NYC statue shows our limitations

"Grounded in the Stars," by Thomas J. Price (Photo courtesy of Times Square Alliance)

     At lunchtime Monday I walked a Rocky Patel cigar from the Iwan Ries cigar shop on Wabash to Gibsons on Rush, pausing to smile at the Irving Kupcinet statue south of Trump Tower.
     I knew Kup. He enjoyed a good cigar, and I considered walking over and blowing a puff in his direction, as a benediction. But time was short, so I kept going, wishing, once again, that his left hand, currently extended in a sort of "I give you the city" wave, could somehow be rearranged into a gesture more fitting to the namesake of the building that replaced his newspaper home.
     The Kup statue did not cause a lot of controversy, which is a shame because the Sun-Times columnist liked nothing more than to stir the pot. He loved to call out racists, and sprang out of the blocks early — in the 1940s he would catalog the snubs suffered by Black soldiers and entertainers, and scolded the Chicago Bar Association for refusing membership to Blacks, claiming to be a social club and not a professional organization. Kup pointed out that social club dues are not tax-deductible. Suddenly the CBA saw the light.
     He'd have a field day with the outcry after "Grounded in the Stars," the realistic statue of a 12-foot tall Black woman unveiled in Times Square April 29. The New York Times called the reaction a "roiling debate," though it's really part of the frenzied purge of Black people from American institutions, government and history. The howl of hurt over the statue, the work of London sculptor Thomas J. Price, is not a discussion, but the typical self-own that racists do when confronted with people unlike themselves doing otherwise ordinary activities — riding a bus, sitting a lunch counter, being represented as a statue — while in the process of being Black.
     “This is what they want us to aspire to be?” the Times quoted Jesse Watters, a Fox News host, gasping. “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” He called it, “a DEI statue."
The overweight crack is unjustified — I'd say she's of standard heft found in most people in this country and looks like she could snap Jesse Watters like a breadstick.
     As for anonymous, honoring symbolic women is something this country excels at, from the 19-foot "Statue of Freedom" atop the Capitol building that Watters' pals recently got off the hook for invading and defiling on Jan. 6, 2021, to a certain large gal in a spiked hat standing at the entrance of New York Harbor, given to the United States by France back in the day when we were smart enough to welcome people who want to be Americans.
     Chicago is peppered with statues of imaginary women, from the golden "Statue of the Republic" in Hyde Park to the way cool art deco Ceres atop the Board of Trade.
     The city has an anonymous woman at its heart — the Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza — a woman's head, rendered in the same COR-TEN steel as the building behind it. Yes, when it was unveiled in 1967, Chicagoans boggled. Confronted with the female face Picasso had been drawing and painting for half a century, they saw everything from a praying mantis to a baboon.
     But that's par for the course. Bigotry makes people see what isn't there. David Marcus, a Fox News digital columnist, looked at the placid visage of "Grounded in the Stars" and saw "an angry Black lady." I'd call her expression somewhere between serene and bored.

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Irv Kupcinet, by Preston Jackson