Asks what lessons are conveyed by the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
Apel, Dora
THE CHARLES H. WRIGHT Museum of African American History (MAAH), which opened in Detroit in April 1997, has been acclaimed as the nation's most important black history museum in numerous...
...Thus, anyone criticizing an institution dedicated to "the celebration of African American achievement" needs to tread carefully...
...Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C...
...The section of the exhibition that represents the slave trade and slavery in the United States, as Charles Pete Banner-Haley points out, follows the outlines of what has now become mainstream black history...
...Here the narrative attempts to incorporate and homogenize into a single mainstream the internal conflicts of the civil rights movement and the Black Power era, without coming to terms with their sometimes polarizing politics...
...The history of the civil rights movement itself is generalized (film clips of civil rights leaders lack specific historical context, providing no dates or places), and the one photograph that directly alludes to interracial collaboration is placed high on a vertical shelf...
...There's Charlie Parker, the great jazz saxophonist...
...The final panels of the exhibition begin with the phrase, "Becoming the Future Means:" and are followed by such prescriptions as, "exerting power as consumers . . . being in business, small, medium, or large, corner stores or multimilliondollar corporations . . . investing in stocks and bonds, in money markets and mutual funds . . . welcoming immigrants . . . from the South, Canada, the Caribbean and Africa . . . putting more African nutrition in our diets and African flavors in our recipes . . . learning African languages and dialects . . . traveling to Africa...
...Thus the narrative effectively effaces the radical black struggles of the sixties and seventies, part of a larger strategy that avoids contentious politics...
...The first half of the exhibition focuses on history about Africa and the African slave trade...
...ClarkeHazlett describes the dilemma of "how to affirm the value and the struggles of past generations of African Americans without sacrificing the complexity of lived history and without ignoring or obscuring the deep, sometimes bitter conflicts that arose among black people who were otherwise united in resistance to racism and oppression...
...Robert Bland, of Detroit, with wood from a mahogany chest that had been passed on by generations of his family for over 100 years...
...Where in this Detroit museum is the history of the role blacks played in the formation of the labor unions, particularly the auto unions...
...Facing a group of impoverished, barely literate teenagers forced to drop out of school to work at low-paying dead-end jobs while caring for ailing parents or children at home, the lawyer regaled them with a speech about the American Dream, urging them to believe that they could be whatever they wanted to be...
...Its proponents question "the value of integration as a goal" and find space in the new separatism that has arisen among middle-class black nationalists...
...The second half of the exhibition is also troublesome, particularly in its treatment of the civil rights and post–civil rights era...
...As Christopher Clarke-Hazlett notes, the links between slavery and racism are themselves taken for granted and never clearly established or explored...
...It does not, however, include more recent scholarship...
...it fulfills African Americans' need for a validating and distinctive history...
...Where, in particular, does this narrative lead...
...While the MAAH attempts to alter the established view of a "white" America, it misses the opportunity to examine the issues surrounding the concept of "race" and racism...
...Other images are set vertically into panels above glass cases, at an eye level about five and a half feet from the floor...
...While seemingly focused entirely on race, the museum is ultimately about class...
...5. Fath Davis Ruffin, "Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part II: The National African-American Museum Project," Radical History Review (70, 1998), p. 92...
...L Charles Pete Banner-Haley, "The Necessity of Remembrance: A Review of the Museum of African American History," American Quarterly (51:2, 1999), p. 423...
...The comparison to Nazi genocide does not stand up to closer scrutiny...
...One day, a successful African- American lawyer visited my class at the invitation of the program director...
...The discourse of "struggle" is replaced throughout with that of "empowerment," and the history of persecution is carefully balanced with one of pride, optimism, and creativity...
...The "nobility" of past victimhood is transformed into a form of middleclass nationalism rooted in black business, corporate enterprise, and faith in the American twoparty system...
...and—the central exhibit—a seventy-foot model slave ship inscribed with the names of more than two thousand slave ships that made the journey known as the Middle Passage from West Africa to the New World over a period of four hundred years...
...These include images of the empty hulk of a bombed bus and segregated classrooms...
...4. Christopher Clarke-Hazlett, "Of the People," American Quarterly (51:2, 1999), p. 423...
...a case full of inventions by African-Americans, such as the stoplight and the gas mask...
...Is this mysterious acquittal her primary achievement...
...4 The permanent exhibition opens with videos on three panels that promise to remember a black history of accomplishment and victorious struggle over oppression...
...The museum's main and permanent exhibition, titled "Of the People: The African American Experience," covers sixteen thousand square feet and illustrates subjects from fourteenth-century African history to contemporary black culture in the United States...
...Nor are the "healing possibilities" of the text spelled out...
...The discourse of race was the most important method by which the homogeneous population was produced...
...However, for other Americans troubled by the history of segregation, the great narrative of African-American life has much more to do with integration into and acceptance by the mainstream of American life.' AFROCENTRISM represents a kind of backlash against this latter view...
...the 1997 debate over Representative Tony Hall's (D-Ohio) proposal to the House that a resolution of apology to African-Americans be made for the past trauma of slavery...
