Here we go again. We heard leftists trumpet the “browning of America” (see MSNBC et al.) via Third World immigration. We also heard them, contradictorily, complain about the “whitewashing” of San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood when Caucasian dot-commers moved in. Now we’re told that New York City’s famed Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is also guilty of EBW.
(That would be “Existing Based on Whiteness.”)
This was used, too, as a pretext last summer for canceling its “‘Mostly Mozart’ festival in favor of more ‘inclusive’ fare,” writes the New York Post’s James Panero— “sponsoring rappers, pop groups and an LGBTQ mariachi band while hanging a 10-foot-wide disco ball above its fountain.”
My, how enticing. Just makes you want to get some tickets and brave NYC’s criminals, vagrants, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells to be culturally enriched.
What happened is that in 2020, Lincoln Center (LC) jumped on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon and endeavored to achieve oppressor status. And the story it told — and a story it is — is that a robust black area called San Juan Hill had, metaphorically speaking, been lynched in the 1950s to make room for LC’s construction.
“The displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families that took place prior to the construction of our campus is abhorrent,” reads LC’s “Message on Our Commitment to Change.” (Note: The term “Latinx” is used by white, cafè-latte leftists; Latinos reject it.)
“We may never know its full impact on those dispossessed of the land on which Lincoln Center sits,” the self-flagellatory message continues. “But only by acknowledging this history can we begin to confront the racism from which our institution has benefited.”
For sure, they “may never know” for a simple reason: Their “history” is a lie — and they don’t seem to care.
Of course, with “the blood-and-soil essentialism of today’s identity politics,” states Panero, LC’s “commitment fell in line with the new progressive rhetoric of land acknowledgments, colonialist dispossession and unearthed legacies of systemic oppression.”
So it’s not surprising that most media sources repeated LC’s story uncritically. Whites are guilty just by virtue of being white, right? And facts can be oppressive.
Besides, there’s something deliciously narcissistic about such declarations. Just as with shows of bravery in the days of knights or displays of piety in an age of faith, land-acknowledgment self-abnegation can be a kind of moral preening, a type of stealth boasting.
What’s sacrificed on this altar of value-signaling, however, is LC’s original mission: Perpetuating the West’s traditional culture. As if to emphasize that last summer’s cultural effluent wasn’t just a one-off, this “summer’s programming, just announced, will lead off with ‘the debut duet of two superstar queens from the blockbuster reality competition ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ followed by ‘Argentinian queercore,’ comedians of ‘Indian heritage’ and ‘silent disco,’” Panero also informs. LC’s chief artistic officer, Shanta Thake, has vowed to lean into this further, too, claiming that such music “belongs to everyone” and thus implying that Mozart doesn’t.
Note that we err tragically when lying to ourselves. No music “belongs to everyone,” especially in culturally fractured America. Yet LC’s whole self-reinvention is based on a lie.
Panero tells us that while the San Juan Hill neighborhood was once a thriving black community, it was just a fire-prone urban blight by the time the Lincoln Square Renewal Project of 1955 was conceptualized. There also are records of the relocated families; most stayed in Manhattan, 900 remained on the Upper West Side, and a “study of the first 742 relocated showed that they mainly moved into larger quarters, all with up-to-date sanitary conditions,” Panero relates.
But here’s the kicker: For “all the ‘abhorrent’ claims of the ‘displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,’” writes Panero, “an internal census revealed a population that was, in fact, overwhelmingly white, with a ratio of three to one, while the area’s black population was in the single percentage points.”
And another leftist narrative bites the dust.
Moreover, Panero also relates that the LC project “was remarkable not for the 17 blocks it cleared but for what was created in its place: a Manhattan campus for Fordham University, a new headquarters for the American Red Cross, 4,000 units of middle-income housing and a home for multiple performing-arts organizations of world renown.”
Put differently, this process — sometimes demeaned as “gentrification” — is how civilizations are built. Now ours is being torn down, purposely.
It’s as with removing statues of historical heroes and then erecting George Floyd memorials; here we are, Year Zero-style, destroying higher, traditional Western culture and replacing it with soul-searing swill.
As for the “whitewashing” of “historically” black and/or Hispanic neighborhoods, it clearly troubles some people that whites (an infestation, apparently) must live somewhere. But even when this change does occur, something is left unsaid:
It’s virtually always a case of once-white neighborhoods simply becoming white again.
Note that in 1900, NYC was more than 98 percent white (San Francisco, mentioned earlier, was 92.5 percent white).
Of course, some whites a century ago no doubt complained about the demographic changes, just as the woke now complain about areas again becoming white. Oddly, though, the woke call the former sentiment “racism” and their own racism rectitude.
Demographic change, however, is the norm. The Arabs displacing Berbers in North Africa, the modern Japanese displacing the Ainus on their islands, and the Chinese displacing the aborigines on Formosa (Taiwan) are just a few examples. People come and people go.
And our culture is going because, in the grip of lies, we’re sacrificing the good in the name of pseudo-elite fantasy and pseudo-moral self-massage.
