Mayor Bill de Blasio manufactures a crisis fit for the South, not New York

Like a tropical weather pattern, the controversy over statues honoring historical figures of dubious renown has moved North, its arrival heralded by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.  

Like any politician unsure whether to exploit an issue or punt, His Honor has convened a blue ribbon panel, the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers.  Befitting the commission’s Orwellian moniker, its designated mission is to “develop guidelines on how the City should address monuments seen as oppressive and inconsistent with the values of New York City.”

It’s curious that this teeming, polyglot metropolis has an official code of values to consult, but perhaps it can be found on NYC.gov. In any case, the go-to option for most New Yorkers encountering something oppressive or inconsistent with their values is to step over it. Life in the City would be impossible otherwise, and we seem to have managed just fine thus far. 

De Blasio shreds Trump: “Stop pulling punches and condemn white supremacy” https://t.co/GsKiOUd0NE pic.twitter.com/dc9uO75JQg

— The Hill (@thehill) August 14, 2017

Moreover, New York is not comparable with the South. The Confederacy was vanquished and slavery abolished, but in the South there is a lingering tendency to romanticize the former at the expense of remembering its predations. Coupled with the residual socioeconomic deficits that bedevil race relations today and it is more than understandable that parents might have misgivings about sending their child to a school named for a patron saint of the antebellum period. The problem isn’t a historical issue, but a contemporary one.

{mosads}New York hasn’t emancipated itself from bigotry, or yawning socioeconomic inequities. But we have sufficient distance from the persons whose likenesses are alleged to cause offense to regard them with dispassion. To suggest otherwise is to manufacture a crisis.

Peter Stuyvesant was a horrendous religious bigot, but we can’t simply wish him away, or his contributions to New York.  And while Mayor de Blasio claims to abhor a street plaque honoring the Nazi collaborator, Marshal Petain, its presence is no more distressing to most Jews than images of Pharaoh in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian wing.  

Jewish history, replete with suffering, is too important to be sandblasted away. Often a cautionary tale, it is the adversaries of Jews who have sought to obscure or deny it. That’s why we preserve the death camps; to remember. In America, treatment of the Jews rates five out of five stars on a historical scale, and a memorial to Petain can be regarded as a curio, evidence of a villain who fell from grace.

Developers routinely raze our architectural heritage to make way for hideous super towers, with the impotent consent of our lawmakers. But our historical legacy is too precious to erase, even when it evokes painful memories. New York is a city of refugees, of survivors, and that painful past informs our identity more than the imagined utopia of Comrade de Blasio.

De Blasio may order removal of New York’s Christopher Columbus statue https://t.co/nbcP69gl3z pic.twitter.com/noUUv9KJKU

— The Hill (@thehill) August 24, 2017

Just how municipalities nationwide ought to manage this issue must be decided on a case by case basis, weighing legitimate sensitivities against a duty to the past. Perhaps Spike Lee’s canonical “Do the Right Thing” pointed in the right direction.

In the film, the lack of inclusion of images of African Americans among the photographs of luminaries on the wall of a Brooklyn pizzeria is a point of contention among the characters, setting the plot in motion. It’s an omission that is easily corrected.

The past is etched in stone, but amidst its rubble and its remains, our moral progress can be acknowledged with new monuments. We can’t change the past, but we can acknowledge it, bracket it, and move forward.

Roy Abrams is a New York-based writer and investor.