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When Black Lives Matter becomes a marketing strategy, facts offer little impediment to speaking “one’s truth.”
Take the case of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which banked its pandemic recovery on a narrative of its own abhorrence.
In 2020, the center began promoting a story that a vibrant black community known as San Juan Hill had been deliberately snuffed out in the 1950s to make way for its creation.
“The displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families that took place prior to the construction of our campus is abhorrent,” declares the center’s “Message on Our Commitment to Change.”
“We may never know its full impact on those dispossessed of the land on which Lincoln Center sits. But only by acknowledging this history can we begin to confront the racism from which our institution has benefited.”
With the blood-and-soil essentialism of today’s identity politics, this commitment fell in line with the new progressive rhetoric of land acknowledgments, colonialist dispossession and unearthed legacies of systemic oppression.
The story was also left unchallenged by the many news sources that repeated it.
For the racial pathologists, the center’s four-block campus obviously owed its existence to the destruction of a historic black neighborhood, paving over those “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families” with white travertine and white culture.
These days, such self-abnegation offers a chance for our managerial class to treat their organizations’ supposed pathologies with a patent mixture of tinctures, elixirs and balms.
For Lincoln Center’s leadership, this has meant attacking from within an institution largely dedicated to the culture of the West by developing programming and even a new campus plan based around this original sin of race-based displacement.
In consequence, last summer the center canceled its “Mostly Mozart” festival in favor of more “inclusive” fare — sponsoring rappers, pop groups and an LGBTQ mariachi band while hanging a 10-foot-wide disco ball above its fountain.
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.”
Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, pledged to “really confront our past head-on as we move into the future” by “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone” — implying, of course, that Mozart does not belong to everyone.
Yet as with much of today’s racialized mythology, this new battle of San Juan Hill has been a story of wishful thinking.
There indeed was a time when this area was a nexus of black New York.
But its cultural height had come and gone long before Robert Moses turned his attention to redeveloping this outmoded and fire-prone section of the West Side.
By then, the “entire area was in an advanced state of decay,” according to the city.
The Lincoln Square Renewal Project of 1955 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.
As Lincoln Center took ownership of its parcel, it kept close tabs on the residents it helped relocate.
Most of them remained in Manhattan, with 900 families staying on the Upper West Side.
A study of the first 742 relocated showed that they mainly moved into larger quarters, all with up-to-date sanitary conditions.
Most notably, for all the “abhorrent” claims of the “displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” 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.
As it turns out, Lincoln Center’s self-accusation has been nothing more than a false confession.
The year 2020 deserves a reckoning in more ways than one, but the race hustling in our institutions is a good place to start.
In the case of Lincoln Center, this distortion of the historical record to satisfy the whims of identity-obsessed elites has distorted reality itself and undermined a historic institution, Mozart and all.
James Panero is executive editor of The New Criterion, from whose May issue this article is adapted.