CNN’s Victor Blackwell had two crazy takes as he hosted Saturday’s First of All. First, he claimed that the National Portrait Gallery not featuring a painting of a black, female transgender Statue of Liberty was some great affront to history, and secondly, he lamented that the Department of Agriculture is ending race-based farm grants.
Blackwell’s lament about the painting was in the context of the Department of Homeland Security’s Instagram account posting a picture of the famous 1872 American Progress painting by John Gast:
Here is the Statue of Liberty, modeled after a black transgender woman. The piece is one of several in an exhibit called American Sublime. It was scheduled to make a stop at the National Portrait Gallery. That was until Amy Sherald says that the gallery told her that concerns had been raised internally by the Smithsonian. She explains that these concerns led to discussions about removing the work from the exhibition. And she says, while no single person is to blame, it's clear that institutional fear, shaped by a broader climate of political hostility toward trans lives, played a role.
[See NewsBusters for more]
