesn't mean people should forget the history behind it nor the mentality surrounding it at a particular time. Erasing remnants of a past you disagree with doesn't erase the facts, but it makes people less inclined to remember or learn about a not so glorious history.
It raises questions about the exact motives at stake here.
> The notion of erasing art has an American pedigree.
Was this a poor choice of words from a hastily written article, or does the author think that erasing art is uniquely American? Changing history, destroying art, etc., have existed since time immemorial. Anyone who honestly thinks that America invented evil is delusional.
I wrote about another situation in which public art created a stir in the community. This mural wasn't on the wall of a building, so it's removal was cheap. What's interesting to me is two things: it's initial anonymity (nobody recognized it for what it is until recently), and how it forces a consideration of collective traumatic memory.
I think a lot of people here seem to be missing the staggering part of this: the mural is overtly, pointedly anti-slavery, anti-colonialism, anti-George Washington, but it's being destroyed because the school board is claiming it's the opposite.
Yup. I'm not sure if people are missing it, or just got used to it. This isn't the first time an action or proclamation in the name of "social justice" twists reality into a Klein bottle.
It's not just the school board that's claiming that. If you look at the Guardian article, for example, it presents the claim that the mural is pro-slavery and pro-colonialism as simply and indisputably correct, and claims to the contrary as a rebutted error of a few wrong-thinking people: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/27/san-francisc...
Remember, any right-thinking leftwing supporters of social justice wouldn't be caught dead reading or believing an article by right-winger Bari Weiss. Doing so would instantly mark them out as a supporter of the enemy. As far as they're concerned (or at least can admit to in public), it will be the people who think this artwork means what the artist created to mean who are ignoring reality.
But realizing this about the mural would require being able to see past the immediate thing that is depicted, or, God forbid, doing some research. Neither is something the radical fringe (left or right) feeding on outrage is either interested in or, quite likely, capable of.
I wouldn't be too surprised though if SF turns out to be the first place to burn books this century.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadGod knows why it costs $600k to destroy one though; this job should actually cost $100 or less, paint and labor all-in.
> And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal.
And we can do that for all art. Given that digital storage verges on free, there's little reason not to preserve every bit of art, from a kid's refrigerator drawings on up. It'd be fascinating to see Picasso's work from his first scribble, for example. And who knows what future generations will make of it.
To take oil painting for example: a painting is usually composed of layer upon layer of translucent paint. The way it alters light cannot be captured in a 2D scan, it is a very complex, 3D laminar object, before you even get to impasto technique. To see a Picasso in real life (or any painting) is vastly more rewarding than just seeing a picture of it.
And incidentally you can see almost every scribble Picasso ever made, there's a museum in Barcelona containing much of his early work, including sketchbooks.
Even if does have to be removed, it's also clear that moving and preserving it in a museum is both cheaper and far better than spending more to destroy it completely. Erasing history like this is no win for anyone.
Of course you wouldn’t. This mural doesn’t glorify and we can add context around it to make it into a teachable situation instead of trying to erase history.
Why is this appropriate for a high school mural?
“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”
In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.
I mean, gosh, the horror of young people confronting history.
I think there's a lot of public art in America that seems to lionise slave owners but I posted too soon.
Edit: maxerickson's reply is much better.
Think about it; how would you feel going to work every day if your office had murals of holocaust victims being sent into gas chambers? There's as valid a lesson to be learned from such a mural, but it's unnecessarily disturbing because it's out of context.
So no, the actual motive of San Francisco officials aside, I don't think it's appropriate for a high school mural.
Are we doing a good service to the youth removing any kind of potentially disturbing imagery? I don’t think so. Reality can be disturbing at times, and still needs to be known.
I think is the same with the Columbus statue removal there[2]. Art is a product of its time and if the times were racist/violent/whatever, the art will be so also. Indeed it would be a good way to learn History.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indiana_state_historic...
[2] https://remezcla.com/lists/culture/columbus-grand-park-statu...
A society, that can't criticize itself is a weak society.
Art has pretty much always been subjected to a pretty ruthless collaborative editing process. In San Francisco's alleys, art is continually being put up and painted over. The good pieces last longer than the random squiggles, but very few reach the level where somebody like Precita Eyes [1] will preserve it past its natural lifespan. For something to survive across generations, it has to fit the standards of multiple generations, and that's how it always has been.
