FOUNDING FATHER’S DAY
Stop NYC’s mad push to erase Jefferson
First Lady Chirlane McCray will head up a review of statues in city buildings, Mayor de Blasio said yesterday — including this one of Thomas Jefferson that members of the City Council want removed.
Not even the Father of Our Country is safe. First Lady Chirlane McCray will rethink city statues and structures honoring historic figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson due to their slavery ties as part of a new Commission on Racial Justice and Reconciliation, Mayor de Blasio announced on Friday.
The move comes a day after five city lawmakers — including Council Speaker Corey Johnson — sent a letter requesting that a Jefferson statue in the City Council’s chamber be removed. It also comes as leaders across the nation struggle to respond to weeks of anti-racism protests that followed the police-custody death of George Floyd.
“This is exactly the kind of thing that this new commission needs to examine,” de Blasio said in his morning briefing as he revealed his wife’s assignment.
“I think it is the time to evaluate the entire look and feel of this city, and a commission that’s focused on justice and reconciliation can really think about a bigger approach.”
De Blasio said the panel’s tasks would include examining City Hall’s statue of Washington and the name of the mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion, which was built and owned by Archibald Gracie, an 18th-century shipping merchant and slave owner.
Critics, however, feared the panel marked the beginning of a slippery slope in which history is sanitized and erased in the name of political correctness.
“I get nervous when people decide they have the purity to judge all figures in history and all efforts to honor figures in history, because I feel that someday people will look at us and see that we were monsters, too,” said Todd Fine, a city-preservation activist who heads the Washington Street advocacy group.
De Blasio acknowledged he was not sure how far the review should go, but said it was time to examine the “profound contradictions” of the city’s and nation’s forefathers.
“I don’t have a foregone conclusion for you now as to what names should be kept, what names should be changed,” he added. “But I think this commission is the right way to do it.”
City Hall said that the panel would review statues and other dedications to historic figures on city property, but that it was too early to know if its judgments would be on a per statue or per persona basis.
The panel’s formation marks the city’s third plunge — and McCray’s second — into the monument issue.
In 2017, de Blasio ordered a commission to re-examine controversial memorials, including the Christopher Columbus statue in Columbus Circle.
That panel concluded in January 2018, recommending the relocation of just one statue — that of 1800s gynecologist Dr. J. Marion Sims, who developed surgical techniques by operating on black slaves without anesthesia.
McCray previously led a commission to build statues of historical women, but the effort came under intense criticism after it snubbed sainted ItalianAmerican nun Mother Cabrini.
The latest reconciliation commission is the second task force that McCray has been named to in recent weeks. Hizzoner selected her to co-chair a panel examining how racial inequities helped to fuel the coronavirus outbreak.
Critics have slammed City Hall for using the highprofile posts to boost McCray’s profile as she eyes a possible run for the Brooklyn borough presidency.
I think it is the time to evaluate the entire look and feel of this city.
Mayor de Blasio, revealing the creation of the review panel with wife Chirlane McCray (at right, in City Council chamber)
AMERICA is burning. Rioters set fire to police stations and restaurants. Looters have ravaged shops from coast to coast. And now they’re coming for the statues — not just of Confederate generals, but the republic’s Founders, including George Washington, whose statue was torn down in Portland, Ore.
Call them the 1619 riots. The justified indignation over George Floyd’s killing has led to calls for policing reform and for the country to do better at fulfilling its principles. But the reaction hasn’t stopped with those worthy and noble objectives. It has surged well beyond to an attack on the principles themselves, which allegedly give rise to “systemic racism.”
But what is “the system” that generates and supports systemic racism? A considered answer is rarely given. Black Lives Matter (the organization, not the slogan) and its academic and media supporters do have some answers, however.
One is that “whiteness” itself is to blame, or at least “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” That is the explanation offered by the Black Power movement of the 1960s and by the likes of Louis Farrakhan and campus identity hucksters today. But the cruel thesis that the white race is “the cancer of human history,” as Susan Sontag once put it, is belied by history and reason.
So who else can they get at? Well, an easier target is one particular set of privileged, white males: the American Founders. The system at the root of systemic racism, the radicals argue, is the American one, beginning with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America, they claim, was born a racist nation and remains one today.
This slander is the dominant opinion among woke millennials and is on its way, alas, to becoming mainstream. Former President Barack Obama wrestled with it, not very successfully, in his 2008 speech trying to disentangle himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had preached “God damn America!” to the future president and his family for 20 years.
The most prominent proponent of the argument is The New York Times’s 1619 Project, named after the year the first black slaves arrived in America. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times reporter who leads the project, has argued that “the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776.”
Her editor, Jake Silverstein, has backed her to the hilt. Black slavery “is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin,” he asserted, “but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin. Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” especially “its astonishing penchant for violence” and “its endemic racial fears and hatreds.”
In other words, 1619 is not “as important” as 1776; it is far more important and more revealing. American slavery is the deeper truth of American freedom. It doesn’t get more systemic than racism being in “the very DNA of this country,” as HannahJones claims.
A Who’s Who of American historians, led by impeccable liberals like Sean Wilentz, Gordon Wood and James McPherson, quickly objected to Project 1619’s untruths. Their criticisms forced a muted, microscopic correction from the Times, but couldn’t slow the spread of the project’s libels into classrooms across the country.
Even Republicans have begun to smear America as racist — members of the very political party formed to redeem the promise of the Declaration and put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction. There was such a thing as white supremacy in our politics, and Abraham Lincoln confronted it when he argued against Stephen Douglas. But for politicians of all stripes it is becoming easier to blame America first than to defend her honor, as Lincoln did.
There is a kind of despair, both angry and frightened, haunting the public mind today. After all, if the problem’s in our DNA, there’s precious little we can do about it. Let’s not kid ourselves. The rioters who commit the violence drew one conclusion from that premise: If justice is out of the question, the next best thing is payback, snatching from the oppressor’s hand whatever loot they can.
The radicals aren’t far behind with their politics of “anti-racism” — a more or less permanent system of racial spoils, protected by speech codes banning criticism as racist “hate speech.”
The alternative is to reconsider the premise: America is not systemically racist, but is a republic devoted, however imperfectly, to the truth that all men are created equal.
Charles Kesler is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of The Claremont Review of Books.