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Let’s see. We have a dead white male. Said imperialist oppressor is pointing a musket — a gun! – at a peaceful indigenous person. And the offending DWM is seen doing it on what is now the main entrance to an Ivy League institution’s repository of approved accumulated knowledge. How many examples of badthink is that? I lost count somewhere.
Anyway, now that Yale has changed the main entrance of its Sterling Memorial Library (now the nebulously named Center for Teaching and Learning) to one that features this astonishingly un-PC carving, something clearly had to be done.
From the Yale Alumni Magazine:
[H]ead librarian Susan Gibbons…and the university’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces decided the carving’s “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.”
What did the august institution’s administration decide to do to protect its students and other innocents who might inadvertently glimpse this upsetting little tableau? They took the Chinese approach and visually revised history to reflect a newer, safer, more congenial reality.
The Puritan’s musket was covered over with a layer of stone (bottom) that Gibbons says can be removed in the future without damaging the original carving.
Sure, it can be removed, but can you imagine attitudes changing sufficiently at Yale to allow such a thing?
Note also that the native American’s bow seen in the sculpture survived the bowdlerization, apparently being judged a purely defensive weapon. Or a hunting implement. Or something.
This is, of course, is of a piece with other similar recent moves, both inside and outside the halls of academe, aimed at protecting the current generation’s fragile sensibilities from some of the past’s inconvenient truths. So while those who are triggered by take offense at these things have grown to hate the term “delicate snowflake” since it was coined by, well, someone, the epithet seems to be more and more apt every day.