It is a sad day for our nation when a beautiful concept like diversity is used as a weapon to assault equality and virtue. A statue was commissioned to commemorate the brave firefighters who came to the city�s rescue on Sept. 11.
The statue was going to depict a White male, a Black male and a Hispanic male, in the likeness of a historical photo of three famous white fire fighters. The price tag on this seemingly noble work of art is a mere $180,000 for Joe Taxpayer and friends.
So what�s the controversy about?
The designers of the statue obviously put race under scrutiny, because they did not tell the artists to depict three individuals. Their instructions segregated Americans into three distinct groups to be depicted by the work.
My curiosity lies with their motives and reasoning for such a conclusion. Government officials are certainly familiar with the census.
I am an engineering student who has never been formally instructed on using the census.
After looking at race through the microscope as our brilliant policy makers decided to do, I came up with interesting facts.
My numbers include an even a higher percentage of minorities than a CNN reporter stated, because I included the adjacent counties to NYC, with the assumption that they responded within an hour to the calls, and participated in the hazardous rescue mission in the first few critical hours.
The fire fighting personnel for NYC and its surrounding counties are comprised of:
0.56 percent Female
Males:
5.34 percent Black
2.79 percent Hispanic
0.21 percent Alaskan or Native American
0.27 percent Other
91.6 percent White
0.0 percent Asian
How is equality served by depicting with biased motives, a group of heroes who risked their lives?
Since race has been scrutinized, what would lead the designers to single a race out and reduce their role by a whopping two thirds in order to inflate the role of the other groups?
Here�s an analogy. During the civil war, a regiment of freed slaves fight and die for the union. The regiment consists of 95 blacks and 5 whites. A statue is commissioned to mark the greatness of those individuals. For some reason, there will only be two men sculpted.
Do I want one of them to be white? Why would I? If race is such an issue, equality should be as well.
How is it not biased to commemorate a deed that was accomplished by an overwhelming majority of blacks by reducing their significance by half?
Why did you have to put the white man in there?
How about we erect a statue for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and deface history and equality by making all of his closest supporters ten different races.
Make his wife Asian, make his daughter Arabic, and make his father Italian-American.
Why doesn�t the Spanish government make a memorial for El Cid and his troops?
They can show an equal number of Whites, Arabic, Blacks and Asians, even though history says that it would be fictitious. But if you like to segregate our population, wouldn�t it make you feel all tingly inside?
There was a simple solution to this problem. We could�ve erected a memorial that is neutral and has no racial implications, like the Vietnam memorial.
However, that opportunity has passed.
Now that the legislature has decided to give a blow to equality and discriminate, it will not suffice until the heroes who participated in this part of history are accurately depicted.
A memorial should be erected depicting a scene of 100 fire fighters. Five should be black, one female, three Hispanics and 91 white males.
Since equality is so important to our people, it should be a valid concept for all races and not a select few.
Diversity is a prideful quality of our nation, but equality should not be displaced by it. It�s hard to find a better example of this unjust act than portraying the dead and living heroes of our time with inequity.
This isn�t a feel-good child�s book; this is a $180,000 representation of the heroes that served in one of the greatest tragedies in American history.
This is a representation of history. It appears that it has been commissioned with only political motives in mind.
Let us place disgraceful shame upon the politicians who failed to realize that the memorial should be erected with honesty, equality and respect for the deceased in mind.
Thomas Kurek is a engineering science and mechanics graduate student. His column is a regular feature of the Collegiate Times.