...THE EXHIBITION is organized around eight "historical stations...
...others were identified as of different races and were to be excluded...
...Her book Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press...
...a reproduction of the door to the jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was held...
...The $38.4 million structure was funded by taxpayer dollars as well as by individual and corporate donations...
...Instead, the text notes: "Internationally renowned as an actor and singer, Robeson was also notable for his repudiation of Nazism, his support of the struggle for civil rights in the United States, and his interest in the Soviet Union...
...Some groups of people were identified as of the same race and could, therefore, be assimilated...
...it develops over time...
...The exhibition consigns the struggles of poor and working-class black Americans, their militant organizations, their conflicts, and their allies, to a murky obscurity...
...Each catDISSENT / Summer 2001 n 9 1 NOTEBOOK egory must be analyzed in terms of the other...
...This has important implications for the rest of the narrative, which is told in the first person, constructing the viewer as "black...
...The narrative culminates in the promotion of petty-bourgeois individual achievement based on a sense of black pride that links American blacks to an African "motherland," despite the fact that many blacks, who have been Americans for generations, feel little or no cultural connection to this distant continent...
...Given this emphasis on black entrepreneurial enterprise and black separateness, the memory of integrated struggles for racial equality or the significance of race and hybridity as socially constructed categories clearly don't fit in...
...Arrested on what charges...
...Inexplicably, an eight-by-ten lynching photograph is easily visible in a low glass case...
...Because viewers are constructed as black, this physically and psychologically places them in a position of having transcended their own history (and, at the same time, in the privileged position of the slavers...
...DORA APEL is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at Wayne State University...
...Holocaust" has gained wide currency among Afrocentrists, as American blacks and Jews have become embroiled in dismaying accusations of black anti-Semitism and of Jewish racism and ignorance about the suffering caused by slavery...
...The kids knew that the American Dream, except for the extraordinarily gifted and unusually lucky, was for somebody else...
...Four graphic photographs of lynchings, about four by six inches each, are placed flat on small shelves nearly five feet above the floor to avoid exposing young children to these sights...
...the Judeocide meant to eradicate all Jews as a people and was not driven by economic motives...
...Has critical inquiry been sacrificed in the interest of celebration...
...Slave owners, with all their brutality, were driven by economic reasons to keep slaves alive for their labor power...
...The model, made from heirlooms of two families, each with the memory of a holocaust of its people, exemplifies the possibilities of healing...
...In the glass cases and on the video monitors, the emphasis is on heroes, role models, and their achievements...
...otherwise its members would certainly already have seen the dilapidated public housing that has existed for years in the city of Detroit...
...SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and the Black Panther Party are referred to in the long text panels lining the wall in terms of their more apolitical activities, such as organizing breakfasts for poor children...
...Referring to this conventional rendition as the "Roots Response," Banner-Haley notes, in particular, the lack of any effort to represent "gender roles and relations and slave family life...
...Film clips of civil rights leaders making speeches show footage of Malcolm X only in connection with his funeral, telling us nothing about this most provocative and eloquent champion of black separatism...
...Postmodern scholarship has recognized race as a discursive construction and essentialism as itself an ideology...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 95 96 • DISSENT / Summer 2001...
...So "blackness" can only be understood as constructed in binary opposition to "whiteness...
...The photograph of FBI agents wandering in a field where Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were believed to be murdered has already been mentioned...
...This selective history not only depoliticizes and impoverishes the past, but veils the memory of thousands of courageous men and women who won many of the gains enjoyed by blacks today...
...At one point, the exhibition intimates that slavery was a holocaust...
...In most African-American museums, some version of this narrative is absolutely central...
...What sort of activist was she...
...The museum presents a separate (but not too radical) black history...
...the flight suit worn in 1987 by Mae Jemison, the nation's first black female astronaut...
...Is the mere sight of the disintegrating state of poor and working-class black housing too disturbing for young black museum-goers to see...
...In the object cases containing unpublished pages of his writing, the narrative alludes to Malcolm X's "changed views" after a visit to Mecca, but fails to spell out the nature and implications of this "change"—a move away from the black nationalism of the Nation of Islam and toward a recognition of the possibility of political struggle in concert with whites...
...and Mrs...
...2. Jon Stratton, Coming out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (Routledge, 2000), p. 53...
...More important, the very idea of race as a social construction, which has been the subject of much recent research and scholarship, is unexamined...
...We are never told that she is a writer, or was a leading member of the American Communist Party...
...also designed by Ralph Appelbaum)—is transformed into something more comfortable, while a voice overhead informs the visitor about the twenty million Africans captured for the slave trade, the loss of about a third of these during the voyage, and the forms of resistance, including hunger strikes and mutinies...
...The narrator (Ossie Davis) states categorically, "Africa is our common heritage, America is our home," establishing the central theme of the exhibition: an Afrocentric sense of American identity...
...His interest in the Soviet Union is thus only indirectly and vaguely connected to his being "banned from concert halls" and being welcome in only certain Detroit neighborhoods...
