April 1, 2018

"People from the African Diaspora are frustrated w/white people being gatekeepers of our narrative."

A tweet quoted in "Museum slammed after hiring white curator for African art exhibit" (NY Post).

The museum, the Brooklyn Museum, is standing by its choice and just saying things like "We’re listening and we hear you" and "we want to assure you that you can count on us, as ever, to continue working deeply on equity within our institution and beyond."

71 comments:

MikeD said...

Yeah, factual scholarship is bad cuz we gots our narrative.

Michael K said...

Do they have a special room for BLM ?

buwaya said...

Interesting that a random African can claim cultural dibs over stuff from diverse African cultures, some of which would not, even now, admit any sort of kinship with him.

Its a bit like some Chinese guy complaining that an Asian art collection covering dozens of cultures should have some "Asian" as boss, just because.

Frankly, I think the best and most just caretaker of such a thing should be representative of those who cared enough to collect it, that is, the European colonizers. No African cared about his neighbors, or his neighbors neighbors.

William said...

Pretty good C.V. I’d say.

Scholarship? Scholarship? We don’t need no stinkin’ scholarship.

gspencer said...

Anyone know who Amy Wax is?

“Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans” because “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.”

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/4/fahrenheit-451-updated

David said...

How about black curators for the black artists and white curators for the white art, Chinese for Chinese art etc? Kinda doubt this would expand the market for black curators.

Anonymous said...

Both probably hardcore lifelong lefties. What acts of humiliation and self-flagellation
will they be compelled to commit to keep their jobs?

Charlie Currie said...

Blogger gspencer said...
Anyone know who Amy Wax is?

Yes.

brylun said...

I wonder if they followed the NFL Rooney Rule?

Jon Ericson said...

PEACH FOTY-FIE!

Ambrose said...

Good way for people of the African Diaspora (cultural appropriation anyone?) to ensue that fewer people will pursue academic careers studying their art.

sean said...

What I do is, ignore African culture. That way, you will never be accused of colonizing. Also, I never explain anything to the female associates at my law firm (only the males). That way, I can never be accused of mansplaining.

buwaya said...

But its not "their" art.
Other than being racially similar to the creators, just a matter of biology.
Its the art of a slew of peoples with which African Americans have next to nothing in common now. And some of these cultures are extinct.

rehajm said...

Open your own African art museum across the street with the right curators and put them out of business.

Michael said...

So those from the African diaspora build, endowed and pay for the operation of the Brooklyn Museum?
Amy Wax is a hero. Common sense is now heroic.

buwaya said...

The whole point of most of these fields of study was to facilitate colonialism. The first scholars in all of these areas were colonialists, or those who exploited the openings the colonialists made.

And every colonialist, whether soldier, administrators, priest or merchant, besides everything else was a practical anthropologist. That was the skillset.

Rabel said...

Well, at least they hired a woman. The collection has about 4000 pieces consisting mostly of small statues and pottery. That's a lot of dusting and dishwashing. You need an expert regardless of race.

Paul Zrimsek said...

Even better headline: "Brooklyn Museum Abolishes Color Bar in African Art Curation."

rehajm said...

Baines and Malek are both white guys. They literally wrote the book on Egyptian art.

What do you bring to the table they can't?

rhhardin said...

It's a big mistake to identify as black.

Stupidity is assumed. It took 50 years for that to settle in.

It started with black leaders showing up on TV. Now it's everywhere.

Achilles said...

Nothing like some good old fashioned racism.

Definition of.

Dude1394 said...

I'm game. Only black people should curate African American museum pieces and no black person should curate European museum pieces. You want to go there, let's go there.

Sam L. said...

Those poooooor BAbies! Mah heyart buhleeds fer them.

Rabel said...

The curator position is named after the Sills family so I assume that they funded it, at least in part.

A little quick research shows that the Sills family, through their foundation, represents the personification of white guilt. And looking at the family history, that may be justified.

I suspect they'll cut another check and hire a second curator. Then they can split up the dustin' and dishwashin'.

robother said...

