[Peace-discuss] San Francisco murals

[David Green]

Much of the discussion between me and Carl Estabrook on News from Neptune
today (not yet available on youtube), was based on the efforts of
"anti-racist" activists to whitewash over precious New Deal Era WPA murals
in a San Francisco high school.

These efforts are being lead by "Stand Up for Racial Justice," which has a
local branch led by Elizabeth Simpson, and has sponsored events at the
Urbana U-U church.

A Counterpunch article referred to on the show can be found here:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/23/whitewashing-american-history-the-wpa-mural-controversy-in-san-francisco/


I especially encourage you to watch the short youtube video linked to in
the above piece.

However, I was not aware at the time of this recording that this issue has
been covered extensively by the NYT.

Of note, this sort of repression gives someone like Bari Weiss, an arch
Zionist and neocon, an opportunity to (correctly) denigrate what some think
of as the "left." Such efforts, as Noam Chomsky stated in relation to
antifa, is a "gift to the right."

Text of her article is below:

San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History

The school board has voted to destroy public murals by a New Deal-era
Communist.
[image: Bari Weiss] <https://www.nytimes.com/by/bari-weiss>

By Bari Weiss <https://www.nytimes.com/by/bari-weiss>

Ms. Weiss is a writer and editor for the Opinion section.

   - June 28, 2019
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Image[image: A section of the mural at George Washington High School in San
Francisco, painted by the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff, shows a
dead Native American.]
A section of the mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco,
painted by the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff, shows a dead
Native American.CreditCreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — More than $8,000. That was the amount John Ashcroft’s
Justice Department spent on blue curtains to cover up the busty Spirit of
Justice statue and her bare-chested male equivalent, the Majesty of Law, in
the department’s Great Hall in 2002. The Victorian move against the Art
Deco sculptures spurred a thousand lampoons. “A blue burqa for justice,” my
colleague Maureen Dowd memorably called it
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/30/opinion/a-blue-burka-for-justice.html?module=inline>.
In The Harvard Crimson, a young Pete Buttigieg wrote
<https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/prudes-and-puritans-the-american-right/>,
“It seems odd that an infant is supposed to feed on them, and a grown man
is expected at some point to behold them, but for a period in between we
feel the need to see to it that no child ever sees a breast.”

I wonder, then, what Mr. Buttigieg, now on the presidential campaign trail,
would make of the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on
Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to
shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is
Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it
can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case
is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

Victor Arnautoff, the Russian immigrant who made the paintings in question,
was perhaps the most important muralist in the Bay Area during the
Depression. Thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress
Administration, he had the opportunity to make some enduring public
artworks. Among them is “City Life” in Coit Tower, in which the artist painted
himself
<https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/coit-tower-arnautoff-mural-san-francisco-ca/>
standing in front of a newspaper rack conspicuously missing
<https://www.academia.edu/36122637/Ivy_Litvinov_at_Stanford> the mainstream
San Francisco Chronicle and packed with publications like The Daily Worker.
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Arnautoff, who had assisted Diego Rivera in Mexico, was a committed
Communist. “‘Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to
me,” he said in 1935. “The artist is a critic of society.”

This is why his freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show
the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley
Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in
1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves
picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers
walking past the corpse of a Native American.

“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
<https://www.russian-americans.org/preserve-victor-arnautoffs-mural-in-george-washington-high-school/>
have tried to make exactly that point.

“This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni
association argued
<https://sfrichmondreview.com/2019/03/29/george-washington-high-school-alumni-oppose-censoring-controversial-murals/>.
“There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very
few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals
should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value.
Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full
truth about American history.”
Editors’ Picks
Hitler Looted the Art, Then They Looted Hitler
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/design/hitler-looted-the-art-then-they-looted-hitler.html?fallback=0&recId=1OZBe4Dsr4bNbFSD6Ipvte1TiTo&locked=0&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=IL&recAlloc=story&geoCountry=US&blockId=home-featured&imp_id=539119427>
For Years, Alcohol Was My Only Comfort. Then It Nearly Killed Me.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/magazine/alcohol-sobriety-military.html?fallback=0&recId=1OZBe4Dsr4bNbFSD6Ipvte1TiTo&locked=0&geoContinent=NA&geoRegion=IL&recAlloc=story&geoCountry=US&blockId=home-featured&imp_id=688594785>

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Such appeals to reason and history
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPpm8FUPC2c&t=3618s> failed to sway the
school board. On Tuesday, it dismissed the option to pull an Ashcroft and
simply cover the murals, instead voting unanimously to paint them over.

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.”

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
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/arts/design/george-washington-murals-ugly-history-debated.html?module=inline>,
only four supported their removal. John M. Strain, an English teacher, told
The Times’s Carol Pogash that his students “feel bad about offending people
but they almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”

Which makes one wonder who these bureaucrats actually seek to protect. Is
it the students? Or could it also be their reputations, given that those in
favor of preserving the murals are being smeared as racists?

“In my entire life, no one has ever, ever accused me of being a ‘white
supremacist,’” Lope Yap Jr., a filmmaker and the vice president of the
alumni association, told me. But if you buy into the expansive notion of
“white supremacy” put forward by Alison Collins, one of the board
commissioners, that is exactly what Mr. Yap, who is Filipino, is. “One of
the earmarks of white supremacy culture is valuing (white) property over
(Black & Brown) ppl,” Ms. Collins recently wrote
<https://twitter.com/AliMCollins/status/1142435131493249024> on Twitter. “I
think about this when I read comments from folks arguing to ‘protect’ the
‘Life of Washington’ murals.”

Mr. Sanchez, the board vice president, told me: “A grave mistake was made
80 years ago to paint a mural at a school without Native American or
African-American input. For impressionable young people who attend school
to have any representation that diminishes people, specifically students
from communities that have already been diminished, it’s an aggressive
thing. It’s hurtful and I don’t think our students need to bear that
burden.”

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The implications of this logic are chilling. What happens when a student
suggests that looking at photographs of the My Lai massacre in history
class is too traumatic? Should newspapers avoid printing upsetting images
that illuminate the crisis at the border, like the unforgettable one
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/father-daughter-border-drowning-picture-mexico.html?module=inline>
of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria,
facedown, drowned in the Rio Grande?

All are fair game for censorship in a worldview that insists that words and
images are to be judged based on how “safe” they make people feel.

“If K-12 schools start to provide top-down total protection from the
emotional pain of confronting uncomfortable ideas — like what actually
happened in real American history — we should not be at all surprised when
these people go on to college campuses and then, into the work force, and
demand the same sort of comforts: safe spaces, trigger warnings,
microaggression prevention, and so on,” said Robby Soave, the author of
“Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump.” He added: “That’s not
on them. That’s on us.”

The notion of erasing art has an American pedigree. Arnautoff was
intimately familiar with it, having been interrogated in 1956 by the House
Un-American Activities Committee for drawing a caricature of Vice President
Richard Nixon. But I suspect he would have been surprised to learn that
more than 60 years later, progressives in charge of educating San
Francisco’s children are merrily following this un-American playbook.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss <https://twitter.com/bariweiss>), a staff writer and
editor for the Opinion section, is the author of the forthcoming “How to
Fight Anti-Semitism.”
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