Predictably, Bari Weiss isn't upset about that ongoing loss of San Francisco art. Gosh golly, why is losing this specific set of unexceptional murals important to her?
[1] http://www.precitaeyes.org/
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/95xxn2fm978025...
Sam Durant wanted the sculpture to be DISMANTLED after it was heavily protested by local Dakota's for it's insensitivity.
Durant literally agreed to having it dismantled and it was buried by Dakota Elders.
"I made Scaffold as a learning space for people like me, white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists" said Durant, "white artists need to address issues of white supremacy."
Movie catalogues, books and destroy them too? We used to make fun of authoritarian regimes and how they were week for trying to stamp out art and thought they didn’t like, but it’s like we’ve become them.
I’m a bit surprised they haven’t revived Gore’s PMRC to ensure music lyrics represent correct orthodoxy.
I mean, I can understand renaming streets. Streets are renamed for various reasons, and some commemorate dubious people, but the street remains. I wonder...
...Will one day all the Mission cities get renamed because they were named by Evangelizing Spanish Missionaries. Is that where we’re headed? We can name them after tribes or chiefs, perhaps. I propose Ohlone for San Francisco.
I'm not accusing you (mc32) of being hypocritical since I haven't seen you make any comments saying that we should rip out old confederate statues because they represent slavery.
However, (let me reiterate that this isn't an attack on you, mc32), I think we as a collective internet need to rethink how we feel about removing artwork if it represents something bad. It is not okay for us to be okay with ripping out some untasteful art but not others, simply because some bad art is "left" and other bad art is "right."
Before you go jumping on me about how slavery is different than communism, remember that communism is responsible for nearly a hundred million deaths, which puts it near the level of slavery in terms of harm it has done to humanity (even if they aren't directly comparable).
One reason that purging of the past is so intrinsically tied to authoritarian regimes is because authoritarian regimes do not want people to think for themselves. They want to enforce their views and only their views with no possible ambiguity or counterpoint. This is the danger of flirting with authoritarianism, as I feel we have been doing in trying to purge the past. Once the momentum for 'cultural purification' grows, you may find that where you draw your personal line in the sand is not where the rest of those pursuing such ends choose to.
The U.S. freedom loving founding fathers participated in not only the legalization of slavery but also the genocide of native americans. Should we lay those sins at the feet of democracy and capitalism as a whole?
Why would it be hypocritical to go be against another user of the tool?
Are politicians hypocritical to have opposing ideas?
They tried to do the same to the Statue of Cecil Roads which I believe is in Oxford University.
There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II.
The use of "White Privilege" really does remind me of the "Global Jewish Conspiracy." As if there exists a cabal we're all in on.
Your comment seems to imply that the premise of "white privilege" should carry a connotation of "white genocide," and that anyone who accepts the former likely desires the latter. I certainly hope that was not your intent, if so you are very mistaken.
White privilege simply means that white people benefit, however implicitly , from a society which was founded on white supremacist ideals. Or more abstractly, that the descendants of the people who stacked the deck of Western civilization in their favor may enjoy privileges that those against whom the deck was stacked may not.
No sinister overtones of purges or mass murder need by applied, except by those with an agenda.
You know what it really is. It is called in Christianity "Original Sin".
There is no such thing as a society founded on White Supremacist Ideals. The only one that did exist was Nazi German and we damn well made sure that the German's would never move back to that.
We just happen to be living at a time after the largest Empire in History was run by a country that happened to be white. Would you be talking about Mongol privilege if we living in the time where the Mongol empire was at its height?
It is a total nonsense concept that is used by racists to guilt trip white people.
But then why were most slaves black? Europe was almost exclusively Christian and the church had long since forbade Christians enslaving Christians. And across the world there were various powerful empires forming. In the Mideast there was the Ottoman empire, China had the Qing dynasty, and so on. Then there was Africa: a disorganized, technologically underdeveloped people whom also had a thriving domestic slave trade already in place. Africans were not chosen to be slaves because of their skin color, they were chosen because their nations' lack of development left them susceptible.
