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‘WHITENESS’ AND THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE. The museum, located on Constitution Avenue in Washington, is the newest — opened 2016 — and one of the most successful in the Smithsonian system.
It has a lot of money — $33 million in federal government funding in fiscal 2019. It receives tens of millions more from some of the biggest names in American business and philanthropy: the Lilly Endowment, the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, American Express, Bank of America, 3M, Boeing, Michael Jordan, Kaiser Permanente, the Rockefeller Foundation, Target, UnitedHealth, Walmart, and many more.
Some of the museum’s most popular exhibits include the Emancipation Proclamation, a passenger railroad car from the segregation era, an Emmett Till memorial, show business artifacts like Chuck Berry’s Cadillac and Oprah Winfrey’s set, and much more.
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It is perhaps less well known, but the Museum also seeks to educate the public on “whiteness.” Its website features a long section on “whiteness,” including a video by Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestseller White Fragility. It also features a chart, “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States.”
The chart endeavors to list “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.” Among those traditions, attitudes, and ways of life are: 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, plus much more.
What to make of the list? Most of the attributes listed seem to be a recipe for success for anyone. Certainly millions of black Americans work hard every day, respect individual effort, plan for the future, are polite to others, and so on. It seems odd to attribute that to “whiteness,” as opposed to, say, the everyday values of trying to lead a successful life. Yet according to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “whiteness” it is.
The list is credited to a diversity consultant named Judith H. 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.
I tweeted the museum’s “whiteness” chart on Wednesday. It got a lot of reaction. The most common was that the attributes the chart listed — individualism, hard work, etc. — are universal values that can help anyone lead a better and more fulfilling life. Many were surprised to see a prestigious, taxpayer- and business-funded institution like the National Museum of African American History & Culture label those attributes the product of “whiteness” — effectively giving its imprimatur to business consultant-speak that many Americans find baffling and even offensive.