...This four-by-six-inch photograph of men in a field has a caption explaining that three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered by racist whites in Mississippi, but not that two of them, Goodman and Schwerner, were Jewish (or "white...
...The MAAH, by emphasizing the separateness, isolation, and individual creativity of American blacks, while effacing the relationship to "white" society, draws on this ideological perspective...
...The students stared bleakly after him as he left, understanding something he couldn't or wouldn't: oppression really oppresses...
...Designed by Ralph Appelbaum, the exhibition is meant to provide African-Americans with a history that goes beyond the brutal victimization of slavery and that can generate a sense of positive identity and collective achievement...
...Thus, race in America was founded on a core myth of the American nation as composed of only white men and women...
...In its first three weeks of operation, it attracted a hundred thousand visitors to see such artifacts as the rusted shackles used to hold slaves on a plantation in Virginia...
...In this myth," writes anthropologist Karen Brodkin, "the alternatives available to nonwhite and variously alien 'others' has been either to whiten themselves or to be consigned to an animal-like ungendered underclass unfit to exercise the prerogatives of citizenship...
...This is due, perhaps, to the very nature of the subject: Americans have been largely unable or ambivalent about coming to terms with the history of American slavery and its legacy, as evidenced by the debate, from 1984 to 1994, over an African-American museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C...
...Nor is Paul Robeson's well-known CP membership mentioned in the text beside an DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 93 NOTEBOOK advertisement for his album Ballad for Americans...
...The museum courts an audience that is middle class and suburban...
...3. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 24...
...There's Angela Davis, and this is her contribution: "Activist Angela Davis was arrested by the FBI and acquitted of all charges...
...Designed by the AfricanAmerican firm Sims-Varner Architects of Detroit, it houses two galleries for temporary exhibitions, a rotunda and 100-foot dome patterned after an African hut, a 317-seat theater, classrooms, a research library, a museum store, and a caf...
...History is obfuscated...
...Another color photograph showing a building in the South Bronx with rubble strewn in front of it is captioned, "Abandoned lot in front of public housing in the South Bronx, New York, 1981...
...IN THE LATE seventies, I was the only white teacher in a Detroit C ETA (Community Education, Training and Action) program that taught social studies to sixteen-year-old black high school dropouts to prepare them for a high school diploma equivalency exam...
...Still, it is necessary to examine the key assumptions underlying the exhibition and to ask, What are the ideological premises guiding the historical narrative...
...The video screens run continuous loops of famous African-Americans with short statements about their accomplishments...
...Viewers stand in a superior position above these figures...
...Isn't this also a crucial part of the story...
...But both American slavery and the Jewish genocide must be understood in historical terms for their impact on the subsequent development of American and European civilization, not simply as "black" or "Jewish" histories...
...Sidney Poitier," we are told, "won an Oscar for Lilies of the Field...
...But, as Fath Davis Ruffins asks: Is the story of Black separation, isolation, and achievement against the odds the primary narrative of meaning...
...The museum, in its reference to the "two holocausts" implicitly relegates the Jewish genocide to the sphere of "white" history and reifies the binary opposition...
...94 • DISSENT / Summer 2001 NOTEBOOK The message of the Museum of African American History is not really designed for them either, but for the more affluent layers of society who already have a much better chance of realizing their aspirations...
...The future of "black history" is presented as striving for a climb up the corporate ladder that, according to the teleology of the narrative, just takes will, because it is assumed the opportunity is already there...
...At first glance the museum might seem to be acting against this alienated relationship by displaying a table-sized model of the slave ship Sunny South with a label that reads, "The model was made by Dr...
...Following the introductory video, visitors cross a steel bridge above the model slave ship, which contains forty lifesize figures of slaves cast from Detroit students...
...THE CHARLES H. WRIGHT Museum of African American History (MAAH), which opened in Detroit in April 1997, has been acclaimed as the nation's most important black history museum in numerous descriptive accounts, but, with a few notable exceptions, has not received much critical attention...
...The emotional experience evoked by entering the proximate space of oppression—for example, the cattle car at the U.S...
...We assume that the fact of collaboration is the basis for this hopeful assessment, in which case we might expect the far more politically potent collaboration of 92 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 NOTEBOOK blacks and Jews during the civil rights movement to be mentioned, but it never is...
...Identity is not fixed or predetermined...
...The high-minded aim of inspiring those unable to escape the grip of poverty and suffocating circumstance means little without the opportunities and support necessary for success—adequate jobs, housing, and education...
...As the nation-state evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its ideologists aimed at, in the words of Jon Stratton, "the establishment of a single, homogenous national culture that was the expression of a single, national people...
...Michael Bennett, sailmakers of Jewish descent, contributed sail canvas, as old as the wood, that had been kept over the years in their own family...
...The semi-inaccessible placement of some of these images raises questions about this strategy...
...During the Cold War era, when he was banned from concert halls because of his views, he was welcomed and supported in some Detroit neighborhoods...
...and the recent vote by the state of Mississippi to retain the Confederate symbol as part of its flag...
...Is it really necessary to shield the young from the image of urban blight...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
