Ya gotta love this.
Over there at the New York Post was this headline:
Lincoln Center cancels Mozart and goes woke — based on a historical lie
The Post reports:
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.”
One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the vivid display of historical ignorance on display here.
Again, note this from the center’s “Message on Our Commitment to Change.” It reads:
“The displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families that took place prior to the construction of our campus is abhorrent….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.”
Hello? Let’s refresh with real history.
As that real history details, the original settlers of Manhattan were the Lenape Indians. Only later did Europeans begin showing up. Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano — for whom today’s Verrazzano Bridge connecting Staten Island to Long Island is named — was one of the first in 1524. Then, in 1609, there was Henry Hudson, who discovered the great river that now bears his name.
In 1626, a Dutch trading company settled on the island and legendarily “purchased” Manhattan from the Lenape for “sixty guilders worth of trade goods.”
Much history has flowed since then. But, obviously, the Lincoln Center’s version that “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx” were displaced is only one-third true. There were no Black or “Latinx” people who were settled in Manhattan when Verrazano arrived, much less were there any to be displaced when the Dutch named. The only people “displaced” were, in fact, the Lenape and other Native Americans. And the later arrivals moving on to Lenape land were not only white Europeans but “Black” (slaves and others) and “Latinx” people. Or, in other words, everyone else from all races and corners of the world.
So, again, when the Lincoln Center says “We may never know its full impact on those dispossessed of the land on which the Lincoln Center sits,” they are charmingly unaware that whatever was on the site where “the Lincoln Center sits” was dispossessed from the Lenape centuries ago, not at some time in the 1950s.
In fact, again to remind as the Post notes, 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.”
Hello? To say the “vibrant black community known as San Juan Hill had been deliberately snuffed out in the 1950s to make way for its creation” ignores that San Juan Hill itself had sat on land originally belonging to the Lenape Indians. Which means, according to the Lincoln Center’s logic, that a section of the Lenape territory that originally populated Manhattan was taken over by the “black community known as San Juan Hill.”
The bottom line here?
The beauty of America is that it belongs to all its people — people of all nationalities, ethnicities, races, and genders.
If the folks running the Lincoln Center have some guilt about their location taking land from the original Lenape owners, then taking down Lincoln Center and giving the land back to the Lenape should be the order of the day. Not to mention that if any of the people running the Lincoln Center live in Manhattan, then they should give up their apartments or homes, give back to the Lenape the land they sit on, and maybe move off Manhattan entirely.
Don’t hold your breath.
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