Museums and Racism

Kylie Message

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138240179
• eBook ISBN: 9781315293875
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Racism is a hot topic in museums today, as well as an urgent social issue. Focused on the broad field of multicultural policy, Museums and Racism examines how the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, has responded to political culture and public debate around racism.

Analysis focuses on the conceptualization of the Immigration Museum in the mid-1990s, and on the most recent permanent exhibition to be opened there, in 2011, which coincided with the publication of a new multicultural policy for Australia. The opening of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in the intervening period is also examined in some detail, as a comparative case study to provide a sense of the broader national social and political context. Message argues that each of the three episodes demonstrates the close relationship between museum and exhibition development on the one hand, and policy, politics, and public opinion on the other hand.

Including a discussion of examples from the United States and other relevant contexts, Museums and Racism is key reading for students and scholars of museum studies and cultural studies around the world. The book should also be of great interest to museum practitioners and policymakers in the area of multiculturalism.

1 Museums

Museums and Racism examines the development of the Immigration Museum in Melbourne in context of contemporary developments in social and cultural policy fields around multiculturalism and debates about racism and hate speech in Australia.¹ It approaches this task by examining claims around whether museums can make a contribution to understandings about the motivations for and ‘management’ of hate (Shoshan 2016: 6), and the experience of structural racism.² This study is important because while museums frequently identify with the moral high ground, presenting themselves as arbiters of social justice and reasonableness, racism, like all forms of extremism, is considered to be a form of moral abjection anathema to rational thinking. Where museums aspire to be inclusive, and to collaborate with minority or marginalized groups to offer agency, the very purpose of racist hate speech is to inhibit the ability of the targets of hate speech to talk back. Hate speech aims at a basic level to ‘exclude its targets from participating in broader deliberative processes’ (Gelber 2011: 84).

The mismatch of language and moral parameters raises complex challenges for museums, particularly those with a remit to represent national identity. The situation is made more difficult still by an increasing acceptance of whiteness as a central defining marker of national identity in Australia and other postcolonial nations such as the United States, where these challenges have been recognized by many as escalating in recent months.³ Claims of urgency show direct links between incidences of racially motivated violence in Charlottesville in the United States, where, writer Toni Morrison (2016) reminds us, ‘the definition of “Americanness” is color’ (and similar events in Australia, where vandalism against colonial statues have been attributed as outcomes of both Charlottesville and the ‘Change the Date’ campaign).⁴ Renewed attention by the media to statements of overt racist hate evidence the continuity of a structural condition that has an extended history of moving race hate speech in and out of public realms of visibility and acceptance at various times.

Figure 1.1 Immigration Museum, Old Customs House, Melbourne

Photograph by Kylie Message.

In The Disobedient Museum, I argued for the effectiveness of structural forms of resistance that work within and through sets of cultural, political, and institutional conditions to disrupt, destabilize, and force change from within. I investigated ways to challenge accepted knowledge/received ‘wisdom’ about ‘the museum’ through a range of critical disciplinary frameworks. I argued that the form of resistance advocated in that book – disruption of a system from within – was more effective to the challenges explored there than a whole-scale rejection or revolution against systemic discrimination.⁵ Arguments about how to engage with a crisis that perhaps has itself become a systemic condition or norm of contemporary life have also been articulated by a range of social movement theorists and writers in the wake of events occurring in the period following the inauguration of Trump, from the Women’s Marches through to the Charlottesville clashes and protests. In an essay called ‘Is there any point in protesting?’ Nathan Heller employs Zeynep Tufekci’s work to suggest that ‘the movements that succeed are actually proto-institutional: highly organized; strategically flexible, due to sinewy management structures; and chummy with the sorts of people we now call élites’. ‘Far from speaking truth to power’, argues Heller, ‘successful protests seem to speak truth through power’, meaning that they need to work within or through the systems they want to change.

In contrast, the hate speech and racism that is exemplified by Ku Klux Klan words and actions function through antagonism. Their tactics are confrontational and often terrifying, designed to create a sense of possibility for an alternative structure of perceived normality/normalization (Waldron 2014; Posner and Neiwert 2016; Shoshan 2016). Their aim is not to effect change within existing social structures, but to entirely reconstitute what are considered acceptable norms within society. To an extent, this approach has been a successful one for the ‘alt-right’, as suggested by the fact that in 2017, the Council of the District of Columbia activated its ‘hate crimes protocol’ (Milloy 2017). The policy assured residents that it would act swiftly in response to incidences which the District of Columbia Mayor Muriel E. Bowser identified as ‘acts’ of violence ‘that put communities at risk’ (quoted in Milloy 2017). Such statements have led some commentators to observe that the language of white supremacy seems to be trending back in by becoming a more ubiquitous feature of mainstream society. However, others have argued that:

the nooses have always been there and will be for years to come. All the bravado about special noose-stopping protocols and promises to catch the vandals have just become part of a very predictable play. A noose is discovered. People are outraged. Protests are held. A culprit is seldom found. People forget. Then, repeat.

