[rad-green] Political correctness run amok in San Francisco

*https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/whiteout/*
<https://harpers.org/archive/2019/11/whiteout/>

*Harper's          November 2019 issue*
Whiteout

By Kevin Baker <https://harpers.org/author/kevinbaker/>

This past spring and summer, political correctness—perhaps inevitably—took
a full turn and became a campaign to erase the worst things that dead white
men have done in our history. This latest twist in our culture wars was set
off not by Republicans or Proud Boys but by the San Francisco school board,
social-justice warriors all, who managed to convince themselves that the
past was so terrible we dare not even look at it.

The cause of the brouhaha was Victor Arnautoff’s 1936 Works Progress
Administration (W.P.A.) murals at San Francisco’s George Washington High
School. Arnautoff was just the sort of artist you’d expect a San Francisco
school board to love, an immigrant White Russian turned Red. A cavalryman
in the tsar’s army, he made a remarkable hegira to California and a new
life via Siberia, China, and Mexico, where he worked with the great
Communist artist Diego Rivera on some of Rivera’s most magnificent murals.

A confirmed Communist himself, Arnautoff painted murals all over the Bay
Area in the 1930s: in post offices and on the wall of a medical clinic, in
the chapel of the Presidio army base, in the library of the California
School of Fine Arts, and in San Francisco’s Coit Tower. Everywhere he
worked, Arnautoff included scenes of struggle, of the fights of working
people to form unions, win power, and build a decent life for themselves.

Arnautoff was not content to paint the sort of triumphalist,
manifest-destiny form of public art then prevalent all over the United
States. He was not going to tell the story of the Father of Our Country
without including the enchained human misery that served as the main source
of our first president’s wealth or the dead First Peoples who were a legacy
of the way West that Washington had pointed. Arnautoff included both in his
murals: enslaved African Americans working at Mount Vernon and a dead
Native American, killed by a menacing, gray phalanx of well-armed
frontiersmen, off to conquer the rest of the continent.

Yet, contrary to what critics of the murals have claimed, neither African
Americans nor American Indians are portrayed only in passive or victimized
roles. A man of color is one of a group shown pulling up a liberty pole,
while Native Americans, in full battle regalia, fight with and against
Washington and, above all, for themselves. This was, in other words, the
real, gloriously ambiguous beginning of the United States, which included
bitter conflict and exploitation.

Somehow, Arnautoff’s impertinence was overlooked at the time. But when he
dared to make a lithograph linking Vice President Richard Nixon with Joseph
McCarthy, he was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) and subjected to a campaign to have him fired from Stanford, where
he was then teaching. Stanford stood firm, and Arnautoff remained on the
faculty until he retired and moved back to the Soviet Union, where he died
in 1979.

His Washington High murals didn’t draw much outside notice, though, until
the 1960s, when the Black Panther–inspired Black Student Union demanded
that the enslaved African Americans depicted be painted over because the
depiction allegedly denigrated black people.

Yet even in the crucible that was 1968, cooler heads prevailed. Local
artists defended the murals, pointing out what a radical statement the
acknowledgment of enslaved peoples at Mount Vernon was in the 1930s. When
the students at Washington High were polled, nearly two thirds of them
responded that the mural should be supplemented but *not *destroyed.

The school board hired a young African-American artist named Dewey
Crumpler, who had grown up poor in the city, to paint what became known as
the “Response” murals. Working for years for what he would later call “a
pittance,” and talking over the work with students as he went along,
Crumpler created a triptych entitled *Multi-Ethnic Heritage.* Big, bold,
and beautiful, his murals are filled with vivid images of rebirth, renewal,
and broken chains, as well as leading African-, Hispanic-, Asian-, and
Native American figures from over the centuries. As such, his works are a
perfect complement to Arnautoff’s, as emblematic of the 1960s as
Arnautoff’s were of the Great Depression. George Washington High was left
with yet another outstanding piece of public art, as well as a great
teaching device with which students could, every day, learn more about the
real history of their country.

But in our endless, self-lacerating culture wars, nothing is ever over. In
2016, a Native American activist named Amy Anderson protested that her son,
Kai—one of four American Indian students then at Washington High—felt
obliged to walk into the school every day with his eyes averted from
Arnautoff’s murals. The Native American students “actually see themselves
and their ancestors up there on those walls, and they feel pain,” Anderson
claimed. “Every child,” she told the school board, “deserves to walk by
something that is empowering, and this is not empowering.”

