Smithsonian fully explores "race"
For contemporary audiences, after the Middle Passage, that might be hard to understand. Race is so pervasive that even figures like President Obama consider it a "third rail' not to be discussed.
Fortunately, the Smithsonian Institution has brought its full museum and research power to bear in a comprehensive exhibition that bursts so many misconceptions about a term that scientists now agree should never have existed.
Although the third floor of the Natural History Museum has the signature exhibit; one should also take the time to become familiar with the Africa Focus permanent display on the second floor; and the African Mosaic exhibition across the mall at the National Museum of African Art.
One can also find a replica of the Woolworth counter where the Greensboro sit-ins took place in the National Museum of American History and Black Wings exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum. BlackList is among the attractions at the National Portrait Gallery.
At the interactive display on Race at the Natural History Museum, one can learn that differences in skin coloration are a function of nature balancing the effect of UV radiation from the sun with the need to create Vitamin D; that humans lived in Africa for 150,000 years before anywhere else; and that the greatest genetic variation is still on the African continent.
One terminal shows with colored dots the spread of human genes across all parts of Africa before any migration to the Middle East.
Balancing the science is an exposition on how the term race was developed, including propaganda from Linneus to Hitler; the use of race in American laws and Supreme Court cases about race. At various times, the court has taken the right of citizenship away from blacks, Chinese, Japanese and Native Americans using such spurious scientific arguments.
In sociological terms, race is explained as a mechanism used by powerful groups to explain disparate treatment. One photo describes a group of five persons in American racial terms, and then also in the much more diverse Brazilian terms. In Brazil, there are 135 known terms for racial differences.
The Africa Focus display explains how Spaniards would write such flowerly language about black women as exemplars like Queen Califia by describing how the Almoravids, black Africans from below the Sahara Desert, conquered Spain and Portugal for 250 years from the 11th to the 13th century.
The economic impact of race is laid out in graphic terms with some little-known facts from history. The first Social Security Act excluded domestic workers and farm workers for almost four decades, because those fields were dominated by blacks and Latinos. From 1938 to 1962, only two-tenths of one percent of Federal Housing Administration loans went to minorities. GI Bill benefits were sparingly doled out to African-American veterans from World War II. They couldn't use education benefits when most colleges were segregated, or housing under restrictive covenants. Stacks of dollars were used to represent the difference in average family net worth for whites, Asians, Latinos and blacks.
As the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial on the Mall becomes a must-see attraction, visitors to the nation's capital should also take in the Smithsonian's Race exhibition to provide useful context for why King is such an important figure.