But I think we should go even further on slavery. In spite of the normalcy of the practice of slavery at the time, many of the founding fathers were actively working to see its end. Thomas Jefferson, indeed a slave owner by inheritance, had penned an explicit condemnation of slavery into the original draft of the constitution. However this was not workable when trying to form a union of states when some still endorsed it. It was stripped from the final revision. In its place we saw two things. The first was the addition of "all men are created equal", which was a fully self aware statement. The second was an agreement that the US would not federally ban slavery prior to 1808. Thomas Jefferson was the president who would effect a law in 1807 that would ban the slave trade on January 1st, 1808. [1]
America, in spite of an extensive "need" of slavery, was also a very small player in it. About 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the new world, 10.7 million survived the voyage. How many were shipped to North America? 388k, less than 4%. [2] There are complex reasons for this, but our mixed relationship with slavery no doubt played a significant role.
But perhaps you mean voting laws. Once again this was hardly an American institution. The idea of the masses being able to vote is something very new. The reason this was avoided in the past was to try to avoid demagoguery and corruption. What do I mean there? Our current president is a reality TV star who had no experience in politics. At one point it looked like he might be running against Oprah, a TV talk show host - with no experience, for the 2020 election. We are a living demonstration of the very reasons that nations feared letting people vote without condition.
After downvoting this because... reasons, please do at least consider that not a single statement I've made here is false. It's quite dangerous when ideology becomes more influential than facts.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of...
[2] - https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...
Somewhat of a person anecdote. Somewhat recently in the UK we had a new Princess. She was mixed race. I'd had seen a few pictures of her and wasn't even aware she was mixed race until the news and television kept on constantly mentioning the fact that she was mixed race (half black, half white I guess, I don't really care). Now of course I know because people wouldn't shut up about it.
If someone wants to put up a statue of a confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway, that’s also different. And would say more about southern culture than the worship of Lee or a monster like Forrest.
The content of your politics doesn’t change whether folks are assholes or not. People pushing for eliminating challenging art are feeding their ego first.
And that's precisely why those generals were being honored; to proactively show that, despite them being on the losing side, we would not be regarding them as traitors! This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today even as cultural divides within the country are widening to the point where they might essentially split it apart all over again. (Not on racial or ethnic lines however, but, loosely speaking, on ones pitting "elite intellectualism" against the "common man's good sense". And I say this while fully acknowledging that the latter is at least as flawed as the former.)
> ...the ideals... That is, black people need to know their place.
Not so. The Civil War was indeed "about" slavery in many ways, but the "confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway" you mention above would be able to tell you plenty of reasons why he was going to fight the Yankees with full conviction no matter what.
Slavery and "keeping black people in their place" were important to the opportunistic elite of the South; but in the common man's view, what was being threatened to the point of wholly justifying their sacrifice was their culture and way of life. And this viewpoint is still one way that the war is understood in many parts of the South.
Except the South reneged on the deal almost as soon as the war ended, violently suppressing and oppressing the formerly-enslaved.
[1] Well, not quite; the "Radical Reconstruction" was a bit of a later development. But then, the truly nasty politics on the other side, with a "Redeemer" movement working together with violent, paramilitary organizations (including the 1st 'Klan') to ensure that white Southern democrats would dominate the South and impose overt white supremacy, was itself enabled and triggered by a backlash to the Radical Reconstruction.
Many of them were put up in the 60s, as a reaction to the civil rights era. Most of them were put up in the 1910s, for similar reasons.
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/08/18/southern-poverty...
They were erected to rewrite the history exactly as you are presenting it.
The 1910s were also within living memory of people who were born as chattel, property of someone else. What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them? This was put up with because the political machinery of the south was incredibly powerful, and northerners, particularly immigrants weren’t exactly woke to the troubles of former slaves either.
The new South era was unique in many ways, including the end of open racial oppression and blacks voting in numbers. LBJ broke the back of the solid south for a few years.
Actually, I've consistently been trying to make the point that the things being honored in this way do NOT include slavery itself. Yes, it's a weird point of view which involves a whole lot of willful cognitive dissonance on the part of those white southerners who celebrate their heritage today. Yes, it is entirely fair to criticize it on that basis. But it's not any more inherently weird than celebrating Washington despite him being a slaveowner, or celebrating the U.S. itself even though its expansion was accomplished by killing Natives. It's just not fair to be in denial about these nuances, and insist that "Southerners who respect their own heritage are celebrating slavery" in a way that others are not. (Note that one can fairly object to the Confederate flag on other grounds - it has always been an overt symbol of illegal secession, and a secession that was explicitly motivated by slavery - that don't quite apply to the statues of defeated generals.)
> What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them?
