Tag: Racism

Decolonize this museum

Sofya Aptekar
TCCS Core Faculty

For the third year in a row, I observed Indigenous People’s Day this past fall by joining the Anti-Columbus Day Tour at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Even if you’ve never been in person, you might know this museum from the movie, Night At The Museum, where Ben Stiller plays a security guard. In general, I think most of us think of kids gawking at dinosaurs or maybe the giant whale hanging from the ceiling when we think of this museum. Pretty innocuous. Why, then, would a thousand protestors pack its halls screaming “Fire to the Colonizer”?

The Museum of Natural History is profoundly shaped by its active participation in settler colonialism and white supremacy. Aside from the dinosaurs and the giant whale, whole floors are devoted to racist displays of indigenous people of various regions. These dioramas feature thousands of artifacts (some sacred) taken from people across the globe, racist models and representations of human beings, and actual human remains, such as skeletons. As an organizer from Chinatown Brigade pointed out during the tour, exhibits of non-European, non-settler people – portrayed as primitive – are located between models of apes and displays of rocks and minerals.

Most of museum’s displays have not been changed in decades, sometimes not at all since being installed a hundred years ago. There have been no attempts to explain to visitors how the various artifacts have been acquired, not to mention the central role of this museum in the eugenics movement in the early 20th century. (NB: This museum actually hosted the International Eugenics Congress conference!) At the grand staircase entrance to the museum stands a statue of Theodore Roosevelt, who is celebrated inside as well. Roosevelt is riding a horse, towering over an African man on one side and a Native American man on the other. A city commission on symbols of hate in the city was split about what to do with this statue, and the activists demand that it be taken down because it celebrates settler colonialism and white supremacy.

Over $17 million dollars of public money flow into the museum every year, underscoring the need for this public institution to be held accountable to the very public it serves. This museum is also the place where hundreds of thousands of school children come to visit on school trips. New York City public school students, who are predominantly people of color, are exposed to exhibits that portray people of color in a degrading and dehumanizing way, without any contextual explanation.

The Anti-Columbus Day tour was certainly an opportunity to have a different experience in the museum. First, we gathered in a big hall as a group with our banners and signs, and used the people’s mic to communicate our goals for the tour. Then, Decolonize This Place brochures in hand, we split into groups to visit various exhibits on a self-guided tour, where we had “encounters” organized by participating organizations, which included NYC Stands with Standing Rock, Black Youth Project 100, South Asia Solidarity Initiative, Chinatown Art Brigade, and Take Back the Bronx. For example, in the Hall of African People, two young organizers with the Black Youth Project 100 used the people’s mic to talk about Ota Benga.

Benga was a Congolese man who was bought at a slave market and exhibited in the museum in the early 1900s. While they spoke, other participants unfurled huge banners from the second floor balcony reading, “Smash Patriarchy,” “Abolish White Supremacy,” and “Stolen Bodies on Stolen Land.” In the Hall of Biodiversity, activists covered the plaque of donors – which includes Monsanto – with a red banner that said “Support for AMNH provided by slavery, genocide, imperialism, and theft.”

At the end, we came together for a People’s Assembly, with hundreds of us sitting in an oval under the Great Canoe hanging from the museum ceiling. One speaker after another brought home the interconnectedness of so many struggles – deaths of indigenous women, police brutality, gentrification, Palestinian liberation, US military in the Pacific islands, and more. As the museum closed, we walked out together chanting Decolonize This Museum and filled the steps leading up to the Teddy Roosevelt sculpture, guarded tightly by the NYPD.

Read Jack Carolan’s article, “How to Make it in a Global City (Chances Are You Can’t…)”…

At this point you probably have a couple of questions. How can thousands of people do this in a museum? The organizers did tell the museum this would happen, in solidarity with the museum guards whom it would affect. What did other visitors to the museum think? My impression was that most were European tourists who were either bewildered or annoyed by our intervention. A few visitors did join the People’s Assembly and more than a few asked questions about what was going on. An organizer from the Chinatown Art Brigade standing in front of a display meant to represent some vague idea of Chinese culture was challenged by a tourist who said that he didn’t see a problem because he’d been to China and that’s what it looked like to him.


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What would decolonization of the American Museum of Natural History look like? Well, let’s take a look at the Museum of Vancouver as an example. Last year, I visited this museum and I was blown away by an exhibit exploring the museum’s own role in colonialism and examining how it told the story of Vancouver that excluded the Musqueam people who continue to live there. This is not to suggest that Canada is a country that currently and completely respects indigenous people’s rights (just one example of how it doesn’t). Instead, I believe this example provides some alternatives for ways that museums might grapple with their racist and colonialist legacies – for the public good.

