2021-10-17

"You're white: therefore you are fired"

Read:

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/15/chicago-art-institute-tells-white-docents-we-dont-want-your-kind-volunteering-around-here/

https://www.foxnews.com/us/art-institute-of-chicago-fires-docents-diversity

https://www.chicagonow.com/dennis-byrnes-barbershop/2021/09/art-institute-of-chicago-fires-docents-because-they-are-too-many-whites-in-their-ranks/

https://www.chicagonow.com/dennis-byrnes-barbershop/2021/10/a-response-to-the-art-institutes-head-honchos-weak-effort-to-justify-firing-its-docents/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-institute-of-chicago-controversially-ends-docent-program-202285

From the Federalist article:
"Had most docents been non-white, it’s easy to imagine that such mass firing would have received wall-to-wall coverage by corporate media and be set up as another example of institutional racism. 
Instead, <b>social justice megaphones such as The New York Times and the Washington Post made no mention of it at all.</b> 
The left does not see injustice when privileged white people are discriminated against."

My (KH) reaction to this:
Surely Veronica Stein couldn't make such a decision without support and approval from her management.
This mass firing must have the approval of not only the AIC president, but also, in the long run, the AIC board.

Those docents were giving their talents and skills to the community.
They were truly enriching it, without asking for anything for themselves.
In the current jargon, they were truly "giving back".
They should have been praised and valued, not fired.
What a shame.

Those fired docents had a great store of cultural memory.
Also the dedication and skill to acquire it.
Surely many of them had undergraduate and possibly even graduate degrees in either the fine arts or art history.
And they were working for free!
Throwing all that away seems to be a deliberate attempt to destroy part of our cultural knowledge, to be replaced by a more politically correct version.
This seems like something out of 1984.