Martin Luther King jr memorial: pourquoi pas un sculpteur noir?

L'auteur revient sur le choix d'un sculpteur chinois pour la statue de MLK...

"Let’s face it: There really is something peculiar about having an artist from communist China sculpt the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial statue. And, yes, it would have been fantastic had an African American sculptor been chosen instead.

I do not believe that such sentiments are racist, as some have charged. They are deeply rooted in America’s racial past and ought not be so easily dismissed.

Much has been made of how King’s memorial, which opened to the public Monday, is situated between Lincoln’s and Jefferson’s, as if they are inviting us into a three-way conversation about the nation’s ongoing struggle for racial justice and equality. Ingenious, to be sure.

Overlooked, however, is the White House to the north and the U.S. Capitol to the east — which were built using extensive black slave labor.

Last year in June, congressional leaders unveiled two bronze plaques commemorating the estimated 400 to 600 slaves from Maryland, Virginia and the District who helped build the Capitol.

“We’ve come here this afternoon to tell the rest of the story. To acknowledge the profound indignity that the slaves who helped clear this land and lay these stones must have suffered in building this great monument to freedom,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during that ceremony.

Must have suffered, indeed.

Surely, having a black sculptor of a black civil rights icon — working on ground once toiled by black slaves, on the National Mall, designed and surveyed with the help of a black mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker — would have added to the King memorial’s symbolic power.

So, yes, it stings when, centuries later, creators of the King memorial say they couldn’t find a qualified black sculptor.

“Not only did we need an artist, we needed someone with the means and methods of putting those large stones together,” Ed Jackson Jr., executive architect of the project, told me recently. “We don’t do this in America. We don’t handle stones of this size.”"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/having-a-black-sculptor-for-king-would-have-been-nice/2011/08/23/gIQAFjWBaJ_story.html