I'm sure that they had plenty of other things to worry about. And that, by and large, they wouldn't have wanted a South that failed altogether to reconcile with the North. Failed reconciliation after a defeat in war can be very dangerous - and if the "Redeemers" were willing to use paramilitary violence in our timeline as a reaction to a comparatively mild "Radical Reconstruction", can we even imagine how Southerners would have reacted to extreme levels of festering resentment? It would have gotten quite ugly, to say the least.
A lot of people now dream about such a thing, they have not perhaps read what that actually means. US let South get away with this crap because it WAS beaten and peace and unity of the country was worth a lot more.
The “traitors” things is somewhat silly, since even men who served with them Before the war did not consider them such. Most considered their state to supersede the union that is all. If Virginia did not secede Lee would have been happily helping Union put down rest of the states.
Lincoln movie has a great moment at the end of president talking to Grant, they were wise men and luckily for all involved did not turn the aftermath of the war into bloodbath that would span decades and turn US into police state.
To be clear about it, the US let the South get away with plenty of terrible things that they shouldn't have. But yes, the monuments thing that people are objecting to nowadays was a lot milder and more positive in its goals than many people assume. The reality is that at some point, by all appearances, many people in the North did not so much care about the plight of the formerly-enslaved; they mostly wanted to punish the South, no matter how counterproductive this would have been. The 'Radical Reconstruction' was in no small part a result of this attitude, and had the North objected to the Confederate monuments, this too would've been seen as such.
It's interesting to note that Lincoln himself did not make this mistake; it may be fair to blame the comparative chaos following his assassination by a radical slavery supporter (which, it should be noted, was immediately condemned in no uncertain terms by the saner voices in the Southern states, including Lee himself) for the sudden change in attitudes. At the very least, the fact that Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, was thereafter made President (leaving him free to sabotage even that remarkably mild approach to Reconstruction, and to antagonize Congress over the issue to a perhaps unprecedented extent) did not exactly help matters.
Last week:
"In partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, UC Santa Cruz will be removing the mission bell that is located on campus. The bell was originally donated to the campus by a local women’s club many years ago ..."
"Mission bells, which were installed across the state to memorialize the California Missions, are viewed by many populations as a symbol of racism and dehumanization of their ancestors."
https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/06/mission-bell.html
These are public murals. They're on giant walls hundreds or thousands of community members must walk by daily (the kids don't even have a choice). I don't think it's too much to demand that public art not be... y'know, wildly racist.
It's not like we're outlawing private galleries or burning books here. This stuff really is offensive, and "historical context" only goes so far.
"No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign [these books] to the flames..." That was spoken by Joseph Goebbels to raucous applause in a crowd of tens of thousands as they celebrated the new and improved morality of the German State, in 1933.
In America we've started down the exact same path, but people accept it because think they believe that banning and burning flags, destroying statues, banning books (see: e.g. Mark Twain), and now destroying art are part of some grand effort to bring about a new morality and new vision for the nation. Instead we just continue down paths that have been tread many a time before yet ever refusing to consider the parallels because, after all, this time it will be different.
Good grief. It's not a library, it's a mural. This isn't an archive of historically important but plausibly controversial artwork being purged for thought crimes, it's a fucking school wall. Kids and staff have to walk by this thing every day. And there's a dead indian on it front and center, and a bunch of slaves working in a field. It's... it's just not appropriate artwork for a public space.
And all this hand wringing is completely insincere anyway. If some random school in Arkansas had decided to repaint a mural with similar content, no one would care. But this is San Francisco, so of course Bari Weiss gets to write about it int The Times and pretend it's some kind of liberal disease.
I mean, it's not like they don't teach the history of slavery or indigenous peoples in California schools. They don't need to celebrate it on the corridor walls if they don't want to, do they?
Let. Them. Decorate. Their. School. Why must everything be a moral lesson with you people? You don't apply that level of finger wagging to anyone else, but Good God if liberals do something then it must be evil.
It's their school, not yours. Why do you think you should get veto power over what they are allowed to change and what they must keep? And why on earth, of all things, do you think they should be required to keep this thing?
If it were merely about choosing what kind of art to show on the wall, they could simply paint over it for $1k.
That's $599,000 that could be used to pay teachers instead being spent to ensure this mural is never seen again.
