​About the speaker

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Dr. Katy Bunning is a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. Her research focuses on museums and the production of racial ideas, and the museum’s role in movements for racial justice, as part of developing more socially engaged practice.

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​Transcript

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Hi, My name is Dr. Katy Bunning, and I have been teaching socially engaged practice in the school of museum studies since around 2015. I'm delighted to share some of my research in this session. I will focus on museums and institutional forms of racism, and looking at that relationship between museums and movements for racial justice globally and also in particular in the United States of America.

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So, put very simply, racism can be understood as regarding one racial group as inferior or superior to another group in any way. And this is a definition that I'm borrowing from Ibram X. Kendi’s work on the History of Racial Ideas in the United States. While we know is that scientifically, different races do not actually exist; the idea that there are different races has been a feature of our global history, and now is very much a socially defined construction, and race continues to have a significant impact on our lives.  So, while this talk refers to the very particular history of racism in the USA, there are many aspects, that I am talking about, that speak to wider contexts of oppression based on, for example, ethnic heritage and or group characteristics, perceived as inferior within a given context, or indeed, perceived as superior. So I'm going to share some of my research into the Smithsonian Institution’s history of socially-engaged practice, looking especially the ways in which the Smithsonian institution, which is the largest national museum complex within the United States, has responded to calls for greater inclusion of people, of history, of objects from marginalized communities over time. 

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My research focus is on 1960s right to the 2010s. And what’s really interesting, when looking at the history of socially engaged practice, is the key finding that a number of racial ideas. So, ideas of superiority and inferiority have had a long history and are still reproduced in the museum sector today. So, this talk aims to offer us the persistence of racial ideas in the museum context, and how they operate today with a view to better understanding of the roles that museums have played in both mainstreaming racism, and also their opportunities to challenge racism through institutional change. I am going to illustrate my talk with various images of the Smithsonian Institution, which covers a wide area within Central Washington DC, nestled in and around the National Mall, an essential civic space for the nation, and the site of many protests over the decades toward creating a more socially just United States.

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As a large institution with several museums and a zoological Park, and as a site of research and practice chartered by the United States Congress in the 1840s, the Smithsonian has not been known for its socially engaged work over its long history. While black and other social movement and history are evolving and flourishing in the early 20th century in the United States, the Smithsonian institution took a relatively hostile, or at best lukewarm approach, to reflecting these cultural expressions and achievements. History and culture were very much represented through a highly racialized and anthropological lens that rendered black and indigenous cultures as inferior to the cultures of white Europeans, whereas other museums were trailblazing with emerging forms of socially-engage practices, such as the Brooklyn Children's Museum in the 1890s and the Newark Museum in New Jersey in the 1920s. It took until the protest and cultural shift of the 1960s for the Smithsonian to direct any significant attention and existing museum resource towards wider community histories and experiences. Social history was evolving at this time as well. And a problem that emerged for museum professionals was how best to tell this history, while at the same time, the cause of black inclusion was causing panic and dismay within some parts of the Smithsonian. So at least, some curators recognized the deep need for inclusion but did not really have the resource, but more importantly, the knowledge nor existing approach or methodology to adequately address African-American experiences in their work.

 

So, the Smithsonian institution pursued inclusion initially, in more familiar ways, and particularly in a way trying to retain its idea as being non-political. The Institution has always seen itself as resolutely non-political over more than a century of practice. And yet the civil rights, black power, and the American Indians movements in the 60s and 70s, lay bare the role of the Smithsonian in the subjugation and oppression of people that are laying outside of the cultural and racial membership of the white elites. This was an institution designed at its core to serve the interests of the white society and to entertain and educate with curiosities of other cultures that were seen as less developed than their own.

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In response to increasing public pressure over the late 1960s, 70s, and into the 1980s together with changes in professional discourse, the Smithsonian began to consciously add in under-represented histories into its social history and technology-focused displays.  So, at this time the aim was very much to show the cultural diversity of the United States, but it was approached with white experts leading the work, rather than breaking down the barriers of museum representation in more structured ways.  In this context within the national narrative, an expression of the distinctiveness of a particular cultural group’s experience, like a sole exhibition focusing on African American history or ideas, for example, could be seen as a kind of threat to the idea of “a nation”, a kind of unfair claim to the greater importance on the parts of African Americans, that somehow threatened the status of the “groups”. Culturally specific approaches were even treated as potentially racist in themselves in the way that they define cultural experiences along racial lines.So at this time, curatorial teams formed a kind of aversion to singling out any one particular group over another. So, for example, exhibition text was modified when it seemed that the “American experiences” were taking up too much space, while “other cultural experiences” were thrown into the mix without any consultation in order to make things seem more fair or more equal. In line with prevailing ideas of the time, the ambition was equality, but this is interpreted as the need for equal treatment, and white experts and staff remained very much at the core.

 

For white communities, museums became an ideal place, signaling a sense of inclusivity, a nod towards diversity, not a place to ponder other cultures, but a place that safely manages this diversity—as just “one small part of a larger home”. 

