Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

All money is dirty – but it can still be used for good

Whitney museum: no space for profiteers of state violence // dismantle patriarchy // warren kanders must go! // supreme injustice must end // we will not forget // choking freedom is a crime // enough // greed is deadly // humanity has no borders // we grieve the harm…

If that array of posters paving the entrance to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art hasn’t plunged you into such an insensate catatonia that the print has blurred, here’s the drill. For months protesters have been campaigning to have Warren B. Kanders, the museum’s vice chairman, who’s already donated $10 million to the institution, removed from the board. Eight artists withdrew from the Whitney’s esteemed Biennial exhibition in solidarity. Last week, with more than a suggestion that he didn’t jump but was pushed, Kanders finally, and stiffly, resigned — presumably taking his fortune and any future donations with him.

Kanders’s crime is to own Safariland, a company that manufactures law-enforcement supplies, including tear gas that may have been used on migrants trying to storm the US-Mexico border. Since enforcing your own immigration laws is tantamount to genocide in certain American quarters, that makes Kanders’s money and service tainted. Similarly, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will no longer accept contributions from the Sacklers, owing to the family’s association with the manufacture of the addictive opioid OxyContin.

Let’s do a reality check. Now that Warren Kanders has stepped down as a Whitney trustee, exactly how many individuals among those huddled masses yearning to breathe free on America’s southern border will not be subject to tear gas? Or now that the Met is shunning Sackler funds, the victims of America’s opioid crisis have been reduced by exactly how many addicts?

None, you say? Seriously? Not, in either instance, even one? Gosh, I’m bewildered.

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