Of course it is. You've got a bunch of hysterical people saying the mural is in support of slavery and genocide. How can you say that the meaning of the art isn't relevant? The beliefs the mob have about the meaning of the mural are central to the story, you cannot abstract them away.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
With no one to challenge the framing (which, yes, includes accusing people of being conservatives) topics like this become echo chambers. I don't want that, and am willing to tolerate some flamage as the price.
But yeah, it's not my forum. Like I said I'll delete the responses here.
It's not my forum either! We're just trying to preserve it.
We're do our best to demand good faith equally from everyone, or rather to cajole them into it. Outrage—feigned or otherwise—seems pretty evenly distributed as far as I can tell.
I think that's been going on for a while. I remember discussions of some works of American literature, which routinely have been parts of teen curriculum, being declared unsuitable due to the use of certain words that represent racial slurs now.
> I’m a bit surprised they haven’t revived Gore’s PMRC to ensure music lyrics represent correct orthodoxy.
That's way too little now. Long past are the times where the only thing that needed for a work to not be banned is content of the work itself. Now if the author fails the purity test, all their work, no matter how clean, is automatically treif and must be expunged. So the ideological commission would have a lot of work on their hands. Likely, it can be crowdsourced by twitterati who are only to happy do dig up any utterance, no matter how old, in the service of the noble goal of unpersoning yet another offender.
> Will one day all the Mission cities get renamed because they were named by Evangelizing Spanish Missionaries.
I wouldn't put it past them. Not only "San" prefix clearly implies religious reference, which triggers atheists and ACLU, I am sure modern sensibilities would not be too kind to Francis of Assisi, which associated with literal crusaders, engaged in various acts of cultural imperialism and so on. And of course there's the question of gender balance - out of all surrounding cities, only Santa Clara - one of the smallest cities, arguably not even a real city at all but merely a district of San Jose agglomeration - is named after a woman. On the other hand, we have San Francisco, San Mateo, San Leandro, San Carlos, San Jose, San Gregorio, San Martin, San Bruno... you get the picture. Cats get the same representation in city names in the Bay as women do. How does it look?
I think renaming San Francisco should be on the agenda very soon.
As in, if you think free speech trumps censoring all possible offensive communication, you are a free speech extremist.
Man, I remember the days when being PC was basically “don’t be a d*”, and censorship was the Right’s shtick.
That’s why so many people supported (and still support) Trump. Removal of the second amendment (guns), fourth amendment (FISA court), first amendment (all the political correctness), etc. The “right” feels persecuted and IMO justly so.
Personally, I fall on the libertarian side so I think both are pretty poor for liberty. But I have watched this scary shift and it kinda mimics the decent into Nazisim... “share my ideals or else we will erase you”.
That's why extreme left is more scary to me, like a wolf in sheeps clothing. Historical death counts also show that extreme left can be quite devastating.
If we have this on the left and the "alt-right" on the right, I'm a bit afraid of what the next round will bring. How much crazier can it get? I'm sure top minds on both sides are working tirelessly on things even dumber, meaner, and crazier than anything we've seen so far.
Look at this article from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunda...
Firstly I take some issue with the scope of the study being limited only to North America and Western Europe.....and completely ignoring the Asian democracies which largely skew more to the right. But scroll down to the third graphic (the line graph). The Republicans are slightly more-right-wing than they were 2000-2008. The Democrat's platform, however, has sharply gone off the deep end of the Left since 2008.
But most PEOPLE are fairly centrist. Even if they are slightly-left-of-center, the Democratic party's extremism is pushing normal to abandon them. But they long-standing Democrat power structures have an outsized influence on media and information channels, hence the non-stop bombardment of outrage culture at how everyone is a "Nazi". Ever notice that almost no-one uses "Communist" as an epithet anymore, despite the world's two major historical Communist governments having by FAR the largest domestic bodycounts of the modern age?
They promote gab and confederate statues but I don't ever see them fighting against intellectual property laws, or fighting for legalizing sympathetic striking, or fighting to allow pornography on youtube. Instead it seems to be fighting for a very specific kind of free speech.
This would be appalling even if it were free to remove the mural. With all the literal and figurative shit San Francisco has to deal with, it’s borderline criminal to waste more than half a million dollars.
I, personally, have the exact same questions as you. Come on, 600 G's?
I'll fly out and paint it for half that if you guys really want it done.
off the subject...
intersectionalism, safe spaces, and more, and some wonder why independents are more horrified by one side of the aisle than the other? once thought, speech, and expression, are neutered nothing else much matters.
