« Blood money: Nets arena to be named after bank founded on slave money | Main | Barclays Buys Naming Rights to Nets Stadium »
January 19, 2007
‘Barclays’ has a bad ring
The Brooklyn Papers, Editorial
The Atlantic Yards developer’s arena naming-rights deal with Barclays, the British bank whose history includes funding the slave trade and doing business with South Africa’s apartheid government, is a stunning insult by a man who has so aggressively courted the support of black leaders over the past three years.
Whenever Ratner needed to show that his oversized, gentrification-causing Atlantic Yards project would be a good deal for Brooklyn, he trotted out those usual suspects, many of whom he paid, to sing his praises.
Yet now — a few weeks after his project gained state approval, and a few days after a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. — Ratner has trashed whatever legitimate good will he might have had in the black community by announcing that his arena would bear the Barclays name.
...
Naming an arena after a slave-trading family is a slap in the face, akin to a developer building an arena in Borough Park — with its high population of Holocaust survivors — and naming it “Volkswagen Field.”It is time for elected officials, most of whom enabled Ratner’s use of racial politics throughout the Atlantic Yards approval process, to stand up for blacks, for history, for integrity and, indeed, for all of Brooklyn and urge Bruce Ratner to find another corporate partner.
Posted by lumi at January 19, 2007 12:29 PM