Maybe this is why vaudevillians adopted blackface when performing black music. Those 19th Century SJWs were pretty badass too, you know. It could work again.

Sebastian said...

So it isn't that blacks objected to racism, they just disliked the kind practiced by whites.

Big Mike said...

Run DNA tests. No one with a single drop of white blood should be allowed to curate the collection. Get a real African, not these wannabe Africans born in the US of A.

Jon Ericson said...

There goes the neighborhood?

Rabel said...

I almost feel sorry for the white dude. The initial press release appeared to read that he was to be curator of African photography when he actually will be curator of photography photography.

African photography - is it all done in black and white? And if you blackout the white what have you got left?

Gahrie said...

look goddamn it...for nearly fifty-three years I have lived my life by the idea that race doesn't matter...character does. I'm getting pretty fucking tired of everyone else but White people being racist and rubbing White people's noses in shit.

The identity police better be fucking careful...because eventually White people are going to get fed up with this shit....and believe me no one wants that to happen.

Gahrie said...

By the way...colonization was the best thing to happen to sub Saharan Africa and the worst was ending it too early.

robother said...

While we're at it, aren't we all sick and tired of Jews and Wasps curating Italian Masters? There's all kinds of Guidos in Staten Island and on the Jersey Shore who know in their bones what Mona Lisa is smiling at. And the canals of Amsterdam are crowded with speed skaters who were born knowing more about Dutch Masters than anyone outside a cigar store owner.

Jon Ericson said...

I'm reserving my opinion on this until I read Tennesee Coats' tweet.

Virgil Hilts said...

Wait until some of these protesters actually visit the African and Egypt collections in the Met and see the treasures/cultural heritage that were stolen by TWM and shipped across the Atlantic. Talk about cultural appropriation.

Fernandinande said...

A tweet quoted

Someone with a twitter account didn't like something.

Bay Area Guy said...

Black people unite against liberal artsy-fartsy, patronizing whites! You have nothing to lose but your artistic chains!

tim in vermont said...

I think that the Creationism Museum is the model for all future museums. You know, where cultural beliefs must never be questioned. Outside the Creationism Museum, you also have the American Indian museum in D.C. where scientific interpretation of artifacts is discouraged.

Narayanan said...

Does Jews leaving Egypt count as African diaspora?

Henry said...

What if they were blind? Would that be better?

Henry said...

I have to say that the most interesting thing about these hires is not that they're so white, but that they're so young. The humanities prey on the young and abandon the old on ice flows.

Crimso said...

You know, the first colonialists were African...

chuck said...

Ah ... never mind. It's the arts scene.

madAsHell said...

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Lost in Translation.

buwaya said...

Seeing as I have a solid family history in the colonialism line, continued right into my own generation, I should apply for that. It sounds like a nice comfortable retirement job.

PeterK said...

"until I read Tennesee Coats' tweet. I see what you did there. now you owe me a new keyboard

Ken B said...

Good for the museum for not letting the twitter mob affect them.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Apparently white people, unlike black people, are limited in what they can accomplish by the color of their skin.
This is coming out of our educational system, from pre-school through grad school. Institutional racism, brought to you by the American Left.

Known Unknown said...

Oh well.

Lewis Wetzel said...

If you were to sit in on a "White studies" class taught in the style of a "Black studies" course, you (if you are a white person) would immediately reject what you were being taught as a load of racist rubbish. Unless you were a Klanner or a Nazi, in which case you would think that it was the truth.
You would be taught that whites were a people eternally oppressed by non-whites, that all of the problems that white people have are caused by the non-whites to further oppress them, and that all the good things that the non-whites have were stolen from the whites.

Saint Croix said...

Can't they just say they are black? I thought that was a thing.

Saint Croix said...

Next you'll be telling me the one on the left is a woman.

Thuglawlibrarian said...


Who would have thought that some on the left would bring back Plessy v. Ferguson?

Lexington Green said...