(Milloy 2017)

In addition, the Council of the District of Columbia Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary 2008 noted ‘a rash of cases involving nooses’ occurring in recent years – 50 were reported by the Southern Poverty Law Centre in 2007 alone. The conflicting aims and forms of expression and reaction apparent between the noose-leavers and the Council of the District of Columbia, for example, have created a gulf between hate speech advocates and the museums and other institutions (schools, universities, some media) which seek to provide education and other programs to counteract the effects of their words.

Acts of fear-mongering (such as leaving nooses in public places) are not just forms of distraction. They are exercises in testing or challenging the legitimacy of legislation and community standards around freedom of expression. In so doing, they reveal the tensions between maintaining freedom of expression and curbing racism in countries such as the United States, and including Australia. Political scientist Erik Bleich refers to this tension as ‘a fundamental dilemma for liberal democracies’ (quoted in Bangstad 2017; also see Gelber and McNamara 2016).⁶ The conundrum that is caused by the ‘inevitable’ dilemma means that there is little space for dialogue between museums, governmental organizations, and proponents of the extreme right.⁷ The spate of nooses being reported as found in museum grounds in the United States over recent months suggests that even where such a space exists, it has been appropriated as a symbolic opportunity for further opportunity to promote fear. There is no shortage of academic analyses of free speech legislation or attempts to navigate the dilemma between how to maintain freedom of expression but condone hate speech, however, such work tends to emphasize the legal and governmental apparatus of regulation at the expense of the implications and effect of hate speech.

Bangstad (2017) recommends a different tack for studying acts of race hate. He suggests that an anthropological lens can bridge rather than exacerbate the distinctions existing between disciplines primarily affiliated with political science and legal studies, and more ‘grounded forms of analysis’ concerned with victim impact and the affect of certain events or conditions (Message 2018: 7). This approach requires the construction of a conversation between text (case study) and context (environment within which the museum, for example, operates). The context includes other instruments of governance such as the media and policy initiatives, both of which act upon and help shape the public sphere. The appeal of this approach is that it refuses to accept hate speech’s project of excluding its targets from participating in broader deliberative processes. It also avoids the trap of closing down the discussion about hate speech that can be an outcome of debates about racism (which can risk leaning in the favour of speech restriction and thereby further silencing everyone involved). Bangstad’s approach identifies the need to acknowledge spaces of communication with individuals targeted by hate speech. It resonates with the approaches that are increasingly preferred by museums and museum studies in that it:

• Starts with the real-life experiences of victims of hate speech in order to tell us ‘exactly what hate speech sounds and feels like and what it does’ (Bangstad 2017).
• Focuses on hate speech’s relation to power, social status, race, and gender to ‘elicit the often ignored or glossed over linkages between more mainstream discourses that feed on and onto hate speech’ (Bangstad 2017).
• Maps the intersections and shared strategies that exist between forms of hate speech that target specific ‘causes’ (such as immigration, Islam, Black Lives Matter, or feminism) and that contribute to a broader culture of fear/normalization of hate speech.

Bangstad’s project is a fundamentally simple – and political – one that works on the proposition that rehumanizing the victims of hate speech will be a powerful tool in the larger project of challenging the normalization of structural racism. Many of the anthropological tactics he advises have an established precedent of being widely employed in museums globally, including those with a thematic focus such as migration, human rights, genocide, but extending also to many of the institutions and places associated with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, as well as a very large number of national museums globally, including, perhaps most notably, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in Washington, DC, in 2017 and which includes significant commentary about race hate.

