A people without the knowledge of their history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

– Marcus Garvey, Jamaican political activist

In 1961, hundreds of civil rights activists, many just out of high school, rode buses to Jackson, Mississippi, knowing they would spend weeks or months in one of the South’s worst jails. They ended segregation in the interstate bus system and won enormous respect for the civil rights movement.

But identity politics has changed twice since then. First, the Black power movement rejected King’s nonviolence and ethics but retained the bravery exhibited by nonviolent direct action.

Second, the new identity politics replaced bravery with demands for protection from exaggerated perceived threats, even when there’s no actual threat. An example would be the “threat” of a little White girl dressing as Moana (Disney’s Polynesian princess) for Halloween.

Only a small minority of the left engages in the outrage politics and cancel culture used to enforce the demands of the new identity politics. However, this small but growing band, which has sometimes self-identified as “social justice warriors,” increasingly inflicts damage on the Democrats and generously fires up Trump’s base.

The purpose of this chapter is to make clear the dramatic differences in tactics and objectives between the civil rights movement and today’s new identity politics. Its main focus will be the Freedom Riders of the 1960s, whose nitty-gritty realities tend to be forgotten. But to make the contrast as clear as possible, I will start with a current incident, with roots in the past, that threatens to destroy a valuable piece of progressive history.

Throwing Ink on the Mural

By 1968, African-American students at George Washington High School (GWHS) in San Francisco, many of whom were Black Panthers, were angry about the school’s anti-racist 1,600-square-foot mural. (Yes, anti-racist; just hang on a minute.) They wanted it gone, replaced with a mural depicting their current heroes. (Spoiler alert: They actually got the mural they wanted, and the original mural was preserved as well—the perfect ending.)

The “Life of Washington” mural was commissioned in 1936 by Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project to match the school’s name. The artist, Victor Arnautoff, was already famous for other murals in the city, including a set in Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill—a landmark tourist attraction to this day. Arnautoff happened to be a student of the most renowned modern muralist, Diego Rivera. And like Rivera, he was a Communist.

Being a Communist meant he took care to show great respect when painting workers, slaves, and Native Americans. In contrast, he painted the White settlers in black and gray as they walked past the dead Plains Indian (with no visible wound). The daring aspect of the mural showed the country’s first president as a slave owner and complicit in the near destruction of the Native American nations.

Now the hero of this story is Dewey Crumpler, a Black art student just out of high school. In 1968, the Black students at GWHS asked him to paint a mural for their school, but the Art Commission said he was too inexperienced (he was) and the students should paint one themselves. That’s when they splashed ink on Arnautoff’s mural (it’s still there). In the meantime, Crumpler went to Mexico, where he studied mural painting and also learned about Arnautoff.

When Crumpler returned from Mexico, he said he would not be a party to destroying the mural but offered to paint a “response” mural. The students agreed and the Art Commission accepted the project in 1970. After 30 meetings with students over the design, he finally painted his mural in 1974.

By then, most of the students agreed with saving the Arnautoff mural. At the dedication of Crumpler’s mural, one of the student leaders got up and said, “Mr. Crumpler, I believe your murals are important. But I want this audience to know that if I had understood what Arnautoff was doing, I would never have reacted in the way that I did.”

Woke Identity Politics

Amy Anderson, a Native American, took her eighth-grade son Kai to visit GWHS in 2016. She was horrified to see the dead American Indian. But Kai wanted to go to GWHS for the music program and told his mom he would walk into school with his head down every day so he would not have to see the murals on the wall.

Later, he said that during his entire freshman year, “I remember not having the emotional capacity in me to look up.” It is hard to imagine a Black Panther or a Freedom Rider reacting this way. They had been taught to be tough and proud, not traumatized.

Because Kai was being traumatized by not looking up, his mother and her fellow indigenous activist Mariposa Villialuna drafted a resolution in the fall of 2018 and sent it to the school board. This resulted in the creation of the district’s Reflection and Action Committee, and on June 25, 2019, the board voted unanimously to destroy the mural.

This move was justified, the committee stated, because Kai and unspecified others were being traumatized, and some, according to Villialuna, were experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), something usually associated with extreme battlefield traumas. The board felt it needed to make the school a safe place for the students.

Some have a different view

“Why try to hide the reality of our history, which is a terrible one?” asked Alice Walker, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “They should leave the mural and explain it to the children. I think that this feeling that everybody is now so tender-hearted that they can’t bear to know the history is ridiculous.” Walker is part Native American. Her daughter attended GWHS and suffered no trauma or PTSD in spite of having both African and indigenous heritages.

Willie Brown, California’s most famous Black politician, said, “I’m the father of a Washington High graduate. My daughter was never traumatized by Arnautoff’s painting—as a matter of fact, it generated conversations at home that otherwise would not have occurred. It was a learning experience for her, and for me.”

The San Francisco president of the NAACP, Rev. Amos Brown, also spoke out for saving the mural, stating, “There comes a time you need to do some deeper thinking, not sound bites.”

Internationally acclaimed Black actor and activist Danny Glover attended GWHS and compared destroying the mural to “book burning.” Dewey Crumpler, who still wants the mural preserved and displayed, said, “Today’s students aren’t taught to interpret artistic imagery. Arnautoff’s goal for the work was to expose America’s first president for who he was, warts and all.” The GWHS alumni association has also gone on record supporting preservation of the mural.

Who’s Been Colonized?

According to Willie Brown, there’s no greater authority on Arnautoff than Robert Cherny, who “literally wrote the book on the artist.” And Cherny reports that “during the public comment section of the school board meeting, those seeking to destroy the murals described the defenders of the murals as representing the perspective of ‘the White supremacy culture.’ They described the American Indians, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans who defended the murals as having been ‘colonized.’”

So there you have it. Alice Walker, Willie Brown, Rev. Amos Brown, Danny Glover, Dewey Crumpler, and the GWHS alumni association have been “colonized.” No need to listen to their brainwashed arguments.

The root of the problem is ignorance protected by what I will show later is postmodern ideology. This ideology denies there is any reason to look into what an artist meant—a notion called “the death of the author.” This is why Crumpler is right when he states: “Today’s students aren’t taught to interpret artistic imagery.” The result, he says, is that “they are trying to look at images literally.”

According to this ideology, when the Reflection and Action Committee sees Washington owning slaves, members think Arnautoff was saying that’s a good thing because they believe that artists only paint what they approve of. I know that may sound like I’m exaggerating their ignorance and confusion, but the written conclusion of the committee states:

The mural glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, White supremacy, oppression, etc.

It’s amazing that Danny Glover attended GWHS for four years and missed this completely. But lucky for us, Kai’s Native American mom, Amy Anderson, understood this the minute she laid eyes on the mural. And the rest of these Black cultural luminaries did no better than Glover, all because they let themselves be colonized by White supremacists.

Thankfully, there’s a good chance the school board will not get away with this, but there is no hint yet that they will do anything to help the students understand the murals.