We Built This City

Therefore I put down for one of the most effectual seeds of the death of any state, that the conquerors require not only a submission of men’s actions to them for the future, but also an approbation of all their actions past; when there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified. – Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapokanikan (tobacco field). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.

As a museum of American art in a city with vital and diverse communities of Indigenous people, the Whitney recognizes the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from its collection and program. The Museum is committed to addressing these erasures and honoring the perspectives of Indigenous artists and communities as we work for a more equitable future. – Whitney Museum, land acknowledgment

Someone’s always playing corporation games 
Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names 
We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage 
They call us irresponsible, write us off the page

Marconi plays the mamba, listen to the radio, don’t you remember? 
We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll – Starship

One doesn’t have to share Thomas Hobbes’s foundational premises or political philosophy to note the wisdom of his statement. Unless we go back to the Great Homestead Act of Genesis 1 every nation’s founding occurs in some context of conquest, harm, and displacement of the pre-existing community. That doesn’t mean that all conquest is moral – nor that it is always and everywhere immoral. It is simply a humble appreciation of Hobbes’s right-for-the-wrong-reasons wisdom. Any nation that feels compelled to morally justify its founding in order to morally justify the legitimacy of its current political authority is a very sick nation.