Adding to the body of politically driven academic scholarship represented by Bangstad is a rapidly growing genre of museums and exhibitions that have taken on the task of representing the experience of migration and multiculturalism from a range of perspectives. It is beyond the parameters and intention of this short book to provide a comprehensive overview of current museological activity relevant to this study, which spans migration policy, multicultural initiatives, and public discourse, debate, and experience. However the expansion of museums working with these subjects globally suggests that although it can sometimes seem as though there is little room for interaction between spheres, an increasing opportunity has actually opened up, perhaps as a consequence of the increasing ubiquity and ‘mainstreaming’ of hate speech in contemporary life.⁸ In other words, the fact that nooses have been left on the grounds of museums reiterates the political function of culture and the significance of museums as sites of identity. I suspect that perhaps even more than in previous iterations of the ‘culture wars’ (Message 2006), this is one battle that museums today are willing and primed for.⁹

Extending the project of boundary crossing introduced in The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge (Message 2018), this book sets out to represent the gulf between museums and racism as a site of exchange. Also extending the expectation that the second book of a trilogy will function as a kind of narrative bridge between the first and final books, I argue that the possibility for exchange arose as a result of the establishment of an exhibition on racism by the Immigration Museum in 2011. Although creation of a site for communication may sound an unlikely outcome from a debate on racism, the Immigration Museum’s tools were sharpened by its alertness and responsiveness to decades of debate within the Australian state of Victoria over policy initiatives around migration, refugee and asylum seeker protocols, and public perspectives on political culture and the influence of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. This readiness was also influenced by the museum’s observations of the contestation surrounding the National Museum of Australia, which was involved in a very public debate about race and identity from 2001 to 2003. Indeed, the relationship between the Immigration Museum as a site of contact between political agencies and instruments and public experience and opinion was also a central focus for the creators of the museum because its short gestation period (less than two years) occurred in the heat of the culture wars that spread across Australia’s national and cultural institutions in the 1990s and early 2000s and that marked the much more extensive gestation of the National Museum of Australia (which was conceptualized in the 1970s, enacted in 1980, and opened in 2001).¹⁰ Not only was the Immigration Museum able to put a face to the experience and implications of racism (as per Bangstad’s recommended strategy), but it was implicated in the attacks, targeted by anti-racist speakers, many of whom based their criticism of the museum on a paradigm that appealed to the reasonableness of everyday Australians on the basis that ‘I’m not racist, but …’. The antagonistic nature of any public engagement with racism across the national stage in Australia has meant that in making a direct contribution to the study of hate speech, the museum’s actions have been brave and complex.¹¹

Book aims and chapter outline

There is a multitude of ways in which the Immigration Museum case study might be approached, and whilst a large body of institutional, collections, and exhibitions based analysis has contributed directly to the research undertaken for this book, my primary goal is to analyse the interaction between political decisions and policy development, institutional practices, and the broader social context and experiences (including racism) of civic multiculturalism in contemporary society. My focus is, as such, predominantly an institutional one that has been narrowed further by my attention to the use of language and discourse around racism and hate speech as produced by museums (specifically the Immigration Museum), politicians, the media, and the interaction between these instruments and the general public. This approach was designed because while there are clear connections between government decisions, museums (which are often associated with government apparatuses), and the broader social population upon which these forces act (Bennett et al. 2017), the Immigration Museum offers a case study that disrupts the easy associations between government decision-making actions and processes of social governance by showing the public and administrative practices through which relations of knowledge and power are composed and exercised. Indeed, the museum’s first director, Anna Malgorzewicz, has said – perhaps provocatively to emphasize this point – that it opened fundamentally with the brief of being a museum about policy, not people.¹² This statement reflects the fact that the museum was an outcome of Victorian state politics (and the personal priority of the Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett)¹³ as much as it was a reflection of national level multicultural policy initiatives, and broader public debates about the culture wars, immigration, and race in Australia.

My purpose here is not so much to focus on the role and impact of cultural policy on museums and organizational change, but to examine the intersections between social policy and museums and the public sphere. The museum developments I address have also been specifically associated with public policy initiatives at different levels of the Australian Government, and comparing the National Museum of Australia and the Immigration Museum illustrates the co-existence of different policy approaches within different jurisdictions. Viv Szekeres, former director of the Migration Museum in Adelaide, which opened as Australia’s first migration museum in 1986, explains why it is important to study museums within the context of policy:

It is always difficult to pinpoint the origins of change in a society as complex as ours, but there were two reports commissioned by the Australian Government in the 1970s that were seminal. They not only captured and described a prevailing reality but also had a long-term effect on the museum industry and on the wider society. The Pigott Report, Museums in Australia, was published in 1975 and the Galbally Report on Migrant Programs and Services was published in 1978. They were totally unrelated to each other.

(Szekeres 2011)

The Pigott Report (Commonwealth Government 1975: 6) an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• It’s a summer of sequels. The culture wars are back. So is the civil rights movement
• 1 Museums
• 2 Multiculturalism
• 3 Racism
• I feel like I belong when I am made to feel welcome
• Bibliography
• Index