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Two years ago, a new 12-foot-high bronze statue by British artist Thomas J. Price was installed outside Rotterdam’s main railroad station. It’s called Moments Contained, and its subject, to quote Guardian reporter Senay Boztas, is “an ordinary-looking black woman” – a plus-sized black woman, I might add – in “tracksuit bottoms and trainers.” When Boztas visited the statue, she encountered a middle-school art class that was there because the statue was part of its “colonialism and slavery” curriculum. One of the students told Boztas that it was “nice to see something other than a white man in a suit.” Boztas also quoted Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb’s praise for the statue: “She’s not a heroine, a character with an illustrious past….She is the future, our future, and this city is her home.” And she quoted Price’s own explanation of the statue’s purpose: “to challenge our current understandings of monuments, to critique this idea of status and value within society: who gets to be seen, to be represented.”

When I read the other day that another 12-foot-high statue of a black woman had been placed in Times Square – in the very heart of New York’s theater district – I figured it was Thomas J. Price at work again. (These days, after all, no artist worth his salt does anything just once.) Of course it was. To be sure, the two statues differ somewhat. The one in Rotterdam seems to be somewhat at ease – leaning back slightly, her hands in her pockets. The one in New York, which is called Grounded in the Stars, is standing up straight, her hands on her hips, and looks as if she’s about to spit on somebody or let loose a string of expletives. She’s even more overweight than her sister in Rotterdam, and her hair is in cornrows. Times Square’s website (who knew that Times Square had a website?) says that the statue “foregrounds the intrinsic value of the individual and amplifies traditionally marginalized bodies on a monumental scale.” You know, the usual. Price, for his part, says that he wants the statue to inspire “deeper reflection around the human condition and greater cultural diversity.” As for the bronze woman herself, “both her stature and her unbothered gaze are markers of status and authority; this is a figure who understands her worth.”

Well, that’s one way to put it. When I look at this woman towering over the crowds in Times Square, I see one thing and one thing only: an angry, entitled ghetto woman. This is the woman you’ve seen in viral videos – the McDonalds customer throwing a fit because her hash browns are cold; the gate agent refusing to let a Frontier Airlines passenger board his flight just because she has the power to do so. This is the nasty, slow-moving New York City Motor Vehicles Bureau clerk who hates having to be of service to anyone, even though that’s her job description. This is the abusive, foul-mouthed mother (played by Mo’Nique) in Precious. This is the lardass in short-shorts and flip-flops whose only exercise is getting into fistfights at airports. This is the flash-mob shoplifter who pushes a cart full of purses and perfumes out of a Nordstrom’s in L.A. while hurling profanities at anyone who gets in her way. This is the heroine of every hip-hop song containing the word ho. This is, weirdly, the woman whom our former First Lady, Michelle Obama, seems to be devolving into on her podcast – a mean-spirited sourpuss who has nothing but complaints.

A Christmas story. Long ago, on an evening in late December, when I was a 23-year-old graduate student at Stony Brook University and we’d just reached the end of the fall semester, my friend Steve and I were working late in our shared office in the otherwise empty Humanities Building when there came a loud knock at the door. Steve opened it to reveal one of his students. (In addition to taking graduate courses, both of us had teaching assistantships that covered our tuition and that required us to teach one undergraduate course apiece per semester in either composition or literature.)

The student was a formidable sight – almost as big as the doorway. And the moment the door opened she was bellowing at Steve, furious and threatening. Steve had given her an F for the term, and she wasn’t having it. Cursing vilely, her body language insanely aggressive, she said that if he didn’t change her grade, she’d beat him to a pulp. Everything about her suggested that this was no idle threat. And she could’ve done it. Steve was a slim 6’1”; I was a slim 6’0”; she was taller than either of us and built like a linebacker. Like Mongo (Alex Karras) in Blazing Saddles, she looked as if she could punch out a horse. I don’t know what I would’ve done in Steve’s place, but what he did was simple: he slammed the door in her face.

