NEW YORK POST, April 18, 2024
Lincoln Center cancels Mozart and goes woke — based on a historical lie
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.”