But, according to USA Today, the board’s decision is getting major pushback from a group of more than 500 professors and academics who blasted it as a “gross violation of logic.”
As reported by The Blaze, the board not only voted unanimously, but they claimed that the Depression-era artwork, the “Life of George Washington,” (painted by Russian-American Victor Arnautooff) suddenly “traumatizes students” while it “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, [and] oppression.”
In other words, the board used all the Left-wing talking points and buzz words in order to justify its very anti-American decision.
The mural was painted on the walls of George Washington High School prior to its opening in 1936. At the time, according to the Richmond District, the mural was the “largest WPA-funded, single-artist suite on the Pacific Coast.”
In other words, it was both publicly funded and a very big deal.
But that was then, before the Alt-Left managed to take control over much of American pop culture and push its poisonous ‘America Last’ agenda on impressionable young minds. (Related: Collapse of Austin into mass homelessness and filth is a warning for all of America: This is what Democrats do to everything they control.)
Covering up the mural won’t be any easy or cheap task. The board estimates the project will take about a year and will cost $600,000. And if, by chance, the project is delayed, well, the board will just have someone install paneling in the meantime. They want it covered up that badly.
When asked about the ridiculously high cost of simply painting over a mural, Mark Sanchez, a commissioner on the board, remarked, “This is reparations.”
Of course.
“It’s not a matter of offense, it’s a matter of the right to learn without a hostile environment,” Paloma Flores, program coordinator for the school district’s Indian Education Program, said at the meeting in which the commission decided to cover the mural. “Intent does not negate lived experience.”
Right.
The Left is just contemptuous of our founding and history
Thanks to big government Marxism, the project won’t begin right away, though. KQED reports that the commission has to wait for — get this — an environmental study — to be completed. And commissioners do expect there to be legal challenges (and there should be, considering the mural was completed using public/taxpayer funds). Lope Yap Jr., vice president of the high school’s alumni association and a big mural supporter, told the station that his group is planning a lawsuit.
“We’ll use every tactic available,” Yap said, noting there are “several grounds” for a suit.
Meanwhile, the delay will give others time to intervene on behalf of saving this valuable part of our history.
In an open letter urging the board to change its mind, the 500-plus professors turned tables on the mural opponents:
It is an important work of art, produced for all Americans under the auspices of a federal government seeking to ensure the survival of art during the Great Depression. Its meaning and commitments are not in dispute. It exposes and denounces in pictorial form the U.S. history of racism and colonialism. The only viewers who should feel unsafe before this mural are racists.
The scholars went on to say that, setting aside whether the voices who are calling for the mural to be scrubbed and painted over have the moral authority to do so, “what remains is a mistake in the way we react to historical works of art — ignoring their meaning in favor of our feelings about them.
“We urge the school board to reverse its decision and take all reasonable steps to preserve the mural and to teach it as a work of art and a representation of our history,” the letter continued. “We oppose this display of contempt for our history.”
Contempt is all the Left has for our founding and ‘our history.’
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