Not content with ruining math, history, and medicine, proponents of critical race theory have another target: museums.
Sociology and Africana studies Professor Tukufu Zuberi, whose real name is Antonio McDaniel, claimed on PBS recently that “race bias” and “prejudice … are the foundation of museums everywhere.”
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“These museums were to justify empire,” the University of Pennsylvania professor and museum curator said on the show last week. “They were to justify the colonization. They were to justify the marginalization of certain groups of people. We have to challenge that.”
Zuberi is the curator of the Africa Galleries at Penn Museum, the same museum that just a few years ago removed a 190-year-old display of skulls with the goal of fighting racism.
He is not alone in his fight to incorporate critical race theory into curation and museums.
The University of Florida employs Professor Porchia Moore, a self-described “museum visionary and activist-scholar” who uses “Critical Race Theory to interrogate museums and other cultural heritage spaces.”
Her areas of interest include “Liberatory Praxis and Black Radical Traditions in Museums/Cultural Heritage” and “Critical Heritage Studies.” She presumably teaches students about these topics as the head of the university’s critical museum studies program.
That program views art through a variety of lenses, including “Radical Librarianship,” “Critical Race Theory and Critical Studies,” and “Decolonization Theory and Studies.”
Moore told the Oberlin Review how she had reimagined the program to embrace radicalism. “My students are change agents,” she said earlier this month in an article. “In 2020, I changed the program from a traditional museum studies program to a critical museum studies program, which meant that we are centering empathy and social justice.”
A few days earlier on Nov. 30, Moore gave a talk at Oberlin College on the “Biomythology of Anti-Blackness and Liberatory Praxis in the Museum.”
Students who want to further explore how to incorporate critical race theory into their future careers as curators have other options besides Moore’s program at the University of Florida.
Tufts University now offers a certificate in “Anti-Racist Curatorial Practice.”
“After six years of working as a museum curator — at a small, a mid-size, and, currently, a very large institution — I’ve learned how nefarious the culture of white supremacy in art museums really is,” director Kelli Morgan wrote in a 2020 essay, which she said was a starting point for understanding the certificate program.
“The PTSD from racial trauma that many of my BIPOC colleagues and I are carrying is a clear indication that art museums are absolutely not in solidarity with BIPOC people and their communities as they claim to be,” Morgan wrote.
Her new certificate “explores the fundamentals of anti-racist, social practice, and community-centered strategies used by artists, scholars, and curators of color, and how these philosophies have re-shaped both art history and the museum over time.”
The first enrollee, according to campus newspaper the Tufts Daily, was Anthony Cruz Pantojas, the campus humanist chaplain who uses “they” pronouns and wants to study “haunting,” “spirituality,” and “the Caribbean.”
Clearly, critical museum studies is not a serious academic subject. Much like its counterparts in math, history, and medicine, it should be exposed and rejected. This “discipline” only exists to further the racial grievance agenda of so many in higher education. It has no place in serious institutions.
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Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.
