Vincent Smith Was Not Racist

I am angered by Maureen Mullarkey’s tendentious review of the late Vincent Smith’s paintings at the Alexandre Gallery [“Gallery Going,” Arts & Letters, January 13, 2005]. Her use of Smith’s paintings as an excuse for another one of her tiresome neocon rants is both ignorant and offensive.

Smith was never an advocate of violence nor did he “[wink] at racial provocateurs.” He was committed to documenting the racial and political upheavals of the 1960s much as Otto Dix had documented the Great War. As a painter, he became a black cultural nationalist not from hatred of white people, but because he saw so little art in the museums and galleries that related to his own people and their experience.

Yes, he was friendly with Amiri Baraka. That friendship dated back to their youthful bohemian days in Greenwich Village. Mr. Baraka encouraged Smith as a painter and bought his work when no one else did. That Mr. Baraka later became the nasty little bigoted clown he is today has never been relevant to Mr. Smith’s work.

I knew Vincent Smith for over 35 years and showed his work several times when I had a gallery. He was a kind and gentle man who respected all people. Comparing him to Ezra Pound is glib and stupid and cheap.

GIL EINSTEIN
Manhattan

Columbia’s False Advertising

One of the most interesting points that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education makes in its debate with the NYCLU over academic freedom [“Academic Freedom Group Enters Fray,” Jacob Gershman, New York, January 11, 2005] is that Columbia University, as a public institution, can create any sort of Middle East Studies Department it likes. The problem only comes from false advertising. In his letter to Columbia President Lee Bollinger, FIRE President David French says, “…if Columbia chose to create the nation’s foremost “anti-Zionist” MEALAC (Middle East Studies) Department, it would have the right to do so…however, it must be as open and honest about its mission and purpose as sectarian schools are about their missions and purposes.” In other words, no bait and switch.

You cannot, morally – and perhaps legally – sell yourself to the public as providing a “liberal arts”-type education, with its diversity of thought and dispassionate scholarly approach, if what you actually provide is narrow, one-sided, and politically correct. If Columbia chooses to have a Middle East Department that focuses on the Jewish state as the cause of ills in the Arab/Islamic world, and to that end treats it as it would no other nation-state, and in addition purposely excludes or downplays the histories, cultures, and plights of ethnic, racial, and gender minorities in the Arab Middle East – the black jihad slaves today in Sudan, the Christians oppressed in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, the African Muslims enslaved and/or dispossessed in Mauritania, Arab women, Arab labor, and gays – fine. But then let it not falsely sell this Arabist tall tale – at high prices – as “scholarship.”

THOMAS STERN
Brooklyn

School Vouchers a Pipedream

I commend The New York Sun for its ongoing advocacy of school vouchers. Your January 12, 2005, editorial, “Opportunity Knocks,” raises its emphasis to a new and welcome level.

Not to knock the opportunity, but the cards are stacked against implementation of a voucher program in the foreseeable future – there is virtually no support system in place.

Vouchers are typically promoted in connection with school choice, with educational excellence as their goal. Fair enough, we need better schools. But I believe that vouchers would be just as attractive as a taxpayer issue. Vouchers can cut the funding of public education by more than half, as they do in Milwaukee, to the extent that pupils utilize them. With the looming threat of Draconian tax increases about to be imposed on New Yorkers on top of the ridiculously high taxes we already pay, the economics of public education takes on added significance.

Most importantly, for vouchers to succeed there must be a vehicle for fostering support, i.e., an organization dedicated to moving the issue. Such an organization is necessary to develop the argument for vouchers, coordinate the effort among like-minded groups and provide a means for individuals to demonstrate their support for vouchers. I expect that, if the issue were cogently presented, widespread support would be forthcoming from parents – who want better schools – and from taxpayers, who want lower taxes.

Until and unless a voucher campaign is created to coordinate a campaign and to publicize vouchers as an alternative to the status quo, their implementation remains illusory.

EDWIN R. THOMPSON
Manhattan

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