Which seems to me to be the censors’ best point. Vital as it is to, say,
remember the Holocaust, a school with Jewish (or gentile) children might
still prefer not to have them greeted every day with images of bodies from
Nazi death camps. But why, then, were the murals not to be granted even the
courtesies afforded statues of the moldiest old Confederate generals and
moved or covered, as many advocates of preserving Arnautoff’s work
suggested?

The Washington High murals are buon fresco, which means they were painted
on wet plaster, and hence could be perilously difficult to remove. Placing
panels over them was estimated to cost only a little more than the price of
painting them over. But the censors decreed that this entire work of art
must be destroyed, including eleven of Arnautoff’s thirteen panels that no
one found offensive. “We all decided those are ideas we do not want to go
through with because we didn’t want anybody to see or retraumatize or get
P.T.S.D. again,” Mariposa Villaluna, an indigenous activist and adviser to
the board insisted.

Contrary to what happened in 1968, however, those critics calling to “paint
it down” never polled the Washington High students, who seemed decidedly
*un*traumatized by the murals. A reporter for the *New York Times* found
that of forty-nine freshmen assigned to write an essay on the frescoes,
“only four favored removal.”

“The fresco shows us exactly how brutal colonization and genocide really
were and are. The fresco is a warning and reminder of the fallibility of
our hallowed leaders,” one student wrote. “It’s not really racist,” another
told reporters. “It’s showing the actual history of George Washington when
[Europeans] first came here and colonized America—the Native Americans were
getting killed so that we had more lands and he did have slaves on his
farm.”

Those in favor of leaving Arnautoff’s work as is or even covering it up
with wooden panels were repeatedly smeared by school board members, their
advisers, and parents in favor of destroying the murals as “white
nationalists” and defenders of “white supremacy culture” who favored
“protecting property over people” and were willing to “traumatize under the
guise of educating,” all in support of a mural that “glorifies slavery,
genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression.”

In reality, those who dared object to painting over the murals appeared to
be overwhelmingly liberals or leftists making reasonable arguments and
talking in terms of compromise. For their pains, they were dismissed as
being mostly white or old, and treated with open contempt, both in hearings
and in emails, the likes of which no citizen should have to endure.

The censors tended to gyrate between the fainting couch and the
battlefield. Board members found it “emotionally draining” and “exhausting”
to even contemplate the fact of the murals or the very idea that someone
might disagree with them over what constituted an intolerable display of
white supremacy. Destroying the murals—even paying out the hundreds of
thousands of dollars necessary to do so—constituted “reparations,”
according to both Villaluna and school board vice president Mark Sanchez.

“Today is a good day to take down a racist mural! Especially because today
is my birthday, and my birthday wish is to whitewash Washington,” reasoned
Amy Anderson. “Today is a good day, as hopeful as I am, to end white
supremacy!”

Most bombastic of all was the victory lap school board president Stevon
Cook took on the op-ed page of the *San Francisco Examiner* after the board
voted unanimously to destroy the murals. Again dismissing defenders of the
murals as “older whites,” Cook noted that the defenders of the murals
“would not consider themselves racist,” but then “neither do defenders of
the confederate flag or those who fought to keep up the prominent statue of
Robert E. Lee in New Orleans.”

“YOU KEEP THOSE SLAVES ON THAT WALL!! That’s how you sound trying to push
this falsehood about how this mural is the truth about ‘our’ history,” Cook
insisted, grossly distorting everything that those who wanted the murals
preserved had said. “They somehow believe that this one mural, in this one
high school hallway is the only, or premier, opportunity to teach about the
complexities of American history.”

The campaign to destroy the murals attracted newspaper and TV reporters
from around the world. Editorials in papers from the *Guardian* to the* Wall
Street Journal *denounced the idea, and a poll of San Francisco voters
showed that 76 percent *opposed *destroying the murals, while only
12 percent favored doing so.

While most state and local politicians ran for the hills on this issue, a
tsunami of opposition to destroying the murals poured forth from the George
Washington High School Alumni Association as well as from local community,
arts, civil liberties, andpreservation organizations.

Most of the leaders of these groups were as liberal as those advocates for
the murals who had been so scorned by the school board in the first place.
Even worse, many of them were not white. They included Washington High
alumnus Danny Glover, who asked, “Why board it up? Why can’t we tell the
truth?” and called the proposed boarding up or destruction of the murals
“absurd” and a “tragedy.”

