NEW YORK — The American Museum of Natural History will remove a prominent statue of Theodore Roosevelt from its entrance after years of objections that it symbolizes colonial expansion and racial discrimination, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday.
First they came for the racist white supremacist statues…
I don’t even recognize my racist country anymore…
This purity shit is getting out of hand.
TR created numerous national parks, national monuments, and national forests.
The statue doesn’t show the figures as subjugated—they are there to show TR’s interest in the West and in Africa, where he safari’d several times.
This is insane.
“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,”
It’s the pernicious nature of racism. Even with progressive tides sweeping them into office, Presidents like Roosevelt and Wilson couldn’t even see how it poisoned their efforts right from the start.
TR thought that women should breed, too.
Interesting as I’m reading a book on the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 called “Isaac’s Storm”, the book is called that, not the storm!
and they go over Columbus’s travels and the lack of knowledge he and everyone had of weather back then, both what it was going to do and what caused it. And, as it was about the same time period, it mentions Teddy’s travels into the western US as travel that was less risky but still no real idea what the weather might throw at you. Book was published in 1999 and I thought it was interesting to notice no mention of either fellows transgressions against native folks, only the weather’s!
Our perfidious President Trumps gonna be irate Roosevelt s his idol. Wonderful.
I might agree with you if both of the figures were on horses of their own, not walking being the white man in the Putinesque pose.
It’s an artistic convention to draw attention to the main subject of the sculpture.
It has nothing at all to do with subjugation, politics, or race.
I have a Master of Fine Arts degree, and I taught art history at the college level for 14 years. I know whereof I speak.
WHAT???!!! I mean, WTF??!!!
I’m Black and a born and raised NY’er. The statue of TR has nothing to do with the ongoing issue of police brutality towards Black people specifically or race relations in this country in general. Nothing. This is some sort of really stupid attempt by the powers that be to look as though they “care”. Not only is this a really stupid and tone deaf attempt, it’s actively harmful. The point of having the statue of TR in from of the Museum is that he was strong defender of conservation in nature. (After he’d killed a whole bunch of aniumals)
In TR’s lifetime, hunting for sport was the manly thing to do.
Today, no one but idiots like the Trump Spawn do it.
It was a new day yesterday.
It’s an old day now.
That is meaningless piffle.
If it was just TR it would probably slide.
Before they came,they said they belong in museums and cemeteries. They lied from the beginning and they are lying now.
Maybe they can put it storage with any statues of Churchill that need to be removed…
One question to be considered, while being purely hypothetical, is what the person being memoralized in bronze will make of the current situation. While Teddy was a man of the 19th century, I do not doubt for a minute that he would be at worst a modern day moderate and very likely a progressive when it came to the relationship of capital and labor…
I have no doubt that Columbus would still be a racist asshole only interested in plundering what ever he could…
It should slide anyway.
It’s political purity run amok.
And it damages the real efforts to address racism.
You may think that my response is kind of lame and that
is certainly your choice, but I’d also point out that the statue represents the association TR had with his view of nature at the time. As was said above, the statue is NOT a reflection of subjugation so much as it reflects most of TR’s worldview and the people in that worldview.
You need to stand back and look at what the statue represents from a different view with different assumptions.
Here’s Holland Cotter, the NYT’s Pulitzer-winning art critic (January 12, 2018):
In addition to creating national parks, TR was also a proponent of eugenics.
I beg to differ. James Baldwin offers a perspective on being black in America that has much resonance today. I heartily recommend reading it if not listening to the actual presentation.