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.
The bronze statue that has stood at the museum’s Central Park West entrance since 1940 depicts Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American man and an African man standing next to the horse.
“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,” de Blasio said in a written statement. “The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”
The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, told the New York Times that the museum’s “community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd.”
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.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac’s_Storm#:~:text=Isaac’s%20Storm%3A%20A%20Man%2C%20a,after%20the%201900%20Galveston%20hurricane.
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!