I guess I don’t understand the left anymore. If Bari Weiss has described the controversy correctly, the San Francisco school board just voted to destroy a 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural painted in the 1930’s for the then-new George Washington High School. The artist, Victor Arnautoff, was a committed communist who was employed by the Works Progress Administration, and he subversively included pictures of Washington’s slaves picking cotton in the fields, as well as a dead Native American. His message was pretty clear. America’s history is complicated and that includes Washington’s legacy. For the non-white populations, it wasn’t always a happy history.

I would not be surprised if people complained that the artist was a subversive and his art was anti-American and  inappropriate for a school that ostensibly celebrates Washington’s legacy. But that’s not the problem here. Apparently, the depiction of the slaves and the Native American is disrespectful to black and Native American people and dehumanizing and possibly traumatic for children. They’re destroying the mural (rather than covering it up) at a cost of $600,000 in taxpayer money so that no one can come along later and undo their decision.

One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said before the vote on Tuesday that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”

These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”

According to Carol Pogash of the Times, 45 out of 49 freshmen who wrote about the decision were opposed to the destruction of the murals, so this isn’t the result of a student outcry or consistent with their wishes.

It seems one key problem here is that the artist’s intent was 180 degrees removed from glorifying slavery and genocide. He included those things so that people would remember them. These same activists would likely be howling if the California university system decided not to include any discussion of slavery and genocide in their American history curriculum, and that’s the same mindset that led Arnautoff to include slaves and a dead Native rather than leaving them out.

It seems like a better solution here, if one is required at all, is to include a plaque that explains the full context of the mural and how artists included subversive messages in their art during this period. Destroying art because you have no sense of irony is not “enlightened” or “woke” or whatever the kids are saying these days. It’s reactionary.