STATUE IN THE PLAZA of a MANHATTAN COLLEGE

Have you seen the weird statue in the plaza outside Borough of Manhattan Community College? Many have. But few remember. Even students who attended the institution, for years, when asked to recall the statue in the plaza outside of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, invariably draw a blank. As you can see, it is a torso, a bronze torso without legs, arms or head. Now, why would they put a brown colored torso, with its arms, legs and head cut off, outside a school attended mostly by Black and Latino students??

According to Michael Brenson, writing in 1983, in the Arts Section of?The New York Times,?it “takes off from the Greek myth, in which Icarus, flying with fragile, wax-bound wings, perishes because he ignores his father’s advice not to fly too close to the sun.” So, was the statue put there to suppress the aspirations of the students?

Of course not, who would do such a thing? Perhaps it was erected to let the students know that success will not be easy. But that, clearly, is not the moral of the Icarus legend, its message is don't soar too high, know your place.?But who would do such a terrible thing? What exactly was the process to select that statue? Who was involved in making the decision, and why? But the specifics don't really matter. What matters is that, in a community college with a low graduation rate, and an overwhelmingly Black and Latino student population, there is a statue of what appears to be a mutilated brown body towering over its central square. And no objects to it.

Perhaps that's because few see it, consciously, that is. But they have seen it, nonetheless.?Meanwhile, down in Wall Street, there is also a bronze statue, that of a mighty bull, symbolizing the power and potential of the US economy. Anthropologists learn a lot about ancient cultures by the monuments they erected. They give deep insight into the mind of a society. In the distant future, when they look back at the bull on Wall Street and the brown mutilated torso in the plaza in the Borough of Manhattan Community College, they will surely discern a lot about today's society. But we can make the same conclusions now. They are two emblems, one a symbol of success, the other, a marker of abject failure. One everyone sees, and remembers, and one everyone sees and tries to forget. But do they?