I asked friends to recommend short, affecting pieces on encounters with racism at museums. They had some amazing suggestions. I couldn’t fit them all on the syllabus, but I thought you might want to read some of them on your own.
#museumsrespondtoferguson (a regular Twitter-based discussion; here’s an interview with the creators)
People of Color in European Art History
Fred Wilson, “Mining the Museum”
Arun Venugopal, “Museums as White Spaces”
American Public Media, Historically Black Podcast
Natasha Trethewey, “Pilgrimage”
Francie Diep, “The Passing of the Indians Behind Glass”
Resources on repatriation from the National Museum of the American Indian
Adrianne Russell’s work and Twitter feed
I also asked for people’s favorite works that demonstrate how it’s entirely possible to perpetrate racism without actively trying to hurt anyone. Two books that came up a lot are George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists.
It’s really common for people of color to experience lots of “small” acts of racism everyday, in many kinds of interactions. (Sometimes people call these “microaggressions.”) When someone points out one or two of these incidents, it can sometimes be hard for other people to see why they’re such a big deal. But when these “small” things happen all day, every day, the sum total of the experience (combined with knowledge of history) can hurt people very, very deeply. I’m not sure I totally got how this happens until I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.
Thanks for these additional resources! Fred Wilson’s, “Mining the Museum” is one of my favorites because I find it to be one the most powerful interventions I’ve ever encountered.