In the case of the American Museum of Natural History, decolonization would begin by removing the Teddy Roosevelt sculpture; doing a major overhaul of the racist dioramas; providing extensive new signage that educates visitors about the museum’s history; and endorsing the call to rename Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day in New York City.

What do you think? Is there a cultural institution in your life that could use some decolonization? How do we make it happen?

 

Sofya Aptekar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and core faculty of the Transnational Cultural and Community Studies program at University of Massachusetts Boston. Follow her @sofyaaptekar

As American as apple pie

Taina Teravainen
TCCS ’19

An infographic showing the extreme unlikelihood that perpetrators of sexual assault will convicted of a crime and incarcerated in the United States, courtesy of the organization RAINN
Content warning: Sexual Assault, rape, racism
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I was nineteen seven autumns ago. I had just moved 15,000 kilometers to Boston from Singapore, my home, for my freshman year of college. In photographs, the most striking thing about me from that year was my purple and black hair, split neatly down the middle. All the other parts of who I am weren’t so obviously portioned out and displayed. I imagined listing all my multitudes during the many upcoming introductions – I am Chinese and white. I’m a Singaporean with a U.S. citizenship. I had chosen Boston partly to be closer to my grandma in the South Shore, a place I visited most Junes, the place I was told harbored the other half of my
identity, as if I would always be divided into two, an entire part of me missing from myself.

As my parents and I drove past the Rainbow Tank toward downtown Boston, I was wedged in the backseat next to my new laundry hamper. Wow, I thought, I’m actually doing it. I feel just like an American teenager. A few days later, still in orientation, I had another experience that turns out to be common among college-aged women in America. I was sexually assaulted. I was raped multiple times that first semester by the same man, another freshman.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), a person is sexually assaulted every 98 seconds in America. 9 out of 10 rape victims are female. Women in college between the ages of 18 and 24 are 3 times more likely than women in general to experience sexual assault. Most college sexual assaults happen from August through November. It may be hard to understand these figures. For me, it simply means that rape culture continues to thrive in America, and that when I’m in a room with other people, I am more likely than not there with another person who has been sexually assaulted.

We have endured an exhausting summer, and stumbled into a fall that feels so much like defeat. Brett Kavanaugh is now an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m unsure what this means for the people of America, but I know that a victim of sexual assault was told in front of this country and the world that her pain did not matter. Kavanaugh, her assaulter, would
not be punished nor denied any opportunities.

The man who raped me told me later that he had first come up to speak to me, when I was sitting alone reading in the dining hall, because I was Asian. He showed me a handwritten list of experiences he wanted to pursue in college, one of the top few being having sex with girls of different races. He was white and from a predominantly white Massachusetts town – the type of town the white side of my family lived in, where I was told held the answers to who I really was. To him, women of color were not individuals, just a box to check off on his scrap of paper. Having found out I was only half Asian after he raped me, he was uncertain if I counted.

When I encounter racism, it almost always, always holds the threat of gender-based violence. There is a tenable link between racism and sexism, and I cannot close my eyes to either, because sometimes they feel like one and the same. Racism and sexual violence are not merely American problems, but their presence dates back in the history of the U.S., a double-edged tool of oppression. Our anti-racist work and anti-sexist work should be intertwined, and these connections should be discussed openly and frequently.

Isolated in the city: The precarious position of migrant workers in Singapore

Taina Teravainen, TCCS ’19 Student

A picture of the Singapore skyline

Singapore is small in size, only 279 mi², but it is densely populated with approximately 5.6 million people living in this space. Over 245,000 people in this figure are “foreign domestic workers:” women who live in their employer’s homes, cook their meals, wash their clothes, and care for their children and elderly. “Foreign migrant workers,” on the other hand, make up the over 296,000 men who migrate to Singapore to labor in the booming construction industry.

As a Singaporean, I have often seen men squat by the side of the road with yellow hardhats waiting to be ferried back to their dormitories in the open-air back of lorries. In the evenings, they can be spotted playing cricket or having a beer in pockets of unused grassy spaces. The women gather en-masse on Sundays in public spaces that they rarely get to visit, except on their single day off. They have picnics with friends, attend religious services, and send remittances to their families in their home countries. This day off isn’t a certainty though.

Due to the precarious situation foreign domestic workers live in, the exploitation they face includes denial of time off, forced work without sufficient rest, and docked or withheld pay for months on end.