Sucks to be a white liberal academic. You can't get a break.
As to the curator of the African art collection, they should have a lottery, anyone can apply for the position, and the only qualifications that you have to identify as a person of African a ancestry. Pick one of the applicants at random and give the job to the lucky winner. Make it a life tenure position. The person cannot be fired even for cause.

Gahrie said...

How long until they start talking about taking land away from White farmers and giving it to Black people?

Mountain Maven said...

Hall of Fame level tone deafness, hiring honkies to run a black museum. Lol

n.n said...

[color] diversity.

Big Mike said...

@Lexington Green, wrong, WRONG, WRONG!!!

Too many people identify as black who have white blood in them. You need pure African ancestry!

Lewis Wetzel said...

Lexington Green wrote:
" . . . and the only qualifications that you have to identify as a person of African a ancestry."
That's me. For real. 1% subsaharan DNA, from an ancestor that married a half Cherokee, half black woman in Georgia 200+ years ago.
One drop rule, man.

TreeJoe said...

I'm sorry but I see no evidence presented that neither of those curators meets a minimum blood threshold of African ancestry. I mean, for all we know, they could be related to Rachel Dolezal.

AllenS said...

Most black Africans (that means black Africans born in Africa) can't stand American blacks.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Do young people realize thus is what the job market will become? More important to count race, gender, seexual orientation, etc - those factors will determine who gets hired - the hell with your qualifications and experience...the MSM has led the way on this for years. See Juan Williams and Don Lemon for proof.

Lewis Wetzel said...

So it is people of the African diaspora versus people of the European diaspora. For better or worse, there would have been no African Diaspora if there had not been a European diaspora. I feel bad for the Native Americans, they never had a diaspora.

CJ said...

"I feel bad for the Native Americans, they never had a diaspora."

FYI - there is a great discrepancy about what the population of the New World was before colonization. Scholarly estimates range between 8 million (in all of North, Central, and South America).

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0289.htm

Research by some scholars provides population estimates of the pre-contact Americas to be as high as 112 million in 1492, while others estimate the population to have been as low as eight million. In any case, the native population declined to less than six million by 1650.

Furthermore, it's estimated by Henry Louis Gates, that only *388,000* African slaves landed in the area that would become the US. The vast majority of the 10mm African slaves landed in Brazil (4mm alone), Mexico, and the Caribbean.

https://www.theroot.com/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us-1790873989


CJ said...

Forgot the quote from "The Root"

"The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial "gold standard" in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.

And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage."

Lewis Wetzel said...

"And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage."
The number shipped from E Africa to the ME by Muslim slavers (black & white) is unknown, but presumed to be much larger. That trade was going on well into the 1950s.

CJ said...

"The number shipped from E Africa to the ME by Muslim slavers (black & white) is unknown, but presumed to be much larger. That trade was going on well into the 1950s."

That can't be because I've been reliably assured that slavery only occurred between Confederate States and Africa in the 1850s, and that America and in particular, Southern Americans, are uniquely and solely responsible for slavery.

Ironclad said...

You miss the larger point about why blacks were even used as slaves in the Americas since indentured labor - of which there was a huge supply in Europe and cost 1/4 of a slave. Malaria. The Europeans brought it and it decimated central and South America and also the US south. Europeans died from it - 50% rate and even the survivors were incapacitated for 6 months or more.

Africans had childhood immunity or sickle cell. So gosh, these folks don’t die and can work - when hand labor was all there was.

Try to teach that in school today and you will be pillaged.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

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I'm Full of Soup said...

If the Europeans killed more than 100 million with disease and bullets, there'd be some massive massive graveyards around. Plus they'd have to have brought an awful lot of bullets.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Lack of draft animals limited efficient agriculture in the New World. The idea that the population of North America was similar to the population of Europe at the time of Columbus is ridiculous.

Gahrie said...

Lack of draft animals limited efficient agriculture in the New World.

There were option..elk, llamas etc. The real limiter was the lack of the wheel.