Lincoln Center cancels Mozart and goes woke — based on a historical lie

Lincoln Center cancels Mozart and goes woke — based on a historical lie


When Black Lives Matter becomes a marketing strategy, facts offer little impediment to speaking “one’s truth.”

Take the case of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which banked its pandemic recovery on a narrative of its own abhorrence.

In 2020, the center began promoting a story that a vibrant black community known as San Juan Hill had been deliberately snuffed out in the 1950s to make way for its creation.

“The displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families that took place prior to the construction of our campus is abhorrent,” declares the center’s “Message on Our Commitment to Change.”

“We may never know its full impact on those dispossessed of the land on which Lincoln Center sits. But only by acknowledging this history can we begin to confront the racism from which our institution has benefited.”

With the blood-and-soil essentialism of today’s identity politics, this commitment fell in line with the new progressive rhetoric of land acknowledgments, colonialist dispossession and unearthed legacies of systemic oppression.

The story was also left unchallenged by the many news sources that repeated it.


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As Lincoln Center took ownership of its parcel, it kept close tabs on the residents it helped relocate.

Most of them remained in Manhattan, with 900 families staying on the Upper West Side.

A study of the first 742 relocated showed that they mainly moved into larger quarters, all with up-to-date sanitary conditions.

Most notably, for all the “abhorrent” claims of the “displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” an internal census revealed a population that was, in fact, overwhelmingly white, with a ratio of three to one, while the area’s black population was in the single percentage points.

As it turns out, Lincoln Center’s self-accusation has been nothing more than a false confession.

The year 2020 deserves a reckoning in more ways than one, but the race hustling in our institutions is a good place to start.

In the case of Lincoln Center, this distortion of the historical record to satisfy the whims of identity-obsessed elites has distorted reality itself and undermined a historic institution, Mozart and all.

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