Stop the suppression of the San Francisco murals! Defend the right to history, art and culture!

By the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality 

14 August 2019

The suppression of the historic Depression era murals at George Washington High School in San Francisco painted by left-wing artist Victor Arnautoff is an attack on freedom of speech and artistic expression.

The censorship campaign against the 13-panel mural titled the “Life of Washington” is based on the brand of right-wing politics that promotes race and gender as the fundamental categories of American society in order to obscure the class exploitation that is the driving force of capitalism and the basic source of social inequality and poverty. At a time when working people all around the world are entering into struggle, the purveyors of identity politics, representing privileged sections of the middle class, aid the efforts of the ruling elites to divide the working class.

The targeting of these murals, which depict the oppression of slaves and Native Americans, as somehow “racist” is a particularly filthy exercise in elitism by those who use race and gender to carve out a bigger share of the wealth and power of the top 10 percent for themselves. It is an attack on culture, art and history, and the right of workers and young people to decide for themselves and learn from the artistic and scientific achievements of the past.

It is the latest in a series of attacks on artistic expression spearheaded by the identity politics zealots.

* Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmitt Till was suppressed because she is white and supposedly has no “right” to portray the racist murder of the 14-year-old African-American boy.

* John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) was taken down for a week at the Manchester Art Gallery under the pretext of fighting misogyny, pedophilia and the “male gaze.”

* The name of Lilian Gish has been removed from a theatre at Bowling Green State University in Ohio simply because the great actress appeared in the racist film Birth of a Nation .

As actor Danny Glover, who attended George Washington High School, recently and correctly said, “To destroy [the murals] or block them from view would be akin to book burning.”

The claim that these murals cause “trauma” among those who view them is absurd. Students do not need self-appointed censors to tell them what they can and cannot see, hear and read!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/13/mura-a14.html