Due to the precarious situation foreign domestic workers live in, the exploitation they face includes denial of time off, forced work without sufficient rest, and docked or withheld pay for months on end.

When I asked my mother about how much time off the domestic worker of our extended family hired received, she said that the worker had chosen to forfeit her day off for increased pay. This is more than just industriousness, I know, but rather a necessity. She has her own children and parents in her home country who depend on the money.

Following independence from British colonial rule in 1965, Singapore’s rapid industrialization has firmly cemented its spot as a global financial centre and, in turn, created a segmented labor market that is filled by cheap and disposable labor from peripheral countries such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, China, The Philippines, and Myanmar.

While these workers provide essential labor and services for increasing production and economic growth in Singapore, they are also denied pathways toward citizenship and are viewed as unable to integrate to Singaporean society. This seems at odds with the Singapore government’s party line that the Singaporeans live in multiracial harmony and raises the question: Who gets to be included in this vision? The racial language used in anti-migrant sentiments raised by local Singaporeans, who themselves are mostly only a few generations removed from their immigrant ancestors, certainly does not support it.

Who gets to be included in this vision? The racial language used in anti-migrant sentiments raised by local Singaporeans, who themselves are mostly only a few generations removed from their immigrant ancestors, certainly does not support it.

Of course, similar migration structures exist in the U.S. and other countries worldwide, but because of land size, Singapore seems to exist as a microcosm of the larger problem of exploitation of migrant workers and a racial hierarchy that stems from it. While living in the small citystate ensures that locals are never too far from encountering a foreign worker, it remains easy enough to avert one’s gaze and one’s thoughts from the abuses that go on within boarded-up construction sites or other people’s private homes, especially if societal rhetoric is that migrant workers are to remain outsiders and less-than, always. More needs to be done by the government, the employers and local Singaporeans to confront the neoliberal ideologies that reduce migrant workers to their labor and erases their personhood.

“Sak Pase/ Que lo Que:” Haiti & The Dominican Republic

Jeannette Mejia,
TCCS Student (MS Candidate ’19)

A young boy looks out of a forest on a hilltop in the Dominican Republic

In 2013, the Dominican Republic ruled to revoke the citizenships of Dominicans of Haitian descent. The attempt and actions of the Dominican government to expel Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent, time and time again, is one that is fueled by anti-Haitian sentiment.

These sentiments are not new and follow a long history of anti-blackness in the Dominican Republic. This anti-blackness arose from colonization of Hispaniola in 1492 by the Spanish regime, the subsequent enslavement of the African peoples forcibly brought to the island, Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804, and the Dominican Republic’s thirty years of dictatorship under Rafael Trujillo.

The colonization of the island by France and Spain split the island into two – the eastern hemisphere of the Dominican Republic and the western side as Haiti. This division did not cause anti-Haitian sentiment per se but it did separate people who share the island. The interests of the United States, which sought to annex the country in the late 1800s, in addition to the colonial interests of France and Spain further deepened this division of the island and its inhabitants.

A map showing the split of Haiti and the Dominican Republic from 1921.
A 1921 map of the island of Hispaniola showing the division of Haiti and “Santo Domingo” (ie pre-independence Dominican Republic) (Wikimedia Commons)

Additionally, the United States’ perspective towards Dominicans not only impacted the ways that Dominicans viewed themselves, but it also had an impact on how the rest of the world viewed people of the island. For example, in 1871, several U.S senators visited the Dominican Republic and noted that most citizens of the country were “mixed” both of African and Spanish descent and that the white blood was dominant in the country. They concluded that this mixture made it a white nation. Subsequently, this complex racial identity was both internalized by Dominicans and exported as the understanding of Dominicans in countries of power.

Black Dominicans, in short, came to see themselves not just as Black but as “white Black” while Haitians became viewed as “just” black. This conception gave Dominicans, as well as other nations, a sense of superiority over Haitians. The “negrophobia” that emerged out of the internalized identities given to people of the Dominican Republic underlie the anti-Haitian sentiments that still so heavily impact the country today.

Today, the Dominican government still tries to expel Haitian citizens and Dominicans of Haitian descent. I pose that one of the reasons that this phenomenon is still occurring is due to the internalized anti-blackness initiated on purpose by countries of power, such as the United States, and the internalized identity of whiteness also imposed by these countries. The effort to remove Haitians, who are in fact Dominican, only benefits the former colonizer and invader of the country.

Silvio Torres, The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity (1998): https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2634170.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A6dcb212d1d8c48bce77adf7f35406ade