Shockingly, the rest of the state hasn’t seen quite as much.
It’s almost as if it’s how the public allows politics to work in general.
https://reason.com/2019/06/20/george-washington-mural-san-fr...
"Painting over the mural would cost at least $600,000, with the majority of the cost in producing an environmental impact report. In addition, supporters of the mural have vowed to sue if the board voted to destroy it and legal costs could add to the cost, district officials said."
It's a little hard to square this with their other numbers, though:
"Other options included covering the mural with panels, which would cost up to $825,000, or obscuring it with curtains, which would have cost up to $375,000."
Maybe there is still small tiny amount of sanity left in San Francisco, and adding curtains doesn't require a full environmental impact statement? Otherwise it means that 1600 sf of paint costs the city at least $225,000. But if no EIS is required, it's hard to imagine spending that much on curtains --- or twice that on panels, for that matter.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-sc...
There are plenty of us who identified the problem at the heart of this movement ages ago: many interpret the movement to change the way we engage with history as filtered through their own, nuance-capable minds, in which case there are good points to be made about glorifying parts of history that we no longer agree with. But in reality, when movements hit any semblance of popularity, they need to be interpreted through the way most people approach issues: it's entirely unsurprising to me that the reaction to this mural is based on gut aesthetic reactions instead of an attempt to engage any brain cells in understanding the mural's intent.
If I recall correctly, back in the 90's, when the Taliban decided to destroy those giant Buddhas, the BM pleaded to be allowed to dismantle them and take them to Britain instead, at its own expense. The Taliban refused.
This art doesn't seem nearly as important, but, I wonder if they could do the same in this case. The PR alone may be worth it. This sort of thing is the best conterargument they can possibly have against contestation of their legitimacy to hold foreign art.
- Rivera, his work and his pupils like the mentioned painter were left wingers actively denouncing white privilege, slavery etc.
- The work is meant to be critical and through being uncomfortable evoke discussion and reflection
- Destroying art because “it doesn’t fit what we think is right” has many really bad examples in history.
I really can’t believe this is happening. Totally sickening and it makes me despair for the education of the kids under this school board.
It's unpleasant to teach your children that the US forefathers were people to be admired when they have seen him with his slaves walking over dead Indians every day.
It's' about making history criminal.
???
The (correct) narrative promoted by the left is that the US was founded by terrible slave-owning racists, and this art promotes that viewpoint.
Also, no one is making anything illegal here.
One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”
These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”
FTA: Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”
The Bayeux tapestry is one of the most recognizable artworks in the world (yes, it's not a mural in the tube or even in the UK but it doesn't need to be). Norman castles, Norman cathedrals...
Of course, why shouldn't there be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_William_the_Conquero...
Perhaps the French could gift a statue of William to the UK; they could put it next to the statue of George Washington in Trafalgar Square.
Edit: The French are not known for their tactlessness. In truth, William the Conqueror is simply not offensive to the modern British people. William is even more distant to the modern British than George Washington, and you don't have the British crying themselves to sleep over that great whupper of Britons having a statue in London.
Just because an interpretation no longer fits with today's view doesn't mean people should forget the history behind it nor the mentality surrounding it at a particular time. Erasing remnants of a past you disagree with doesn't erase the facts, but it makes people less inclined to remember or learn about a not so glorious history.
It raises questions about the exact motives at stake here.
Or its forbears in this case.
Was this a poor choice of words from a hastily written article, or does the author think that erasing art is uniquely American? Changing history, destroying art, etc., have existed since time immemorial. Anyone who honestly thinks that America invented evil is delusional.
I wrote about another situation in which public art created a stir in the community. This mural wasn't on the wall of a building, so it's removal was cheap. What's interesting to me is two things: it's initial anonymity (nobody recognized it for what it is until recently), and how it forces a consideration of collective traumatic memory.
Couldnt they just paint over the offending parts of the mural? Sounds more conciliatory
Remember, any right-thinking leftwing supporters of social justice wouldn't be caught dead reading or believing an article by right-winger Bari Weiss. Doing so would instantly mark them out as a supporter of the enemy. As far as they're concerned (or at least can admit to in public), it will be the people who think this artwork means what the artist created to mean who are ignoring reality.
Truly Orwellian.
I wouldn't be too surprised though if SF turns out to be the first place to burn books this century.