The National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the federal government’s Smithsonian Institution system, has removed from its website a chart listing “the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States.” The chart listed individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, a belief in progress, a written tradition, politeness, the justice system, respect for authority, delayed gratification, and planning for the future, among others, as “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” that have been “internalized” by people of color in the U.S.
Critics suggested those attributes and qualities, rather than being the product of “whiteness,” are universal values that can help anyone lead a more satisfying and successful life.
The topic went viral online, and the museum quickly acted. “Since yesterday, certain content in the ‘Talking About Race’ portal has been the subject of questions that we have taken seriously,” the museum wrote in a statement Thursday. “We have listened to public sentiment and have removed a chart that does not contribute to the productive discussion we had intended.”
The chart was credited to a diversity consultant named Judith Katz, who has written about race for many years. In the late 1970s, she wrote White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training. She later wrote Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity. (In the 1990s, the Boston Herald called her a “diversity doyenne.”) Today, the company where she is a top executive, Kaleel Jamison Consulting, counts among its clients FedEx, Merck, Toyota, and several others.
After the chart received public attention on Twitter, some observers said it perpetuated rather than reduced racism in the U.S. “Quite frankly, it’s a racist document,” Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen said on Fox News on Thursday. “It’s racist to say that black people don’t possess these characteristics or that it is alien to black people to have these characteristics.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is one of the most popular in the Smithsonian system. It received $33 million in government funding in 2019. It received tens of millions more from some of the biggest names in business and philanthropy: the Lilly Endowment, the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, American Express, the Bank of America, 3M, Boeing, Michael Jordan, Kaiser Permanente, the Rockefeller Foundation, Target, UnitedHealth, Walmart, and many more.
Minus the chart, the “whiteness” page on the museum’s website remains the same, including a video from another diversity consultant, Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestseller White Fragility. It includes a discussion of “white dominant culture” without the specific references to individualism, hard work, objectivity, etc., that the chart included.