“I’m the father of a Washington High graduate. My daughter was never
traumatized by Arnautoff’s painting—as a matter of fact, it generated
conversations at home that otherwise would not have occurred,” concurred
former San Francisco mayor, speaker of the California State Assembly, and
local political legend Willie Brown in the *San Francisco Chronicle.* “It
was a learning experience for her, and for me.”

“Am I offended by these murals? My answer is NO,” insisted Robert Tamaka
Bailey, a Choctaw language instructor, in a statement from the alumni
association, “but I would be offended if you took them down, because then I
would see you as those who say, ‘It didn’t happen and there are no Indians
left to offend.’?”

Bailey had taken part in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, half a
century before, in 1969. Another veteran of those years spoke up as well:
Dewey Crumpler, still making art and teaching it now too, at the San
Francisco Art Institute.

“People are not taught how to read art and artistic imagery. So they don’t
understand how it operates, they are trying to look at images literally,
not euphemistically, not symbolically,” Crumpler explained in an interview
with artnet.com. “Your confrontation with difficulty is the very thing you
need as a child, particularly in an educational environment, so you can
learn how to deal with those difficulties that you are going to run into
throughout your life.”

Crumpler was adamant that “if you run away from history, you’ll never
change history. You have to confront history. . . . My mural is part of the
Arnautoff mural, part of its meaning, and its meaning is part of mine. If
you destroy his work of art, you are destroying mine as well.” Which it
seems to me is the heart of the matter, in history as in art.

The activists and the censors of the San Francisco school board want to
tell a story of struggle and empowerment—as well they should. But without
depicting oppression, how to portray struggle? Without the whole truth, how
does this story shine? What was it that all those remarkable people of
color on Dewey Crumpler’s walls had to fight against? What was it that they
overcame?

Just over a month after his celebration in the *Examiner,* a more
restrained Stevon Cook announced that after hearing “much more input from
the public,” he had decided “that the mural depicts a history of the
country that’s hard to see.” Cook proposed a new plan to cover the
Arnautoff panels for the time being with acoustic panels—a proposal that
would waste an estimated $875,000 of the school system’s money, but would
at least keep the paintings intact for another day. His motion passed by
only a single vote, with three school board members still holding out for
destruction of the artwork to ensure that the “students feel safe.”

“We have come to a place where art, unless it’s absolutely didactic, is
without agency and without significance,” Dewey Crumpler told the artnet
reporter. “And that becomes really a slippery slope that leads to a very
dark place. I thought fifty years ago that [the Arnautoff mural] should not
be destroyed—because there are elements that are just waiting in the wings
to take down other art, and they will use this argument to do exactly that.”

These sound to me like bedrock principles, but I doubt they will pierce the
cartoon Leninism of the mural’s critics, with their willingness to use any
tactics, no matter how undemocratic or unfair, to get what they want.
Somehow, it seems to have become standard procedure for the
identity-politics left in America to smear, to insult, to vilify all who
disagree with them, in any way, on any issue.

I’m dismayed by the rush to reduce most things to personal feelings and an
exaggerated psychology. I don’t like the way in which serious words such as
“trauma” are tossed around. Victor Arnautoff’s murdered Native
American—lying on his side, head turned away, unmarked by wounds—is more
elegiac than shocking. Honestly, I find it hard to believe it would
traumatize anyone in younger generations, raised on entertainment in which
graphic violence is pervasive. But I may be wrong. I will not make the
reciprocal mistake of disrespecting anyone else’s motives, especially in
such a dire time.

“I remember not having the emotional capacity in me to look up at the *Life
of Washington* mural in my freshman year,” Kai Anderson-Lawson told the
school board. “The mural is very hard to look at due to the fact that it
paints my people as victims.”

And here is, I think, the key to this whole war of misunderstood words:
*victim.* It has become the very worst thing to be in our popular
discourse, the one thing that none of us wants be. And yet we all are. As
nations, not necessarily as any reflection on our culture or valor, we are
victims to lost battles, valiantly fought, to superior force, and
technology better honed to a killing edge, and deceit and ignorance and
betrayal and brutality, and all the other terrible attributes of the human
condition. But, inevitably, too, we are victimized as individuals, by
illness and age and all the other human frailties. What matters is not that
we endure this but how we meet it—and thanks to both Victor Arnautoff and
Dewey Crumpler, the students of George Washington High School have a great
opportunity to learn that every day.

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