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Diversity was the goal in order to show differences from what was perceived to be the “white norm”. In this context, expressions of “blackness”, which had developed between conditions of racial oppression and cultural renaissance, were largely unwelcomed, as different groups were added into the museum's emerging social-history narratives in a relatively contained, brief, and de-politicized way. 

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One of the key problems was the inclusion without a sense of self definition. There was very little input from people of color into exhibitions and collections, so the representation lacked a certain authenticity or depth. Museum practitioners expressed the fear of institutions being seen to be too political, for all that might signal in terms of their expertise and intellectual legitimacy. The irony of course was that this chronic and highly political process of singling out was that of a white academic lens, a racial identity category went unrecognized or unspoken. What was singled out repeatedly was the white norm, the academic voice of the institution masquerading as neutral, culture-free, aloof somehow from the complexities of racial identifications that form the subject of displays. 

Long-standing discourses of white-centric cultural diversity have been strongly challenged in recent years, for manifesting tokenistic participation that maintains the existing priorities and interests of white social elites. For Porchia Moore, for example, diverse artists, audiences, and programming have been approached on unequal terms by museums only at certain times, and largely, in order to satisfy the white gaze. Diversity policies have had the effect of creating new forms of unequal power relations that render black participants as temporarily invited guests, whose presence in museums secures the illusion of white institutions as open, tolerant, and inclusive, but continues to prioritize and center white expertise, and maintains the intersecting class, gender and race boundaries that operated within the museum and maintained the museum as a white space. 

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Racism continues to operate within and beyond museum. Institutional racism remains alive across many societies. Evidence include disproportionate risk of harm, poverty, less favorable health outcomes, and lower life expectancies among those who are disadvantaged due to their racial status quo. And this image shows demonstrations under the banner “Justice for Michael Brown”, an anti-police brutality rally on the steps of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in August 2016. The unfolding black lives matter movement is a key part of an ongoing series of movements for racial justice, which have had a profound impact on museum discourses and practices in recent years, not just in the US but internationally too. “Black Life Matters” as prompted widespread discussion in museum conferences and board meetings. How can museums respond to calls or the recognition of black lives? How are museums complicit in sustaining a white centric system, that’s been designed without the interests of the black communities in mind? 

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At the same time, “decolonizing the museum” has become a matter of urgency, a process of challenging the colonialist approach to museum’s past and present, and making visible the ideas that have shaped Institution over time. In the US and elsewhere, monuments built of racist individuals in this movement have become another focus for protest. In some cases, statues have been removed, as part of a symbolic and performative process of critical work, to question who societies choose to remember and why. These movements are necessary because ideas of white superiority, and the assumptions that white superiority rests upon, which is black inferiority still persist today both overtly and covertly. 

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In museums, white supremacy is manifested as normativity through much of the museum’s work, from the uncritical adherence to traditional disciplinary and professional norms, the scope of collections, interpretations, historical narratives, to the idea of audiences, and the wider stakeholders too. Ideas of black inferiority can also be detected in response to black-led Museum programming, where the intellectual content and audience appeal, can be subject to excessive critique and over scrutinizing, with such projects being seen as predominantly political projects in ways that white-led projects rarely are. At the same time, museum have operated within societies, which have discouraged direct and in-depth questions about contemporary racism. Social justice-led identity politics are often treated with suspicion as potentially unwelcome political correctness, serving to undermine the values of truth and freedom of expression. Within many museums and similar levels of organizations, there are voices that sympathize with these ideas that are contributing to a culture where there is an unwillingness to center social and racial Justice within organizations. This is one reason why Black Life Matters is so significant for museums as Museum workers ask more direct questions about how museums can play a role in dismantling racism.

 

Led by Activists and professionals of color, new thinking on how the histories that underpin contemporary racism can be addressed ethically and with rigor— are at the forefront of professional debate. These calls to address social justice emerging within and around museums has served to highlight that museums are neither necessarily safe nor intrinsically legitimate spaces, and cannot remain aloof from the issues that plague society at large. But there is significant fear of “getting it wrong”, and further tokenizing through politically informed practice. In this context of fear, complicity, and opportunity, museums’ choices of the stories they choose to emphasize, that their choices in the extent nature of their engagement with community, their willingness to take a difficult stance on difficult issues, and their willingness to disengage themselves from partner organizations that support explorative endeavors across the globe, all have a profound effect on the extent to which racial Injustice are addressed, ignored or discarded within museum context.

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Today it remains the case that museums are still rendered legitimate even when their colonial structures and white centricity remain intact. As progressive sites, they are able to shift their attention towards that possibilities for change, yet without the anti-racist or de-colonial structures and tools at the ready. It is apparently enough for museums to indicate change, rather than to deliver it. White supremacy in museums does not need to be merely identified or disrupted through activism although these are essential components for change. It ultimately needs to be designed in a way, though fundamental, institutional shifts that ensure that museums are designed collaboratively to serve more of us, more of the time. Thank you very much indeed for your time.