I didn’t imagine that that could possibly be the end of it. I expected her to bang on the door again, even more violently than before. When that didn’t happen, I was sure that when we left, she’d be lying in wait for us. Yes, I was fairly confident that if we did encounter her and she did start swinging, Steve and I together could take her down. But there was no way for us to win: if we so much as touched her, she’d go to the university authorities and touch up the story in such a way as to turn us into would-be rapists. Imagine the headlines: two white guys attacking a young black girl after dark, in an empty building! We’d be pariahs. At the very least, we’d lose our teaching assistantships. More likely there would also be a nightmare of a lawsuit that would drag on forever and destroy both our lives.

Fortunately, nothing else ever happened with that girl. But she’s who I see when I look at that statue in Times Square. A woman with no dignity or class or manners – no self-control, and no self-respect. A slob. A mess. A savage whose default mode is irrational rage. Once upon a time, the black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) wrote of the Talented Tenth, the top ten percent of the black American community whom he felt could profit from higher education and who could then go on to become the cultural and intellectual pillars of black America – its thinkers, its artists, its lawyers and doctors, its politicians and professors. Well, that girl at Stony Brook was a perfect representative of the bottom ten percent – somebody who has no business whatsoever being anywhere near a college, who has no worthwhile thoughts in her mind and nothing of value to say, but who says it the loudest, and in the most obscene language possible.

Grounded in the Stars? Stars? Really? What stars? To behold this twelve-foot-tall woman is to see the type of gutter trash who used to be held up by responsible black parents as a cautionary example. Now, however, she’s pretty much the base of the Democratic Party – the welfare queen who’s lived all her life on the dole and has no ambition other than to make sure that the money keeps flowing in, and who will therefore stay on the party plantation forever. She’s the white progressive’s idea of a “strong, proud black woman,” because she’s the one who stomps up to the microphone at political rallies, pushing everyone else aside, and howls stupidly about what she’s entitled to and hasn’t gotten yet.

It’s the leftist idealization of this kind of woman that has filled Congress with cartoon characters like Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Frederica Wilson, and Jasmine Crockett, and has installed clowns like Lori Lightfoot and Karen Bass as the mayors of some of our largest cities. Long gone is the era of the intelligent, articulate, and dignified Barbara Jordan, the congresswoman from Texas who was black and female and gay and wheelchair-bound – but who, devoted to her constituents and her country, never made a big point of any of it. Even longer gone is the era of Hattie McDaniel, who, when she became the first black woman to win an Oscar, dared to express the hope that she would always be “a credit to my race and to the motion-picture industry.”

Nowadays the idea of being a credit to one’s race – or, for that matter, to one’s religion or sex or sexual orientation or to any category to which one happens to belong – is such a politically incorrect thought that it seems to have become de rigueur in woke circles to try to do the exact opposite: namely, to be a disgrace to your race. Which is why this towering hunk of bronze in Times Square, which is wokeness writ very large indeed, is a slap in the face to every hard-working, law–abiding, self-respecting black person who walks past it. Check it out, folks: this is what the white Democrats who run New York City – and who are in charge of furnishing Times Square – think of you.

By the way, there’s already a famous statue in Times Square. It’s of George M. Cohan, who (with apologies to Max Bialystock) was the real king of old Broadway – a singer and dancer, director and producer, and composer and lyricist of many of the earliest song standards of the twentieth century, including “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” The ideal pendant to the Cohan statue, it seems to me, would be a statue of the legendary Bert Williams. Williams, a universally beloved song-and-dance man, starred in In Dahomey, the first all-black musical to be performed in a major Broadway theater – that was way back in 1903 – and was also the first black man to perform in a racially integrated show on Broadway, namely the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910. But more important, he was a star of the first order whose name is hardly remembered now.

But Williams, alas, was male. If Times Square demands a statue of a black woman, the ideal candidate would be Lorraine Hansberry, whose A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first play by a black woman to be staged on Broadway – although what matters, all these decades later, is that it was a beautiful piece of work. Another top-notch idea would be a statue of Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, who played the title roles in the original 1935 production of Porgy and Bess. I’d also propose the immortal Lena Horne, although that might be seen as overkill, given that the Nederlander Organization already renamed the Brooks Atkinson Theater for her in 2022. But numerous other possibilities abound. Of course the point, in any event, should be to erect a statue of someone whom people look up to, or whom they should look up to – not, God help us, to pay tribute to the indecency, slovenliness, and gaucherie that our haywire culture increasingly holds up to us, these days, as worthy of emulation, even as the coarser creatures among us seem poised to destroy our very civilization.