The Black Woman Statue In Times Square Is Cultural Warfare

The cultural parasites of the left have struck again. This time, they have erected a bronze statue of a 12-foot-tall anonymous overweight black woman in New York City’s Times Square, where it will stand for the next month.

Matt Walsh asked on X whether it was a particular person “or just a statue of a random black woman for no apparent reason?”

It is indeed a random black woman, and the randomness is for a very specific reason. Having torn down beautiful statues of American heroes and icons, the left is now erecting intentionally ugly statues designed to attack the very idea of greatness and undermine the notion that exceptional people should be memorialized and honored in public. And they’re doing it for the ultimate purpose of seizing and wielding cultural and political power.

But don’t just take my word for it. The statue, we’re told, “disrupts preconceived ideas of what defines a triumphant figure and challenges who should be rendered immortal through monumentalization.”

These people do not come to build but to destroy, and what they erect in the place of what they have destroyed isn’t just boring and narcissistic, it’s also cultural propaganda that insists on a neo-Marxist paradigm pitting the supposedly marginalized and oppressed against the oppressors. And we all know who the oppressors are.

Recall that in recent years New York City removed a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had stood in city hall for 187 years and took down a statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History that had been there for nearly a century. The monuments to these great Americans were, in the left’s telling, nothing more than celebrations of racism and bigotry, and had to be torn down as part of their cultural revolution.

And what do they offer as a replacement for the likes of Jefferson and Roosevelt in the public square? A celebration of both mediocrity and identity. The official description of the ground-level statute states “the woman … cuts a stark contrast to the pedestaled permanent monuments — both white, both men — which bookend Duffy Square, while embodying a quiet gravity and grandeur.”

A stark contrast indeed. Historically, we have put statues of American heroes on pedestals because we’re meant to look up at them, to admire them, honor them, and aspire to their greatness. By putting a statue of a random black woman at ground level, the message, at least on one level, is clear: Do not aspire to greatness, do not honor those who achieve objectively great things. What undergirds this message is a diabolical philosophy: There is no such thing as greatness, or honor, or beauty, goodness, or truth.

But the ultimate purpose of this kind of propaganda isn’t merely to push cultural relativism. It’s to accumulate power. Once the left has “disrupted” the idea of greatness and destroyed our cultural patrimony, it can impose a new set of standards that divides Americans into identity groups based on immutable characteristics like race and sex.

Hence the white man of the past becomes the universal villain and the anonymous fat black woman becomes the true American hero, the one who should be immortalized in bronze. The fact that the artist didn’t choose a specific black woman is part of the propaganda. Unchosen things like race and sex, according to the cultural left’s ideology, are more important than any one individual’s accomplishment or contribution to public life, however heroic or unique. The statue need not be any particular black woman, because every black woman is a “hero” based on her race and sex alone. That’s why our American history, full of actual heroes like Jefferson and Roosevelt and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, must become a parade of villains, a litany of lies. 

In carrying out their assault on American history and culture, the revolutionary left can’t help but mock what they would destroy. Hence the official description of the statute notes that, “In her depiction, one recognizes a shared humanity, yet the contrapposto pose of her body and the ease of her stance is a subtle nod to Michelangelo’s David.” What nonsense. No one who looks at this statue is going to think of Michelangelo’s David. Even mentioning that masterpiece in the description is intended to denigrate it.

This cultural warfare isn’t new, and it isn’t confined to America. Leftist ideologues are putting similar statues of random black women all over western Europe, right in the heart of western civilization, which is what the left ultimately wants to destroy.

We shouldn’t let them, and that means recognizing this kind of cultural warfare for what it is, taking down their statues, and restoring the ones they tore down.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.