Erasure: “Some say it’s San Diego’s most famous landmark. We say, ‘most infamous.’”

“Looking back, it was inevitable, really,” says Esther Erasure, Director of Change at the soon-to-be-razed-and-recently-renamed San Diego Museum of Us. “When we adopted our Decolonizing Initiatives in January of this year, we explicitly acknowledged that it would be an ongoing effort that required ongoing reflection. I think it was February when one of our board members pointed out that the museum’s Saint Francis chapel, while touted as nonsectarian, was actually quite Catholic in both design and decor. Catholicism, of course, was just one tool used by the Spanish colonizers to subjugate and eventually destroy the Indigenous population. Further, it was patently ridiculous to have a functioning religious space in a museum devoted to humanity. It wasn’t an exhibit in the Museum of God, you know? So the chapel was dismantled. But then another board member noted that the museum itself was designed by a White man to resemble a Spanish Colonial church and then built on ancient Kumeyaay land — a triple whammy of no-nos. We already knew we were going to get rid of that awful phallic tower when we switched from Museum of Man to Museum of Us. But upon further consideration, we realized the whole thing had to go if we were going to fulfill our mission. Really, the very notion of a museum is a bit absurd — as if we need to make pilgrimages to learn from our cultural betters. What we need is dialogue and exchange. And we invite the rest of Balboa Park to join us in our efforts to decolonize San Diego, starting with that monument to Dead White Male cultural imperialism right next door: The Old Globe Theater. Shakespeare, Shmakespeare. Whoever thought it was appropriate to build a replica of an English theater in a country that was born by rejecting English colonialism, anyway? And while we’re at it, how on earth is our city’s main urban park named after a Spanish conquistador? Why does it house a museum devoted to railroads, which did so much to aid the replacement of Indigenous civilization with our current White dystopia? Really, we just hope that our demolition will be remembered as the first domino to fall as America’s Finest City finally decides to join the 21st century.”